3

When the onset of that cold and early winter brought snow to Rome, many of those who lived there saw the freeze as an ill omen. Neither Norbanus nor Scipio Asiagenus had returned after their respective defeats, nor did cheering news come of their subsequent activities; Norbanus was now under halfhearted siege in Capua, while Scipio drifted around Etruria recruiting.

Toward the end of the year, the Senate thought about convening to debate what its—and Rome’s—future held. Numbers were down to about a third of Sulla’s original fairly plump body of men, between those who had streamed to join Sulla in Greece, and this latest outpouring anxious to align itself with Sulla now he was back in Italy. For despite the protestations of a group of senators who insisted upon calling themselves neutral, everyone in Rome from highest to lowest knew very well that the lines were drawn. All of Italy and Italian Gaul were not large enough to accommodate Sulla and Carbo in peaceful coexistence; they stood for opposite values, systems of government, ideas of where Rome ought to go.

Sulla stood for the mos maiorum, the centuries—old customs and traditions which embodied the landed aristocrats as leaders in peace and war, whereas Carbo stood for the commercial and business leaders—the knights and the tribuni aerarii. As neither group would agree to share an equal dominance, one or the other would have to win dominance by means of another civil war.

That the Senate even toyed with the idea of meeting was due only to the return of Carbo from Italian Gaul, summoned from Ariminum by the tribune of the plebs Marcus Junius Brutus, he who had legislated the status of a fully Roman city for Capua. They met in Brutus’s house on the Palatine, a place with which Gnaeus Papirius Carbo was very familiar; he and Brutus had been friends for many years. It was besides a discreeter location than Carbo’s house, where (so rumor had it) even the boy who cleaned out the chamber pots was taking bribes from several people interested in knowing what Carbo was thinking of doing next.

That Brutus’s house was free from corrupt servants was entirely thanks to Brutus’s wife, Servilia, who ran her establishment more stringently by far than Scipio Asiagenus had his army. She tolerated no kind of misbehavior, seemed to have as many eyes in her head as Argus, and as many ears as a colony of bats. The servant who could outwit or outgeneral her did not exist, and the servant who was not afraid of her lasted scant days.

So it was that Brutus and Carbo could settle to their very private conversation in complete security. Except, of course, for Servilia herself. Nothing happened or was said in her house that she did not know about, and this very private conversation was not conducted out of her hearing, she made sure of that. The two men were inside Brutus’s study with the doors shut, and Servilia crouched outside on the colonnade beneath the one open window. A cold and uncomfortable place for an eavesdropper, but Servilia thought that of little consequence compared to what might be said inside the cozy room.

They began with pleasantries.

“How is my father?” asked Brutus.

“He’s well, sends you his regards.”

“I’m surprised you can put up with him!” burst from Brutus, who stopped, obviously shocked at what he had said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound angry. I’m really not angry.”

“Just somewhat bewildered that I can put up with him?”

“Yes.”

“He’s your father,” said Carbo in tones of comfort, “and he’s an old man. I understand why you might find him a trouble. However, he isn’t to me. It’s as simple as that. After Verres absconded with what was left of my governor’s allowance, I had to find a replacement quaestor anyway. Your dad and I have been friends ever since he returned with Marius from exile, as you well know.” Carbo paused, probably to pat Brutus on the arm, thought the eavesdropper cynically; she knew how Carbo handled her husband. He then went on. “When you married, he bought you this house so he wouldn’t be underfoot. What he didn’t count on was the loneliness of living by himself after you and he had been—well, bachelors together might be the best way to put it—for so long. I imagine he made a nuisance of himself, and may have annoyed your wife. So when I wrote and asked him to be my new proquaestor, he accepted with alacrity. I see no need for guilt in you, Brutus. He’s happy where he is.”

“Thank you,” said Brutus with a sigh.

“Now what’s so urgent I had to come in person?”

“The elections. Since the desertion of everyone’s friend, Philippus, morale in Rome has plummeted. No one will lead, no one has the courage to lead. That’s why I felt you had to come to Rome, at least until after the elections. I can find no one well qualified who wants to be consul! No one qualified wants to hold any position of importance, for that matter,” said Brutus nervously; he was a nervous man.

“What about Sertorius?’’

“He’s a stickler, you know that. I wrote to him in Sinuessa and begged him to stand for the consulship, but he declined. For two reasons, though I had expected only one—that he is still a praetor, and ought to wait the customary two years before being consul. I had hoped to talk him over that hurdle, and might have, had it been his only reason. The second reason I found impossible.”

“What was his second reason?”

“He said Rome was finished, that he refused to be consul in a place full of cowards and opportunists.”

“Elegantly put!”

“He would be governor of Nearer Spain, he said, and take himself right away.”

“Fellator!” snarled Carbo.

Brutus, who did not like strong language, said nothing to this, and apparently had nothing further to say on any subject, as nothing was said for some time.

Exasperated, the listener on the colonnade applied her eye to the ornate lattice of the shutter, and saw Carbo and her husband sitting one on either side of Brutus’s desk. They might, she thought idly, have been brothers—both very dark, both rather homely of features, and neither particularly tall nor particularly well built.

Why, she had asked herself often, had Fortune not favored her with a more impressive-looking husband, one she could be sure would shine politically? Of a military career for Brutus she had abandoned hope early, so politics it must be. But the best Brutus could think of was to legislate to give Capua the status of a Roman city. Not a bad idea—and certainly it had saved his tribunate of the plebs from utter banality!—but he would never be remembered as one of the great tribunes of the plebs, like her Uncle Drusus.

*

Brutus had been Uncle Mamercus’s choice, though in himself Uncle Mamercus was mind and body Sulla’s man, and had been in Greece with Sulla at the time it became necessary to find a husband for the eldest of his six wards, Servilia. They were all still living in Rome under the chaperonage of a poor relation, Gnaea, and her mother, Porcia Liciniana—a terrifying woman! Any guardian, no matter how geographically removed from his wards he might happen to be, need have no worry about the virtue and moral status of a child living under the thumb of Porcia Liciniana! Even her daughter, Gnaea, just grew plainer and more spinsterish as the years passed.

Thus it had been Porcia Liciniana who had received the suitors for Servilia’s hand in marriage as her eighteenth birthday approached, and Porcia Liciniana who had transmitted relevant information about the various suitors to Uncle Mamercus in the east. Together with penetrating remarks about virtue, morality, prudence, temperance, and all the other qualities she considered desirable in a husband. And though Porcia Liciniana had never once committed the gross solecism of expressing an outright preference for one suitor above any other, those penetrating remarks of hers did sink into Uncle Mamercus’s mind. After all, Servilia had a huge dowry and the felicitude of a splendid old patrician name, and was, Uncle Mamercus had been assured by Porcia Liciniana, not unattractive in her person besides.

So Uncle Mamercus took the easy way out; he chose the man Porcia Liciniana had hinted about most heavily. Marcus Junius Brutus. Since he was a senator in his early thirties, he was deemed old enough to be beyond youthful follies and indiscretions; he would be the head of his branch of the family when Old Brutus died (which could not be too far away, said Porcia Liciniana); and he was a wealthy man of impeccable (if plebeian) ancestry.

Servilia herself did not know him, and even after Porcia Liciniana informed her of her impending marriage, she was not allowed to meet Brutus until their wedding day arrived. That this antique custom was levied upon her was not due to the daunting Porcia Liciniana; it was rather the direct outcome of a childhood punishment. Because she had served as her estranged father’s spy in the household of her Uncle Drusus, her Uncle Drusus had sentenced her to a form of domestic imprisonment: she was never to be allowed to have her own room or any vestige of privacy within his house, and never to be allowed to leave that house unless accompanied by people who would police her smallest step or expression. And all that had been years and years before she reached marriageable age, and every adult in her life at that time—mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandmother, stepfather—was long dead. But still the rule continued to be enforced.

No exaggeration then to say that Servilia was so anxious to marry and be gone from Uncle Drusus’s house that she would hardly have cared who her husband was. To her, he had come to represent liberation from a detested regimen. But on learning his name, she had closed her eyes in profound relief. A man of her own class and background rather than the country squire she had expected—the country squire her Uncle Drusus during his lifetime had more than once threatened would be her husband when she grew up. Luckily Uncle Mamercus could see no advantage in marrying his niece below her station—nor could Porcia Liciniana.

Off to the house of Marcus Junius Brutus she went, a new and very thankful bride, and with her went her enormous dowry of two hundred talents—five million sesterces. What was more, it would remain hers. Uncle Mamercus had invested it well enough to ensure her a good income of her own, and directed that upon her death it should go to her female children. As her new husband, Brutus, had plenty of money of his own, the arrangement concerning her dowry did not disappoint him. Indeed, it meant that he had acquired a wife of the highest patrician aristocracy who would always be able to pay for her own upkeep—be it slaves, wages for slaves, clothing, jewelry, houses, or other expenses she incurred, she would have to pay for them herself. His money was safely his!

Aside from freedom to go where she pleased and see whomever she pleased, marriage for Servilia turned out to be a singularly joyless affair. Her husband had been a bachelor too long, no mother or other woman in his house; his ways were set, and did not include a wife. He shared nothing with her—even, she felt, his body. If he asked friends to dinner, she was told to absent herself from the dining room; his study was forbidden to her at all times; he never sought her out to discuss anything of any kind with her; he never showed her anything he bought or acquired; he never requested her company when he visited any of his country villas. As for his body—well, it was just a thing which from time to time visited her room and excited her not at all. Of privacy, she suddenly found she had far more than the long years without privacy now made comfortable or welcome. As her husband liked to sleep alone, she didn’t even have someone else in the cubicle where she slept, and found the silence horrifying.

So it was that marriage turned out to be merely a variation on the theme which had dogged her almost from infancy: she was important to no one, she mattered to no one. The only way she had managed to matter was by being nasty, spiteful, vicious, and this side of herself every servant in the house knew to his or her cost. But to her husband she never showed this side of herself, for she knew he did not love her, and that therefore divorce was never far away. To Brutus, she was unfailingly pleasant. To the servants, she was unfailingly hard.

Brutus did his duty, however. Two years a wife, Servilia fell pregnant. Like her mother, she was properly formed for bearing children, and suffered not a bit. Even labor was not the nightmare agony she had been led to believe; she brought forth her son within seven hours on an icy March night, and was able to revel in him when he was given to her, washed and sweet.

Little wonder then that baby Brutus expanded to fill every vacant corner of his mother’s love—starved life—that she would not let any other woman give him milk, and cared for him entirely herself, and put his crib in her own sleeping cubicle, and from his birth was wrapped in him to the exclusion of all else.

*

Why then did Servilia bother to listen outside the study on that freezing day late in November of the year Sulla landed in Italy? Certainly not because her husband’s political activities interested her for his sake. She listened because he was the father of her beloved son, and she had made a vow that she would safeguard her son’s inheritances, reputation, future welfare. It meant she had to keep herself informed about everything. Nothing must escape her! Especially her husband’s political activities.

Servilia didn’t care for Carbo, though she acknowledged that he was no lightweight. But she had correctly assessed him as one who would look after his own interests ahead of Rome’s; and she wasn’t sure that Brutus was clearheaded enough to see Carbo’s deficiencies. The presence of Sulla in Italy worried her deeply, for she was possessed of a genuinely political mind, and could see the pattern of future events more acutely than most men who had spent half a lifetime in the Senate. Of one thing she was sure; that Carbo didn’t have sufficient strength in him to hold Rome together in the teeth of a man like Sulla.

She took her eye away, presented her ear to the lattice instead, and sank to her knees on the painfully cold terrazzo floor. It was beginning to snow again—a boon! The flakes formed a veil between her muffled body and the hive of domestic activity at the far end of the peristyle garden, where the kitchens were, and servants pattered back and forth. Not that fear of detection concerned her; Brutus’s household would never have dared question her right to be anywhere she liked in any kind of posture. It was more that she liked to appear to Brutus’s household in the light of a superior being, and superior beings did not kneel outside a husband’s window to eavesdrop.

Suddenly she tensed, pressed her ear closer. Carbo and her husband were talking again!

“There are some good men among those eligible to run for praetor,” Brutus was saying. “Carrinas and Damasippus are as capable as they are popular.”

“Huh!” from Carbo. “Like me, they let a hairless youth beat them in battle—but unlike me, they at least had been warned that Pompeius is as ruthless as his father, and ten times as crafty. If Pompeius stood for praetor, he’d win more votes than Carrinas and Damasippus put together.”

“Pompeius’s veterans carried the day,” said Brutus in a reasonable tone.

“Maybe. But if so, then Pompeius let them do their job without interference.” Impatient, it seemed, to leap into the future, Carbo now changed the subject. “Praetors are not what concern me, Brutus. I’m worried about the consulship—thanks to your predictions of gloom! If necessary, I’ll stand for consul myself. But whom can I take for a colleague? Who in this wretched city is capable of shoring me up rather than dragging me down? There will be war in the spring, nothing is surer. Sulla’s not been well, but my intelligence sources say he’ll face the next campaigning season in high fettle.”

“Illness was not his only reason for hanging back this past year,” said Brutus. “We’ve heard rumors that he’s stayed inert to give Rome the chance to capitulate without a war.”

“Then he stayed inert in vain!” said Carbo savagely. “Oh, enough of these speculations! Whom can I take as my fellow consul?”

“Have you no ideas?” asked Brutus.

“Not a one. I need someone capable of firing people’s spirits—someone who will inspire the young men to enlist, and the old men to wish they could enlist. A man like Sertorius. But you say flatly that he won’t consent.”

“What about Marcus Marius Gratidianus, then?”

“He’s a Marius by adoption, and that’s not good enough. I wanted Sertorius because he’s a Marius by blood.”

There was a pause, but not of a helpless kind; hearing an indrawn breath from her husband, the listener outside the window stiffened to absolute stillness, determined not to miss a single word of what was coming.

“If it’s a Marius you want,” said Brutus slowly, “why not Young Marius?”

Another pause ensued, of the thunderstruck variety. Then Carbo said, “That’s not possible! Edepol, Brutus, he’s not much more than twenty years old!”

“Twenty-six, actually.”

“He’s four years too young for the Senate!”

“There’s no constitutionally official age, in spite of the lex Villia annalis. Custom rules. So I suggest you have Perperna appoint him to the Senate at once.”

“He’s not his father’s bootlace!” cried Carbo.

“Does that matter? Does it, Gnaeus Papirius? Really? I admit that in Sertorius you would have found your ideal member of the Marii—no one in Rome commands soldiers better, or is more respected by them. But he won’t consent. So who else is there except Young Marius?”

“They’d certainly flock to enlist,” said Carbo softly.

“And fight for him like the Spartans for Leonidas.”

“Do you think he could do it?’’

“I think he’d like to try.”

“You mean he’s already expressed a wish to be consul?”

Brutus laughed, something he was not prone to do. “No, Carbo, of course not! Though he’s a conceited sort of fellow, he’s not actually very ambitious. I simply mean that I think if you went to him and offered him the chance, he’d jump at it. Nothing so far in his life has presented him with any opportunity to emulate his father. And in one respect at least, this will give him the opportunity to surpass his father. Gaius Marius came late into office. Young Marius will be consul at a younger age even than Scipio Africanus. No matter how he fares, there’s fame in that for him.”

“If he fares half as well as Scipio Africanus, Rome stands in no danger from Sulla.”

“Don’t hope for a Scipio Africanus in Young Marius,” warned Brutus. “The only way he could prevent Cato the Consul from losing a battle was to stab him in the back.”

Carbo laughed, something he did often. “Well, that was a bit of luck for Cinna at least! Old Marius paid him a fortune not to press a charge of murder.”

“Yes,” said Brutus, sounding very serious, “but that episode should point out to you some of the difficulties you’ll face with Young Marius as your colleague in the consulship.”

“Don’t turn my back?”

“Don’t turn your best troops over to him. Let him prove he can general troops before you do that.”

There came the noise of chair legs scraping; Servilia got to her feet and fled to the warmth of her workroom, where the young girl who did the nursery laundry was enjoying a rare chance to cuddle baby Brutus.

The flare of scorching jealousy leaped inside Servilia before she could control it; her hand flashed out, cracked so hard against the girl’s cheek that she fell from her perch on the crib, and in so doing, dropped the baby. Who didn’t reach the floor because his mother swooped to catch him. Then, clasping him fiercely to her breast, Servilia literally kicked the girl from the room.

“Tomorrow you’ll be sold!” she shrieked down the length of the colonnade enclosing the peristyle garden. Her voice changed, she merely shouted now: “Ditus! Ditus!”

The steward, whose flowery name was Epaphroditus but was usually addressed as Ditus, came at the run. “Yes, domina?”

“That girl—the Gaul you gave me to wash Baby’s things—flog her and sell her as a bad slave.”

The steward gaped. “But domina, she’s excellent! Not only does she wash well, she’s absolutely devoted to Baby!”

Servilia slapped Epaphroditus quite as hard as she had the girl, then demonstrated that she knew how to use a choice obscenity. “Now listen to me, you pampered, over—fed Greek fellator! When I give you an order you’ll obey it without a word, let alone an argument! I don’t care whose property you are, so don’t go whining to the master, or you’ll rue it! Now fetch the girl to your office and wait for me. You like her, so you won’t flog her hard enough unless I’m there to see it.”

The crimson mark of her hand standing out on his face was complete to its fingers, but it didn’t provoke the terror in him that her words did. Epaphroditus bolted.

Servilia didn’t ask for another maid; instead, she herself wrapped baby Brutus warmly in a fine wool shawl, and carried him down to the steward’s office. The girl was tied down and a weeping Epaphroditus forced, under the basilisk glare of his mistress, to flog her until her back turned to bright red jelly and gobbets of her flesh flew everywhere. Incessant screams erupted from the room into the snow—muffled air, but the snow could not muffle those screams. Nor did the master appear to demand what was going on, for Brutus had gone with Carbo to see Young Marius, as Servilia had guessed.

Finally Servilia nodded. The steward’s arm fell. She walked up to inspect his handiwork closely, and looked satisfied. “Yes, good! She’ll never grow skin back on that mess again. No point in offering her for sale, she wouldn’t fetch a single sestertius. Crucify her. Out there in the peristyle. She’ll serve as a warning to the rest of you. And don’t break her legs! Let her die slowly.”

Back to her workroom Servilia marched, there to unwrap her son and change his linen diaper. After which she sat him on her lap and held him out at arm’s length to adore him, leaning forward occasionally to kiss him tenderly and talk to him in a soft, slightly growling voice.

They made a sufficiently pretty picture, the small dark child upon his small dark mother’s knee. She was a beautiful woman, Servilia, endowed with a firmly voluptuous figure and one of those little pointed faces which have an air of many secrets in a stilly folded mouth and thickly lidded, hooded eyes. The child however, owned only his infant’s beauty, for in truth he was plain and rather torpid—what people called a “good baby” in that he cried hardly at all and made no fusses.

And so when he came home from the house of Young Marius did Brutus find them, and listened without comment to the coldly narrated story of the negligent laundress and her punishment. As he would never have dared to interfere with Servilia’s smoothly efficient domestic arrangements (his house had never run as well before he married her, so much was sure), he made no alterations to his wife’s sentence, and when his steward came to him later at his summons, did not remark upon the snow—smothered figure tied lolling to a cross in the garden.

*

“Caesar! Where are you, Caesar?” He came strolling barefooted out of what used to be his father’s study, a pen in one hand and a roll of paper in the other, wearing no more than a thin tunic. Frowning, because his mother’s voice had interrupted his train of thought.

But she, swaddled in layer upon layer of exquisitely fine home—woven woolen fabric, was more concerned with the welfare of his body than the output of his mind, and said testily, “Oh, why will you ignore the cold? You do, you know! And no slippers either! Caesar, your horoscope suggests that you will suffer a terrible illness at about this time in your life, and you’re aware it does. Why do you tempt the lady Fortune to touch the line of that evil aspect and bring it into being? Horoscopes are commissioned at birth to ensure that potential risks can be prevented from becoming real. Be good!”

Her perturbation was absolutely genuine—and he knew it—so he gave her the smile for which he was already famous, a kind of unspoken apology that did not threaten his pride.

“What is it?” he asked, resigned the moment he set eyes on her to the fact that his work would have to wait; she was clad for going out.

“We’ve been sent for to your Aunt Julia’s.”

“At this time of day? In this weather?’’

“I’m glad you’ve noticed the weather! Not that it prompts you to dress sensibly,” said Aurelia.

“I do have a brazier, Mater. In fact, I have two.”

“Then go into the warmth and change,” she said. “It is freezing in here, with the wind whistling down the light well.” Before he turned to go, she added, “Best find Lucius Decumius. We’re all asked.”

That meant both his sisters, which surprised him—it must be a very important family conference! Almost he opened his mouth to assure his mother that he didn’t need Lucius Decumius, that a hundred women would be safe under his protection; then he shut it. He wouldn’t win, so why try? Aurelia always knew how she wanted things done.

When he emerged from his rooms he was wearing the regalia of the flamen Dialis, though in weather like this he wore three tunics beneath it, woolen breeches to below his knees, and thick socks inside a pair of baggy boots without straps or laces. His priest’s laena took the place of another man’s toga; this clumsy double—layered garment was cut on the full circle, contained a hole in its middle through which he poked his head, and was richly colored in broad stripes of alternating scarlet and purple. It reached to his knees and completely concealed his arms and hands, which meant, he thought ruefully (trying to find some virtue in his detested laena), that he did not need to wear mittens in this icy storm. Atop his head sat the apex, a close—fitting ivory helmet surmounted by a spike upon which was impaled a thick disc of wool.

Since officially becoming a man, Caesar had adhered to the taboos which hedged the flamen Dialis around; he had abandoned military practice on the Campus Martius, he allowed no iron to touch his person, he wore no knots or buckles, said hello to no dog, had his footwear made from the leather of an animal killed accidentally, and ate only those things his role as flamen Dialis permitted. That his chin displayed no beard was because he shaved with a bronze razor; that he had managed to wear boots when his priestly clogs were impractical was only because he had personally designed a style of boot to fit well without using the normal devices which made it snug around ankle and calf.

Not even his mother knew how deeply he loathed his lifelong sentence as Priest of Jupiter. When he had become a man at half—past fifteen, he had assumed the senseless shibboleths of his flaminate without a murmur or a look, and Aurelia had heaved a sigh of relief. The early rebellion had not lasted. What she couldn’t know was his true reason for obeying: he was a Roman to his core, which meant he was committed absolutely to the customs of his country, and he was inordinately superstitious. He had to obey! If he did not, he would never obtain the favor of Fortune. She would not smile upon him or his endeavors, he would have no luck. For despite this hideous lifelong sentence, he still believed Fortune would find a way out for him—if he did his best to serve Jupiter Optimus Maximus as his special priest.

Thus obedience did not mean reconciliation, as Aurelia thought it did. Obedience only meant that with every passing day he hated being flamen Dialis more. And hated it most because under the law there could be no escape. Old Gaius Marius had succeeded in shackling him forever. Unless Fortune rescued him.

Caesar was seventeen, would not be eighteen until another seven months had elapsed; but he looked older, and he carried himself like a consular who had also been censor. The height and the broad shoulders helped, of course, allied as they were to a gracefully muscular frame. His father had been dead for two and a half years, which meant he had come very early into his title of paterfamilias, and now wore it naturally. The extreme good looks of his boyhood had not faded, though they had become more manly—his nose, thank all the gods, had lengthened to a form properly, bumpily Roman, and saved him from a prettiness which would have been a great burden to one who so ardently desired to be everything a man should be—soldier, statesman, lover of women without suspicion that he was also a lover of men.

His family was assembled in the reception room, garbed for a long, cold walk. Except, that is, for his wife, Cinnilla. At eleven years of age she was not considered adult enough to attend these rare gatherings of the clan. However, she was present, the only small and dark member of the house; when Caesar entered, her pansy—black eyes flew to his face just as they always did. He adored her, moved to her now and swept her off her feet to hold her in his arms, kissing her soft pink cheek with his eyes closed the better to inhale the exquisite perfume of a child kept clean and balmed by his mother.

“Doomed to stay home?” he asked, kissing her cheek again.

“One day I’ll be big enough,” she said, showing dimples in her enchanting smile.

“Indeed you will! And then you’ll be more important than Mater, because you’ll be the mistress of the house.” He put the child down, smoothed his hand over her mass of waving black hair, and winked at Aurelia.

“I won’t be the mistress of this house,” she said solemnly. “I’ll be the flaminica Dialis, and mistress of a State house.”

“True,” he said lightly. “How could I have forgotten?”

Out into the driving snow he went, up past the shops which nestled in the outer wall of Aurelia’s apartment house, to the rounded apex of that triangular building. Here was located what appeared to be a tavern, yet was not; it was the headquarters of the College of Crossroads Brethren who supervised the well-being and spiritual life of the crossroads outside its double doors, especially the towerlike shrine to the Lares and the big fountain, which now flowed sluggishly amid a tumble of ethereally blue icicles, so cold was this winter.

Lucius Decumius was in residence at his usual table in the back left—hand corner of the huge, clean room. Grizzled these days but face as unlined as ever, he had recently admitted his two sons to membership, and was training them in all the multifarious activities of his college. So they sat one on either side of him like the two lions which always flanked a statue of Magna Mater—grave, tawny, thick—maned, yellow-eyed, claws furled. Not that Lucius Decumius in any way resembled Magna Mater! He was little, skinny, and anonymous-looking; his sons took after their mother, who was a large Celtic lady from the Ager Gallicus. To no one unacquainted with him did he seem what he actually was—brave, tortuously subtle, amoral, enormously intelligent, loyal.

The three Decumii brightened when Caesar walked through the door, but only Lucius Decumius rose. Threading his way between the tables and benches, he reached Caesar, stood on tiptoe and kissed the young man on the lips more fondly than he did either of his sons. It was the kiss of a father, though it was given to someone whose only connection with him lay tangled amid the cords of his not inconsiderable heart.

“My boy!” he crowed, and took Caesar’s hand.

“Hello, dad,” Caesar answered with a smile, lifted Lucius Decumius’s fingers and pressed them against his cold cheek.

“Been sweeping out some dead man’s house?” asked Lucius Decumius, in reference to Caesar’s priestly regalia. “Nasty weather for dying! Have a cup of wine to warm you, eh?”

Caesar grimaced. He had never managed to cultivate a real liking for wine, try though Lucius Decumius and his brethren had to instill it in him. “No time, dad. I’m here to borrow a couple of the brethren. I have to take my mother and sisters to the house of Gaius Marius, and she doesn’t trust me to do it on my own, of course.”

“Wise woman, your mother,” said Lucius Decumius with a look of wicked glee. He beckoned to his sons, who rose at once and came to join him. “Togs on, lads! We’re going to take the ladies to the house of Gaius Marius.”

No resentment of their father’s obvious preference for Gaius Julius Caesar colored the emotions of Lucius Decumius Junior or young Marcus Decumius; they simply nodded, clapped Caesar on the back in great affection, and went off to find their warmest clothing.

“Don’t come, dad,” said Caesar. “Stay here out of the cold.”

But that didn’t suit Lucius Decumius, who allowed his sons to dress him much as a doting mother might have dressed her toddling offspring. “Where’s that oaf Burgundus?” he asked as they spilled out into the swirling snow.

Caesar chuckled. “No use to anyone at the moment! Mater sent him down to Bovillae with Cardixa. She might have started breeding late, but she’s produced one baby giant every year since she first set eyes on Burgundus. This will be number four, as you well know.”

“You’ll never be short of bodyguards when you’re consul.”

Caesar shivered, but not from the cold. “I’ll never be consul,” he said harshly, then lifted his shoulders and tried to be pleasant. “My mother says it’s like feeding a tribe of Titans. Ye gods, they can eat!”

“Good people, but.”

“Yes, good people,” said Caesar.

By this time they had reached the outer door of Aurelia’s apartment, and collected the womenfolk. Other aristocratic ladies might have elected to ride in litters, especially in such weather, but not the Julian ladies. They walked, their progress down the Fauces Suburae somewhat eased by the Decumius sons, who shuffled ahead to blaze a path through the accumulating snow.

The Forum Romanum was utterly deserted, and looked odd bled of its vividly colored columns and walls and roofs and statues; everything was marble—white, seemed sunk in a deep and dreamless sleep. And the imposing statue of Gaius Marius near the rostra had a bank of snow perched on either bushy eyebrow, masking the normally fierce glare of his dark eyes.

Up the Hill of the Bankers they toiled, through the vast portals of the Fontinalis Gate, and so to the door of Gaius Marius’s house. As its peristyle garden lay at the back of the mansion, they entered straight into the foyer, and there peeled off outer garments (save for Caesar, doomed to wear his regalia). Lucius Decumius and his sons were taken away by the steward, Strophantes, to sample some excellent food and wine, while Caesar and the women entered the atrium.

Had the weather been less unnaturally cold, they might have remained there, since it was well past dinnertime, but the open rectangle of the compluvium in the roof was acting like a vortex, and the pool below it was a twinkling crust of rapidly melting snowflakes.

Young Marius appeared then to welcome them and usher them through into the dining room, which would be warmer, he said. He looked, thought Caesar warily, almost afire with happiness, and the emotion suited him. As tall as Caesar (who was his first cousin), he was more heavily built, fair of hair and grey of eye, handsome, impressive. Physically far more attractive than his father, he yet lacked that vital something which had made of Gaius Marius one of the Roman immortals. Many generations would go by, Caesar reflected, before every schoolchild ceased to learn about the exploits of Gaius Marius. Such would not be the lot of his son, Young Marius.

This was a house Caesar loathed visiting; too much had happened to him here. While other boys of his age had been heedlessly frittering away their time playing on the Campus Martius, he had been required to report here every day to act as nurse/companion to the aged and vindictive Gaius Marius. And though he had swept strenuously with his sacred broom after Marius died here, that malign presence still lingered. Or so Caesar thought. Once he had admired and loved Gaius Marius. But then Gaius Marius had appointed him the special priest of Jupiter, and in that one stroke had rendered it impossible for Caesar ever to rival him. No iron, no weapons, no sight of death—no military career for the flamen Dialis! An automatic membership in the Senate without the right to stand for election as a magistrate—no political career for the flamen Dialis! It was Caesar’s fate to be honored without earning that honor, revered without earning that reverence. The flamen Dialis was a creature belonging to the State, housed and paid and fed by the State, a prisoner of the mos maiorum, the established practices of custom and tradition.

But of course Caesar’s revulsion could never endure past the moment in which he set eyes upon his Aunt Julia. His father’s sister, the widow of Gaius Marius. And, differently from his mother, the person in the world he loved the most. Indeed, he loved her more than he did his mother, if love could be classified as a simple rush of sheer emotion. His mother was permanently grafted to his intellect because she was adversary, adherent, critic, companion, equal. Whereas Aunt Julia enfolded him in her arms and kissed him on the lips, beamed at him with her soft grey eyes innocent of the faintest condemnation. Life for him without either one was unthinkable.

Julia and Aurelia elected to sit side by side on the same couch, ill at ease because they were women, and women did not recline on couches. Forbidden by custom to lie comfortably, they perched on the edge with their feet dangling clear of the floor and their backs unsupported.

“Can’t you give the women chairs?” asked Caesar of Young Marius as he shoved bolsters behind his mother and his aunt.

“Thank you, nephew, we’ll manage now you’ve propped us up,” said Julia, always the peacemaker. “I don’t think the house has enough chairs for all of us! This is a conference of women.”

An inalienable truth, acknowledged Caesar ruefully. The male element of this family was reduced to two men: Young Marius and Caesar. Both only sons of dead fathers.

Of women, there were more. Had Rome been present to see Julia and Aurelia side by side, Rome would have enjoyed the spectacle of two of her most beautiful women encompassed in one glance. Though both were tall and slim, Julia owned the innate grace of the Caesars, whereas Aurelia moved with brisk, no-nonsense economy. One, Julia, had softly waving blonde hair and widely opened grey eyes, and might have posed for the statue of Cloelia in the upper Forum Romanum. The other, Aurelia, had ice—brown hair and a quality of beauty which had, in her youth, caused her to be likened to Helen of Troy. Dark brows and lashes, a pair of deeply set eyes many of the men who had tried to marry her had insisted were purple, and the profile of a Greek goddess.

Julia was now forty-five years old to Aurelia’s forty. Both had been widowed in distressing though very different circumstances.

Gaius Marius had died of his third and most massive stroke, but only after launching and pursuing an orgy of murder no one in Rome would ever forget. All his enemies had died—and some of his friends—and the rostra had bristled with the heads as thickly as pins in a cushion. With this sorrow, Julia lived.

Aurelia’s husband, loyal to Cinna after the death of Marius—as was only fitting in one whose son was married to Cinna’s younger daughter—had gone to Etruria to recruit troops. One summer morning in Pisae he had bent over to lace up his boot, and died. A ruptured blood vessel in his brain was the conclusion reached at postmortem; he was burned on a pyre without a single member of his family present, and his ashes were then sent home to his wife. Who did not even know her husband was dead when Cinna’s messenger came to present her with the funerary urn. How she felt, what she thought, no one knew. Even her son, made head of his family a month short of his fifteenth birthday. No tear had she shed that anyone had seen, and the look on her face had not changed. For she was Aurelia, fastened up inside herself, apparently more attached to her work as landlady of a busy insula than to any human being save for her son.

Young Marius had no sisters, but Caesar had two older than himself. Both of them looked like their Aunt Julia; there were strong echoes of Aurelia in Caesar’s face, but not in either of his sisters’.

Julia Major, called Lia, was now twenty-one years old, and carried the faintest suggestion of something careworn in her expression. Not without reason. Her first husband, a penniless patrician by name of Lucius Pinarius, had been the love of her heart, so she had been allowed—albeit reluctantly—to marry him. A son had arrived less than a year later, and shortly after that happy event (which did not turn out to have the hoped—for sobering effect on Lucius Pinarius’s character or behavior), Lucius Pinarius died in mysterious circumstances. Murder by a confederate was thought likely, but no proof could be found. So Lia, aged nineteen, found herself a widow in such an impoverished state that she had been obliged to return to live under her mother’s roof. But between her marriage and her widowhood the identity of the paterfamilias had changed, and she now discovered that her young brother was not nearly as softhearted or malleable as her father had been.

She must marry again, said Caesar—but a man of his choosing, for, “It is clear to me,” he said to her dispassionately, “that, left to your own devices, you will pick another idiot.”

Quite how or where Caesar had found Quintus Pedius, no one knew (though some suspected a collaboration with Lucius Decumius, who might be a seedy little man of the Fourth Class, but who had remarkable contacts), but home he came with Quintus Pedius, and betrothed his widowed oldest sister to this stolid, upright Campanian knight of good but not noble family. He was not handsome. He was not dashing. At forty, he was not even very young. But he was colossally rich and almost pathetically grateful for the chance to marry a lovely and youthful woman of the most exalted patrician nobility. Lia had swallowed, looked at her fifteen-year-old brother, and graciously accepted; even at that age, Caesar could put something into his face and eyes that killed argument before it was born.

Luckily the marriage had turned out well. Lucius Pinarius might have been handsome and dashing and young, but as a husband he had been disappointing. Now Lia discovered that there were many compensations in being the darling of a rich man twice her age, and as time went on she grew very fond of her uninspiring second husband. She bore him a son, and was so settled into her delightfully luxurious life on her husband’s estates outside Teanum Sidicinum that when Scipio Asiagenus and then Sulla had established camps in the neighborhood, she flatly refused to go home to her mother, who would, she knew, regulate her exercise, her diet, her sons and her life to suit her own austere ideas. Of course Aurelia had arrived in person (after, it seemed, an unexpected meeting with Sulla—a meeting about which she had said little beyond mentioning it), and Lia had been bundled to Rome. Without her sons, alas; Quintus Pedius had preferred to keep them with him in Teanum.

Julia Minor, called Ju—Ju, had been married in the early part of this year, not long after her eighteenth birthday. No chance that she would be allowed to pick someone unsuitable! Caesar did the picking, though she had railed against his highhanded usurpation of a task she felt herself fully able to perform. Of course he won. Home he came with another colossally rich suitor, this time of an old senatorial family, and himself a backbencher senator content to stay on the back benches. He hailed from Aricia, just down the Via Appia from the Caesar lands at Bovillae, and that fact made him Latin, which was one cut above mere Campanian. After setting eyes on Marcus Atius Balbus, Ju—Ju had married him without a murmur; compared to Quintus Pedius he was quite reasonable, being a mere thirty-seven, and actually handsome for such an advanced age.

Because Marcus Atius Balbus was a senator, he owned a domus in Rome as well as enormous estates at Aricia, so Ju—Ju could congratulate herself on yet one more advantage over her elder sister; she at least lived more or less permanently in Rome! On that late afternoon when all the family was summoned to the house of Gaius Marius, she was beginning to be heavy with child. Not that her pregnancy had prevented her mother from making her walk!

“It isn’t good for pregnant women to coddle themselves,” said Aurelia. “That’s why so many of them die in childbirth.”

“I thought you said they died because they ate nothing but fava beans,” Ju—Ju had countered, wistfully eyeing the litter in which she had made the journey from her husband’s house on the Carinae to her mother’s apartment building in the Subura.

“Those too. Pythagorean physicians are a menace.”

One more woman was present, though by blood she was not related to any of the others—or at least, not closely related. Her name was Mucia Tertia, and she was Young Marius’s wife. The only daughter of Scaevola Pontifex Maximus, she had been called Mucia Tertia to distinguish her from her two famous cousins, the daughters of Scaevola the Augur.

Though she wasn’t precisely beautiful, Mucia Tertia had disturbed many a man’s sleep. A muddy green in color, her eyes were abnormally far apart and thickly fringed by black lashes which were longer at the outer corners of her eyes, thereby accentuating the distance between them; though she never said so, she deliberately trimmed her lashes shorter at the inner corners of her eyes with a tiny pair of ivory scissors from Old Egypt. Mucia Tertia was well aware of the nature of her unusual attractions. Her long, straight nose somehow managed not to be a disadvantage, even if the purists did think there ought to be some sort of bump or break in it. Again, her mouth was far from the Roman ideal of beauty, being very wide; when she smiled, she showed what seemed like a hundred perfect teeth. But her lips were full and sensuous, and she had a thick, creamy skin which went well with her dark red hair.

Caesar for one found her alluring, and at half—past seventeen was already highly experienced in sexual matters. Every female in the Subura had indicated willingness to help such a lovely young man find his amatory feet, and few were deterred when they discovered Caesar insisted they be bathed and clean; the word had gone out very quickly that young Caesar was equipped with a couple of mighty weapons, and knew how best to use them.

Most of the reason Mucia Tertia interested Caesar lay in a certain quality of enigma she owned; try as he might, she was one person he couldn’t see to the bottom of. She smiled readily to display those hundred perfect teeth, yet the smile never originated in her extraordinary eyes, and she gave off no clues of gesture or expression as to what she really thought.

She had been married for four years of apparent indifference, as much on Young Marius’s side as on hers. Their conversation together was pleasantly chatty but quite formal; they never exchanged those glances of secret understanding most married couples did; no move did either make to touch the other, even when no one was looking; and they had no children. If the union was genuinely devoid of feeling, Young Marius for one certainly did not suffer; his philanderings were common knowledge. But what about Mucia Tertia, of whom no whisper had ever circulated concerning indiscretion, let alone infidelity? Was Mucia Tertia happy? Did she love Young Marius? Or did she hate him? Impossible to tell, and yet—and yet—Caesar’s instincts said she was desperately unhappy.

The group had settled down, and every eye was now fixed on Young Marius, who perversely had elected to sit upon a chair. Not to be outdone, Caesar too drew up a chair, but far removed from where Young Marius sat in the hollow of the U formed by the three dining couches; he sat behind his mother’s shoulder, on the outside of the U, and so could not see the faces of his most beloved women. To him, it seemed more important by far to look at Young Marius, Mucia Tertia, and the steward Strophantes, who had been asked to attend and who stood near the doorway, having quietly refused Young Marius’s invitation to seat himself.

Wetting his lips—an unusual sign of nervousness—Young Marius began to speak. “Earlier this afternoon, I had a visit from Gnaeus Papirius Carbo and Marcus Junius Brutus.”

“That’s an odd combination,” said Caesar, who didn’t want his cousin to flow on without interruption; he wanted Young Marius a little flustered.

The look Young Marius flashed him was angry, but not angry enough to fluster his thinking. A start only.

Then Caesar found his ploy foiled. Said Young Marius, “They came to ask me if I would stand for the consulship in conjunction with Gnaeus Carbo. I said I would.”

The stir was general. Caesar saw amazement on the faces of his sisters, a sudden spasm in his aunt’s spine, a peculiar but unfathomable look in Mucia Tertia’s remarkable eyes.

“My son, you’re not even in the Senate,” said Julia.

“I will be tomorrow, when Perperna puts me on the rolls.”

“You haven’t been quaestor, let alone praetor.”

“The Senate is willing to waive the usual requirements.”

“You don’t have the experience or the knowledge!” Julia persisted, her voice despairing.

“My father was consul seven times. I grew up surrounded by consulars. Besides, you can’t call Carbo inexperienced.”

Asked Aurelia, “Why are we here?”

Young Marius shifted his earnest and appealing gaze from his mother to his aunt. “To talk the matter over between us, of course!” he said, a little blankly.

“Rubbish!” said Aurelia bluntly. “Not only have you made up your mind already, but you’ve also told Carbo you’ll run as his colleague. It seems to me that you’ve dragged us out of our warm house just to listen to news the city gossip ‘would have brought to our ears almost as quickly.”

“That’s not so, Aunt Aurelia!”

“Of course it’s so!” snapped Aurelia.

Skin bright red, Young Marius turned back to his mother, a hand extended to her in appeal. “Mama, it’s not so! I know I told Carbo I’d stand, but—but I always intended to listen to what my family had to say, truly! I can change my mind!”

“Hah! You won’t change your mind,” said Aurelia.

Julia’s fingers fastened upon Aurelia’s wrist. “Be quiet, Aurelia! I want no anger in this room.”

“You’re right, Aunt Julia—anger is the last emotion we want,” said Caesar, inserting himself between his mother and his aunt. From this new vantage spot he stared at his first cousin intently. “Why did you say yes to Carbo?” he asked.

A question which didn’t fool Young Marius for a moment. “Oh, give me credit for more intelligence than that, Caesar!” he said scornfully. “I said yes for the same reason you would have, if you didn’t wear a laena and an apex.”

“I can see why you’d think I would have said yes, but in actual fact I never would have. In suo anno is the best way.”

“It’s illegal,” said Mucia Tertia unexpectedly.

“No,” said Caesar before Young Marius could answer. “It’s against the established custom and even against the lex Villia annalis, but it’s not exactly illegal. It could only become prosecutably illegal if your husband usurped the position against the will of Senate and People. Senate and People can legislate to nullify the lex Villia. And that is what will happen. Senate and People will procure the necessary legislation, which means the only one who will declare it illegal is Sulla.”

A silence fell. “That is the worst of it,” said Julia, voice faltering. “You’ll be in the field against Sulla.”

“I would have been in the field against Sulla anyway, Mama,” said Young Marius.

“But not as the inaugurated representative of Senate and People. To be consul is to accept ultimate responsibility. You will be leading Rome’s armies.” A tear trickled down Julia’s cheek. “You’ll be the focus of Sulla’s thoughts, and he is the most formidable man! I don’t know him as well as your Aunt Aurelia does, Gaius, but I know him quite well enough. I’ve even liked him, in the days when he used to take care of your father—he did, you know. He used to smooth over the little awkwardnesses which always seemed to happen around your father. A more patient and perceptive man than your father. A man of some honor too. But your father and Lucius Cornelius share one very important factor in common—when all else fails, from constitution to popular support, they are—or should that be were?—both capable of going to whatever lengths are necessary to achieve their aims. That’s why both of them have marched on Rome in the past. And that is why Lucius Cornelius will march on Rome again if Rome takes this course, elects you consul. The very fact of your election will tell him that Rome intends to fight him to the end, that there can be no peaceful resolution.” She sighed, wiped the tear away. “Sulla is why I wish you’d change your mind, dear Gaius. If you had his years and background, you might possibly win. But you do not. You cannot win. And I will lose my one and only child.”

It was the plea of a reasonable and mature adult; Young Marius was neither, and his face as he listened to this heartfelt speech only set. His lips parted to answer.

“Well, Mater,” said Caesar, getting in first, “as Aunt Julia says, you know Sulla better than any of the rest of us! How do you feel about it?”

Little discomposed Aurelia, and she had no intention of telling them the details of her last discomposure: that awful, tragic encounter with Sulla in his camp. “It is true, I do know Sulla well. I’ve even seen him within the last six months, as all of you know. But in the old days I was always the last person he saw before he left Rome, and the first person he saw when he came back. Between his goings and his comings, I hardly saw him at all. That is typical of Sulla. At heart he’s an actor. He can’t live without drama. And he knew how to make an otherwise innocuous situation pregnant with meaning. That’s why he chose to see me at the moments he did. It invested my presence in his life with more color, more significance. Instead of a simple visit to a lady with whom he liked to talk of relatively unimportant things, each visit became a farewell or a reunion. He endowed me with portent, I think it would be fair to say that.”

Caesar smiled at her. “You haven’t answered my question, Mater,” he said gently.

“Nor I have,” said that extraordinary woman without alarm or guilt. “I will proceed to do so.” She looked at Young Marius sternly. “What you must understand is that if you face Sulla as the inaugurated representative of the Senate and People—that is, as consul—you will endow yourself with portent as far as Sulla is concerned. Your age combined with the identity of your father Sulla will use to heighten the drama of his struggle to achieve dominance in Rome. All of which is scant comfort to your mother, nephew. For her sake, give up this idea! Face Sulla on the field as just another military tribune.”

“How do you feel?” asked Young Marius of Caesar.

“I say—do it, cousin. Be consul ahead of your year.”

“Lia?”

She turned troubled eyes toward her Aunt Julia and said, “Please don’t do it, cousin!”

“Ju—Ju?”

“I agree with my sister.”

“Wife?”

“You must go with your fortune.”

“Strophantes?”

The old steward sighed. “Domine, do not do it!”

With nods that rocked his upper body gently, Young Marius sat back on his chair and flung an arm along its tall back. He pursed his mouth, blew through his nostrils softly. “Well, no surprises, at any rate,” he said. “My female relatives and my steward exhort me not to step out of my time and status and imperil my person. Perhaps my aunt is trying to say that I will also imperil my reputation. My wife puts it all on the lap of Fortune—am I one of Fortune’s favorites? And my cousin says I must go ahead.”

He got to his feet, a not unimposing presence. “I will not go back on my word to Gnaeus Papirius Carbo and Marcus Junius Brutus. If Marcus Perperna agrees to enroll me in the Senate, and the Senate agrees to procure the necessary legislation, I will declare myself a candidate for the consulship.”

“You haven’t really told us why,” said Aurelia.

“I would have thought that was obvious. Rome is desperate. Carbo can find no suitable colleague. So where did he turn? To the son of Gaius Marius. Rome loves me! Rome needs me! That is why,” said the young man.

Only the oldest and loyalest of retainers would have found the courage to say what Strophantes did, speaking not only for the stricken mother, but for the father who was dead: “It is your father Rome loves, domine. Rome turns to you because of your father. Rome doesn’t know you, except that you are the son of the man who saved her from the Germans, who won the first victories in the war against the Italians, and who was consul seven times. If you do this thing, it will be because you are your father’s son, not because you are yourself.”

Young Marius loved Strophantes, as the steward well knew; considering its implications, he took the steward’s speech very well. His lips tightened, that was all. When Strophantes was done, he merely said, “I know. It is up to me to show Rome that Young Marius is the equal of his dear old dad.”

Caesar looked at the floor, said nothing. Why, he was asking himself, didn’t the crazy old man give the laena and apex of the flamen Dialis to someone else? I could do it. But Young Marius never will.

*

And so toward the end of December the electors in their Centuries met upon the Campus Martius in the place called after a sheepfold, and voted in Young Marius as senior consul, with Gnaeus Papirius Carbo as his junior colleague. The very fact that Young Marius polled far higher than did Carbo was an indication of Rome’s desperation, her fears as well as her doubts. However, many who voted genuinely felt that something of Gaius Marius must have rubbed off on his son, and that under Young Marius victory against Sulla was a strong possibility.

In one respect the electoral results had highly gratifying consequences; recruitment, especially in Etruria and Umbria, accelerated at once. The sons and grandsons of Gaius Marius’s clients flocked to join the son’s legions, suddenly much lighter of heart, full of new confidence. And when Young Marius visited the enormous estates of his father, he was hailed as a savior, feted, adored.

Rome turned out in festive mood to see the new consuls inaugurated on the first day of January, and was not disappointed. Young Marius went through the ceremonies displaying a transparent happiness which endeared him to the hearts of all who watched; he looked magnificent, he smiled, he waved, he called out greetings to familiar faces in the crowd. And, since everybody knew where his mother was standing (beneath the stern statue of her late husband near the rostra), everybody saw the new senior consul leave his place in the procession in order to kiss her hands and her lips. And gesture a brave salute to his father.

Perhaps, thought Carbo cynically, the people of Rome needed to have Youth in power at this critical moment. Certainly it was many years since a crowd had given full—throated approval to a consul on his first day in office. Today it did. And by all the gods, Carbo finished his thought, hope that Rome did not come to regret her electoral bargain! For so far Young Marius’s attitude had been cavalier; he seemed to assume as a matter of course that everything would just fall into his lap, that he would not need to work, that all the battles of the future were already safely won.

The omens were not good, though nothing untoward had been witnessed by the new consuls during their night watch atop the Capitol. What boded ill was an absence—an absence of such moment that no one could forget or ignore it. Where the great temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus had reared on the highest point of the Capitoline Hill for five hundred years, there now existed only a heap of blackened, unrecognizable detritus. On the sixth day of Quinctilis of the year just ended, a fire had begun inside the Great God’s house, and burned for seven long days. Nothing was left. Nothing. For the temple had been so old that no part of it save its podium was made of stone; the massive drums of its plain Doric columns were as wooden as its walls, its rafters, its interior paneling. Only its great size and solidity, rare and costly colors of paint, glorious murals and plenteous gilding had served to make it look a fitting abode for Jupiter Best and Greatest, who lived only in this one place; the idea of Principal Jupiter setting up house on top of the highest mountain—as Greek Zeus had done—was quite unacceptable to any Roman or Italian.

When the ashes had cooled sufficiently for the priests to inspect the site, disaster had piled on top of disaster. Of the gigantic terracotta statue of the God made by the Etruscan sculptor Vulca during Old Tarquin’s reign as King of Rome, there was no trace. The ivory statues of Jupiter’s wife, Juno, and his daughter Minerva had vanished too; as had the temple’s eerie squatters, Terminus the Boundary and Juventas of Youth, who had refused to move out when King Tarquin had commenced the building of Jupiter Optimus Maximus’s home. Law tablets and records of unparalleled antiquity had gone, as had the Sibylline Books and many other prophetic documents upon which Rome relied for godly guidance in times of crisis. Innumerable treasures made of gold and silver had melted, even the solid gold statue of Victory given by Hiero of Syracuse after Trasimene, and another massive statue in gilded bronze of Victory driving a biga—a two—horsed chariot. The tortured lumps of admixed metals found among the detritus had been gathered up and given to the smiths for refining, but the ingots the smiths had smelted (which went into the Treasury beneath the temple of Saturn against the time when they would be given to artisans to make new works) could not replace the immortal names of the original sculptors—Praxiteles and Myron, Strongylion and Polyclitus, Scopas and Lysippus. Art and History had gone up in the same flames as the earthly home of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

Adjacent temples had also suffered, particularly that of Ops, who was the mysterious guardian of Rome’s public wealth and had no face or person; the temple would have to be rebuilt and rededicated, so great had been the damage. The temple of Fides Publica was badly hurt. too. The heat of the nearby fire had charred all the treaties and pacts fixed to its inside walls, as well as the linen swaddle around the right hand of an ancient statue thought—only thought!—to be Fides Publica herself. The other building which suffered was new and made of marble, and therefore required little beyond fresh paint; this was the temple to Honor and Virtue erected by Gaius Marius to house his trophies of war, his military decorations and his gifts to Rome. What perturbed every Roman was the significance of the distribution of the damage: Jupiter Optimus Maximus was the guiding spirit of Rome; Ops was Rome’s public prosperity; Fides Publica was the spirit of good faith between Romans and their gods; and Honor and Virtue were the two principal characteristics of Rome’s military glory. Thus every Roman asked himself and herself: was the fire a sign that Rome’s days of ascendancy were over? Was the fire a sign that Rome was finished?

So it was that on this New Year’s Day the consuls were the first ever to enter office unhallowed by the shelter of Jupiter Best and Greatest. A temporary shrine had been erected beneath a canopy at the foot of the blackened old stone podium upon which the temple used to stand, and here the new consuls made their offerings, swore their oaths of office.

Bright hair hidden by his close—fitting ivory helmet, body hidden by the suffocating folds of his circular laena, Caesar the flamen Dialis attended the rites in his official capacity, though he had no active role to play; the ceremonies were conducted by the chief priest of the Republic, the Pontifex Maximus, Quintus Mucius Scaevola, father of Young Marius’s wife.

Caesar stood there experiencing two separate and conflicting foci of pain: one, that the destruction of the Great Temple rendered the special priest of Jupiter religiously homeless, and the other, that he himself would never stand in purple-bordered toga to take office as consul. But he had learned to deal with pain, and throughout the rituals disciplined himself to stand straight, tall, devoid of expression.

The meeting of the Senate and the feast held afterward had been shifted from Jupiter Optimus Maximus to the Curia Hostilia, home of the Senate and a properly inaugurated temple. Though by age Caesar was disbarred from the interior of the Curia Hostilia, as flamen Dialis he was automatically a member of the Senate, so no one tried to stop his entering, and he listened impassively to the short, formal proceedings which Young Marius as senior consul got under way quite creditably. The governorships to commence in twelve months’ time were apportioned out by lot to this year’s praetors and both the consuls, the date of the feast of Jupiter Latiaris on the Alban Mount was determined, and other movable days of public or religious nature were also fixed.

As there was little the flamen Dialis could eat among the bountiful and expensive food offered after the meeting concluded, Caesar found an inconspicuous spot and set himself to listen to whatever conversations drifted past him as men sorted out their preferred couches. Rank dictated the positions of some, like those holding magistracies, priesthoods, augurships, but the bulk of the senators were at liberty to distribute themselves among cronies and settle to partake of viands the bottomless purse of Young Marius had provided.

It was a thin gathering, perhaps no more than a hundred strong, so many senators had fled to join Sulla, and by no means all of those present to witness the inauguration of the consuls were partial to the consuls or their plans. Quintus Lutatius Catulus was there, but no lover of Carbo’s cause; his father, Catulus Caesar (who died during Marius’s bloodbath) had been an implacable enemy of Marius’s, and the son was cut from the same cloth, though not as gifted or educated. That, reflected the watching Caesar, was because his father’s Julian blood had been diluted in the son by his mother, a Domitia of the Domitii Ahenobarbi—Famous Family stock, but not famous for intellect. Caesar didn’t like him, a prejudice of looks; Catulus was weedy and undersized, and had his mother’s Domitian red hair as well as her freckles. He was married to the sister of the man who reclined next to him on the same couch, Quintus Hortensius, and Quintus Hortensius (another noble stay-in-Rome neutral) was married to Catulus’s sister, Lutatia. Still in his early thirties, Quintus Hortensius had become Rome’s leading advocate under the rule of Cinna and Carbo, and was held by some to be the best legal mind Rome had ever produced. He was quite a handsome man, his taste for life’s little luxuries was betrayed by a sensuous lower lip, and his taste for beautiful boys by the expression in his eyes as they rested upon Caesar. A veteran of such looks, Caesar extirpated any ideas Hortensius might have been forming by sucking his mouth in ridiculously and crossing his eyes; Hortensius flushed and turned his head immediately to look at Catulus.

At that moment a servant came to whisper to Caesar that his cousin demanded his presence at the far end of the room. Rising from the bottom—tier step where he had huddled himself to look, Caesar slopped in his backless clogs to where Young Marius and Carbo lay, kissed his cousin on the cheek, then perched himself on the edge of the curule podium behind the couch.

“Not eating?” asked Young Marius.

“There’s not much I can eat.”

“S’right, I forgot,” mumbled Young Marius through a mouthful of fish. He swallowed it, and pointed to the huge platter laid out on the table in front of his couch. “There’s nothing to stop you having some of that,” he said.

Caesar eyed the partially dismembered carcass with distinct lack of enthusiasm; it was a licker—fish of the Tiber. “Thank you,” he said, “but 1 never could see any virtue in eating shit.”

That provoked a chuckle from Young Marius, but couldn’t destroy his enjoyment in consuming a creature which thrived upon the excrement flowing out of Rome’s vast sewers; Carbo, Caesar noted with amusement, was not so strong—stomached, for his hand, which had been in the act of reaching out to tear off a chunk of licker—fish, suddenly grabbed at a tiny roast chicken instead.

Of course here Caesar was more noticeable, but prominence carried considerable reward; he could see many more faces. While he exchanged idle badinage with Young Marius, his eyes were very busy skipping from man to man. Rome, he thought, might be pleased enough at the election of a twenty-six-year-old senior consul, but some of the men present at this feast were not pleased at all. Especially Carbo’s minions—Brutus Damasippus, Carrinas, Marcus Fannius, Censorinus, Publius Burrienus, Publius Albinovanus the Lucanian ... Of course there were some who were highly delighted, like Marcus Marius Gratidianus and Scaevola Pontifex Maximus—but they were both related to Young Marius, and had, so to speak, a vested interest in seeing the new senior consul do well.

The younger Marcus Junius Brutus appeared behind Carbo’s end of the couch. He was greeted, Caesar noticed, with unusual fervor; Carbo did not normally indulge in rapturous welcomes. Seeing it, Young Marius weaved away in search of more convivial company, leaving Brutus to take his place. Brutus nodded in passing to Caesar, without displaying any interest in him. That was the best thing about being flamen Dialis; he interested nobody because he was so politically insignificant. Carbo and Brutus proceeded to talk openly.

“I think we can congratulate ourselves on an excellent ploy,” said Brutus, digging his fingers into the disintegrating carcass of the licker—fish.

“Huh.” The chicken, barely nibbled, was thrown down with a grimace of distaste; Carbo took bread.

“Oh, come now! You ought to be elated.”

“About what? Him? Brutus, he’s as hollow as a sucked egg! I’ve seen enough of him during the past month to know that, I do assure you. He may hold the fasces for the month of January, but it’s I who will have to do all the work.”

“You didn’t expect that to be different, surely?”

Carbo shrugged, tossed the bread away; since Caesar’s remark about eating shit, his appetite had vanished. “Oh, I don’t know…. Maybe I’d hoped to see him grow a little sense. After all, he is Marius’s son, and his mother is a Julian. You’d think those facts would be worth something.”

“They’re not, I take it.”

“Not your granny’s used handkerchief. The most I can say about him is that he’s a useful ornament—he makes us look very pretty, and he sucks in the recruits.”

“He might command troops well,” said Brutus, wiping his greasy hands on the linen napkin a slave passed to him.

“He might. My guess is he won’t. I intend to take your advice in that area, certainly.”

“What advice?”

“To make sure he isn’t given the best soldiers.”

“Oh.” Brutus flipped the napkin into the air without bothering to see whether the silent servant hovering near Caesar managed to catch it. “Quintus Sertorius isn’t here today. I had at least hoped he’d come to Rome for this occasion. After all, Young Marius is his cousin.”

Carbo laughed, not a happy sound. “Sertorius, my dear Brutus, has abandoned our cause. He left Sinuessa to its fate, made off to Telamon, enlisted a legion of Etrurian clients of Gaius Marius’s, and sailed on the winter winds for Tarraco. In other words, he’s taken up his governorship of Nearer Spain very early. No doubt he hopes that by the time his term is over, there will be a decision in Italy.”

“He’s a coward!” said Brutus indignantly.

Carbo made a rude noise. “Not that one! I’d rather call him strange. He’s got no friends, haven’t you ever noticed it? Nor a wife. But he doesn’t have Gaius Marius’s ambition, for which we all ought to thank our lucky stars. If he did, Brutus, he’d be senior consul.”

“Well, I think it’s a pity he’s left us in the lurch. His presence on the battlefield would have made all the difference. Aside from anything else, he knows how Sulla fights.”

Carbo belched, pressed his belly. “I think I’m going to retire and take an emetic. The young cub’s prodigious assortment of food is too rich for my stomach.”

Brutus assisted the junior consul from the couch and led him off toward a screened corner of the hall behind the podium, where several servants tended an array of chamber pots and bowls for those in need.

Flicking a scornful glance at Carbo’s back, Caesar decided he had heard the most important conversation likely to take place at this consular inaugural feast. He kicked off his clogs, picked them up, and quietly stole away.

Lucius Decumius was lurking in a sheltered corner of the Senate House vestibule, and appeared at Caesar’s side the moment he had fully emerged from the doorway. His arms were full of more sensible garments—decent boots, a hooded cloak, socks, a pair of woolen breeches. Off came the regalia of the flamen Dialis. Behind Lucius Decumius loomed an awesome personage who took apex, laena and clogs from Lucius Decumius and stuffed them into a drawstringed leather bag.

“What, back from Bovillae, Burgundus?’’ asked Caesar, gasping with the cold as he struggled to pull on a laceless boot.

“Yes, Caesar.”

“How goes it? All well with Cardixa?”

“I am the father of another son.”

Lucius Decumius giggled. “I told you, Pavo my peacock! He will have given you a whole bodyguard by the time you’re the consul!”

“I will never be consul,” said Caesar, and looked out at the shrouded end of the Basilica Aemilia, swallowing painfully.

“Rubbish! Of course you’ll get there,” said Lucius Decumius, and reached up his mittened hands to cup Caesar’s face. “Now you just stop all that gloomy business! There’s not nothing in the whole world will stop you once you make up your mind to it, hear me?’’ Down came the hands, one of them gesturing impatiently at Burgundus. “Go on, you great German lump! Clear a path for the master!”

*

It went on as it had begun, that terrible winter, and seemed as if it would never end. The seasons were in fair company to the calendar after some years of Scaevola as Pontifex Maximus; he, like Metellus Dalmaticus, believed in keeping date and season in harmony, though the Pontifex Maximus between them, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, had allowed the calendar to gallop ahead—it was ten days shorter than thesolar year—because he despised finicky Greek habits, he had said.

But finally in March the thaw set in, and Italy began to believe that warmth would return to countryside and house. Asleep since October, the legions stirred, woke into activity. Braving the deep snow of early March, Gaius Norbanus issued out of Capua with six of his eight legions and marched to join Carbo, who was back in Ariminum. He went straight past Sulla, who chose to ignore him; on the Via Latina and then the Via Flaminia, Norbanus could manage to move despite the snow, and soon reached Ariminum. His arrival plumped out Carbo’s forces there to thirty legions and several thousand cavalry, an enormous burden for Rome—and the Ager Gallicus—to carry.

But before leaving for Ariminum, Carbo had solved his most pressing problem: where the money to keep all these troops under arms would come from. Perhaps it was the melted gold and silver from the burned temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus stored as ingots in the Treasury gave him the idea, for certainly he commenced by seizing them, leaving in their stead a promissory note that Rome owed her Great God so many talents of gold and so many talents of silver. A large number of Rome’s temples were rich in their own right, and since religion was. a part of the State and run by the State, Carbo and Young Marius took it upon themselves to “borrow” the money held in Rome’s temples. In theory this was not unconstitutional, but in practice it was abhorrent, a solution to financial crises which was never put into effect. But out of the temple strong rooms came chest after chest after chest of coins: the single sestertius which was given at the birth of a Roman citizen’s male or female child to Juno Lucina; the single denarius which was given upon maturation of a Roman citizen male child to Juventas; the many denarii donated to Mercury after a businessman wetted his laurel bough at the sacred fountain; the single sestertius which was given at the death of a Roman citizen to ‘Venus Libitina; the sesterces which were donated by successful prostitutes to Venus Erucina—all this money and much more was commandeered to fund Carbo’s war machine. Bullion too was taken, and any gold or silver temple gift not felt to be an artistic loss was melted down.

The stammering praetor Quintus Antonius Balbus—not one of the noble Antonii—was given the job of minting new coins and sorting out the old. Sacrilegious many may have deemed it, but the value of the haul was staggering. Carbo was able to leave Young Marius in charge of Rome and the campaign in the south, and journey to Ariminum with an easy mind.

Though neither camp was aware it shared something in common, both Sulla and Carbo had made a similar resolution—that this was one civil war would not wreck Italy, that every mouthful of provender for man and beast involved in the hostilities must be paid for in hard cash, that the amount of land ruined by army maneuvers must be kept to an absolute minimum. The Italian War had brought the whole country to the brink of extinction; the country could not afford another war like it, especially so soon. And this, both Sulla and Carbo knew.

They were also aware that the war between them lacked in the eyes of ordinary people the nobility of purpose and ironclad reason which the Italian War had possessed in abundance. That had been a struggle between Italian states which wanted to be independent of Rome, and Rome which wanted the Italian states kept in a certain degree of vassalage. But what was this new conflict really all about? Simply, which camp would end in ruling and owning Rome. It was a struggle for ascendancy between two men, Sulla and Carbo, and no amount of propaganda either camp put out could really disguise that fact. Nor were the ordinary people of Rome and Italy fooled. Therefore the country could not be subjected to extreme hardship, nor the economic well-being of the Roman and Italian communities diminished.

Sulla was borrowing from his soldiers, but the only ones Carbo could borrow from were the gods. And always at the back of each man’s mind there loomed an awful dilemma: how, when the struggle was over, could the debt be paid back?

None of this impinged upon the thoughts of Young Marius, the son of a fabulously wealthy man never brought up to care about money, be it the money to pay for some expensive personal trifle, or the money to pay the legions. If old Gaius Marius had talked to anyone about the fiscal side of war, it had been to Caesar during those months when Caesar had helped him recover from his second stroke. To his son, he had hardly talked at all. For by the time he had needed his son, Young Marius was of an age to be seduced more by the charms of Rome than by his father. To Caesar—nine years younger than his cousin—fell the lot of Gaius Marius’s reminiscences. And Caesar had listened avidly to much the arrival of his priesthood had rendered worse than useless.

When the thaw set in after the middle of March, Young Marius and his staff of legates moved from Rome to a camp outside the little town of Ad Pictas on the Via Labicana, a diverticulum which avoided the Alban Hills and rejoined the Via Latina at a place called Sacriportus. Here on a flat alluvial plain eight legions of Etrurian and Umbrian volunteers had been encamped since early winter, under as strict and intensive a training program as the cold made possible. Their centurions were all Marian veterans, and good at training, but when Young Marius arrived toward the end of March, the troops were still very green. Not that Young Marius cared; he genuinely believed that the greenest recruit would fight for him the way hardened soldiers had fought for his father. And he faced the task of stopping Sulla with unimpaired confidence.

There were men in his camp who understood far better than Young Marius the enormity of that task, but not one of them tried to enlighten their consul—commander. If taxed for a reason why, each one would probably have answered that beneath all his bluster, Young Marius did not have the internal resources to cope with so much truth. The figurehead, Young Marius must be cherished and protected, kept together.

When intelligence reports arrived to inform him that Sulla was preparing to move, Young Marius cheered. For Sulla it seemed had detached eleven of his eighteen legions along with all save a few squadrons of cavalry, and sent this big force under the command of Metellus Pius the Piglet toward the Adriatic coast and Carbo in Ariminum. Which left Sulla with seven legions only, a smaller force than Young Marius owned.

“I can beat him!” he said to his senior legate, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus.

Married to Cinna’s elder girl, Ahenobarbus was committed to Carbo’s side despite a natural inclination in Sulla’s direction; he was very much in love with his beautiful red-haired wife, and sufficiently under her thumb to do whatever shewished. The fact that most of his close relatives were either sternly neutral or with Sulla he contrived to ignore.

Now he listened to Young Marius in jubilant mood, and felt a much greater degree of unease; perhaps he ought to start thinking of how and where to flee if Young Marius didn’t make good his boast and beat the old red fox, Sulla.

On the first day of April, Young Marius in high fettle moved his army out of camp and marched through the ancient pylons at Sacriportus onto the Via Latina, heading southeast toward Campania and Sulla. He wasted no time, for there were two bridges to cross within five miles of each other, and he wanted to be clear of them before he encountered the enemy. No one offered him any advice as to the prudence of marching to meet Sulla rather than remaining where he was, and though he had traveled the Via Latina dozens of times, Young Marius did not have the kind of mind which remembered terrain or saw terrain in military terms.

At the first bridge—spanning the Veregis he remained behind while his troops marched across in high spirits, and suddenly realized that the ground was better for fighting around the pylons of Sacriportus than in the direction he was going. But he didn’t stop. At the second bridge—across the bigger, more torrential stream of the Tolerus—it finally dawned on him that he was steadily moving into country where his legions would find it difficult to maneuver. His scouts arrived to tell him that Sulla was ten miles down the road and rapidly passing the town of Ferentinum, whereupon Young Marius panicked.

“I think we’d better go back to Sacriportus,” he said to Ahenobarbus. “I can’t hope to deploy the way I want to in this country, and I can’t get past Sulla to more open ground. So we’ll face him at Sacriportus. Don’t you think that’s best?”

“If you think so,” said Ahenobarbus, who was well aware of the effect an order to face about and retreat would have on these green troops, but decided not to say a word. “I’ll give the command. Back to Sacriportus.”

“At the double!” cried Young Marius, his confidence oozing away moment by moment, and his sense of panic increasing.

Ahenobarbus looked at him, astonished, but again elected to say nothing. If Young Marius wanted his army exhausted by some miles of run—trot—walk retreat, why should he argue? They couldn’t win anyway.

So back to Sacriportus the eight legions proceeded at the double, the thousands of young soldiers growing more bewildered as their centurions exhorted them to pick up their heels and move! Young Marius too became infected with this desperate hurrying, and rode among the ranks urging them on—without once thinking to inform them that they were not in retreat, merely moving to better ground on which to fight. The result was that both troops and commander arrived on that better ground in no mental or physical condition to make proper use of it.

Like all his peers, Young Marius was tutored as to how to fight a battle, but until now he had simply assumed his father’s acumen and skill would automatically swirl into his mind; but at Sacriportus, with legates and military tribunes all clustered about him looking at him to receive orders, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t find one single iota of his father’s acumen and skill.

“Oh,” he said finally, “deploy the legions in checkered square—eight men deep on each side of each square, and keep two legions in line behind to serve as reinforcements.”

They were not adequate orders, but no one tried to force better orders out of him, and his thirsty, panting troops did not find their flagging spirits cheered by an address from Young Marius; instead of attempting to speak to them, he rode off to one side of the field and sat upon his horse with his shoulders hunched and his face betraying the depth of his dilemma.

Discerning Young Marius’s unadventurous battle plan from the top of a ridge between the Tolerus and Sacriportus, Sulla sighed, shrugged, and sent his five legions of veterans into action under the elder Dolabella and Servilius Vatia. The two best legions from Scipio Asiagenus’s old army he held in reserve under Lucius Manlius Torquatus, while he himself remained on the ridge, attended by a squadron of cavalry deputed to form a messenger corps and carry the general’s instructions to the battlefield at the gallop if a change in tactics should become necessary. With him was none other than old Lucius Valerius Flaccus Princeps Senatus, the Leader of the House; Flaccus had made up his mind during the worst of the winter, and quit Rome for Sulla halfway through February.

*

When he saw Sulla’s army approaching, Young Marius underwent a return of his calm, though not of his optimism, and assumed personal command of his left wing without having any real idea of what he was doing or what he ought to do. The two armies met in midafternoon of that shortish day, and before the first hour was over the Etrurian and Umbrian farm boys who had enlisted so enthusiastically for Young Marius were fleeing the field in all directions away from where Sulla’s veterans were chopping them into pieces with effortless ease. One of the two legions Young Marius had kept in reserve deserted en masse to Servilius Vatia, and stood quietly while the slaughter of their confederates went on scant paces away.

It was the sight of that defected legion that finished Young Marius. Remembering that the formidable fortress town of Praeneste lay not far to the east of Sacriportus, he ordered a retreat into Praeneste. With something tangible to do, he fared better, and contrived to evacuate the troops of his left wing in reasonable order. Commanding Sulla’s right, Ofella took after Young Marius with a swiftness and savagery Sulla, watching from his ridge, applauded heartily. For ten miles Ofella harried and harassed, cut off stragglers and cut them up, while Young Marius endeavored to save as many as he could. But when at last the enormous gates of Praeneste closed behind him, only seven thousand of his men had managed to stay with him.

Young Marius’s center had perished on the field almost to the last man, but his right wing, led by Ahenobarbus, succeeded in breaking off hostilities and making a run for Norba. This ancient stronghold of the Volsci, fanatically loyal to Carbo’s cause, stood atop a mountain twenty miles to the southwest, and gladly opened the gates in its impregnable walls to receive Ahenobarbus’s ten thousand men. But not to receive Ahenobarbus! Wishing his devastated soldiers the best of luck for the future, Ahenobarbus continued on for the coast at Tarracina and there took ship for Africa, the farthest place from Italy he could bear to think of with equanimity.

Unaware that his senior legate had slipped away, Young Marius was satisfied with his Praenestian shelter; from this city Sulla would find it extremely difficult—if not impossible—to dislodge him. Some twenty-three miles from Rome, Praeneste occupied the heights of a spur of the Apennines, a site which had enabled it to withstand many assaults on its frowning walls through the centuries before Young Marius availed himself of its defenses. No army could take it from behind, where the outcrop on which it stood joined higher, more precipitous mountains; yet it could be provisioned from this direction, which made it impossible to starve out. Of springs there were aplenty within the citadel, and in vast caverns below the mighty shrine to Fortuna Primigenia for which Praeneste was most famous, there lay many medimni of wheat and oil and wine, other imperishable foods like hard cheeses and raisins, as well as apples and pears from the previous autumn’s picking.

Though its roots were Latin enough and its version of that language proudly held by its citizens to be the oldest and purest, Praeneste had never allied itself with Rome. It fought on the side of the Italian Allies during the Italian War, and still held defiantly that its citizenship was superior to Rome’s—Rome was a parvenu place! Its fervent espousal of Young Marius was therefore logical enough; he seemed to the people of Praeneste the underdog facing Sulla’s vengeful might, and being his father’s son besides, was warmly welcomed. As thanks, he pressed his soldiers into forming forage parties and sent them out along the snake—paths behind the citadel to procure as much food as possible. Praeneste now had many extra mouths.

“By summer Sulla will have moved on from sheer necessity, and then you can leave,” said the city’s chief magistrate.

A prophecy not to bear fruit; less than a market interval after the battle of Sacriportus, Young Marius and the inhabitants of Praeneste witnessed the beginnings of a siege investment too monumental to be anything less than iron determination to see Praeneste fall. The tributaries which ran off the spur in the direction of Rome all entered the Anio River, whereas those which ran off the spur in the opposite direction all eventually entered the Tolerus River: Praeneste was a watershed. And now, with a speed the imprisoned onlookers found incredible, a great wall and ditch began to grow from the Anio side of the spur all the way around to the Tolerus side. When these siegeworks were completed, the only way in or out of Praeneste would be the snake—paths through the mountains behind. Provided, that is, that they were left unguarded.

*

The news of Sacriportus flew to Rome before the sun had set upon that fatal day—but very secretly. General dissemination would have to wait upon hearsay. It came by special courier from Young Marius himself, for the moment he was inside Praeneste he dictated a hasty letter to Rome’s urban praetor, Lucius Junius Brutus Damasippus. It said:

All is lost south of Rome. We must hope that Carbo in Ariminum wages the sort of war Sulla will not be able to deal with, if only because he grossly lacks Carbo’s numbers. Carbo’s troops are far better than mine were. Mine’s lack of proper training and experience unsettled them so much they could not hold for an hour against Sulla’s old retainers.

I suggest you try to prepare Rome for a siege, though that may be impossible in a place so huge and so divided in its loyalties. If you think Rome will refuse to undergo siege, then you must expect Sulla within the next market interval, for there are no troops to oppose him between here and Rome. Whether he intends to occupy Rome, I do not know. What I hope is that he intends to bypass it in favor of attacking Carbo. From what I have heard my father say about Sulla, it would be like him to be forming a pincer to crush Carbo, using Metellus Pius as his other jaw. I wish I knew. I do not know. Except that it would be premature for Sulla to occupy Rome at this time, and I do not see Sulla making that mistake.

It may be some time before I can leave Praeneste, which has taken me in willingly—its people have a great affection for Gaius Marius, and have not refused to succor his son. Rest assured that as soon as Sulla moves on to deal with Carbo, I will break out and come to Rome’s aid. Perhaps if I am in Rome myself, her people will agree to withstand siege.

Further to that, it occurs to me that the time has come to destroy every last nest of Sullan vipers within our beloved city. Kill them all, Damasippus! Do not allow sentiment to soften your resolve. Living men who might decide to support Sulla will make it impossible for Rome to resist him. But if the great ones who might make trouble for us are dead, then all the little ones will knuckle under without demur. Every man who might be of military help to Carbo must leave Rome now. That includes you, Damasippus.

Here follow a very few names of Sullan vipers which spring to mind. I know I have missed dozens, so think of them all! Our Pontifex Maximus. The elder Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. Carbo Arvina. Publius Antistius Vetus.

*

Brutus Damasippus followed orders. During the shortlived but comprehensive program of murder old Gaius Marius had perpetrated before he died, Quintus Mucius Scaevola the Pontifex Maximus had been stabbed, for no good reason anyone could discover. His would—be assassin (that Fimbria who had gone off with Flaccus the suffect consul to relieve Sulla of his command against King Mithridates, then murdered Flaccus) could produce no better excuse at the time than to laugh that Scaevola deserved to die. But Scaevola had not died, though the wound was severe. Tough and doughty, the Pontifex Maximus was back on his feet and about his public duties within two months. Now, however, there was to be no escape. Father-in-law of Young Marius though he was, he was cut down as he tried to seek asylum in the temple of Vesta. Of treachery to Young Marius he was quite innocent.

The elder Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, consul not long after his brother the reforming Pontifex Maximus, was executed in his home. And no doubt Pompey the Great would have beamed his full approval had he known that his father-in-law’s blood need not now stain his own hands; Publius Antistius was murdered too, and his wife, demented with grief, took her own life. By the time Brutus Damasippus had worked his way through those he considered might endanger Carbo’s Rome, some thirty heads adorned the rostra in the lower Forum Romanum; men who called themselves neutral (like Catulus, Lepidus and Hortensius) bolted the doors of their houses and refused to venture out in case one of Brutus Damasippus’s minions decided they must die too.

His work done, Brutus Damasippus fled from Rome, as did his fellow praetor Gaius Albius Carrinas. Both of them joined Carbo. The minting praetor, Quintus Antonius Balbus, also left Rome at this time, but commanding a legion of troops; his task was to go to Sardinia and wrest that island off Philippus.

Strangest defection of all, however, was that of the tribune of the plebs Quintus Valerius Soranus. A great scholar and a known humanitarian, he found himself unable to condone this slaughter of men not even proven to be affiliated in any way with Sulla. But how to make a public protest which would impress the whole city? And how could one man destroy Rome? For Quintus Valerius Soranus had come to the conclusion that the world would be a better place if Rome ceased to exist. After some thought, he arrived at his solution. He went to the rostra, climbed upon it, and there, surrounded by the dripping trophies of Brutus Damasippus, he screamed aloud the secret name of Rome.

“AMOR!’’ he cried, again and again.

Those who heard and understood ran with hands clapped over their ears away from his voice. Rome’s secret name could never be uttered aloud! Rome and all she stood for would fall down like a shoddy building in an earthquake. Quintus Valerius Soranus himself believed that implicitly. So having told air and birds and horrified men Rome’s secret name, Soranus fled to Ostia wondering why Rome still stood upon her seven hills. From Ostia he sailed for Sicily, a marked man to both sides.

Virtually bereft of government, the city did not fall down or fall apart. People went about their affairs as they always did; the neutral noblemen popped their heads from out of their front doors, sniffed the air, sallied out, said nothing. Rome waited to see what Sulla would do.

*

Sulla did enter Rome, but quietly, and without his army at his back to protect him.

There was no compelling reason why he should not enter Rome, but very many compelling reasons why he should. Matters like his imperium—and whether or not he relinquished it in the moment he crossed the sacred boundary of the pomerium into the city—he cared little about. Who was there in this rudderless Rome to gainsay him, or accuse him of illegalities, or religiously impugn him? If he came back to Rome it would be as Rome’s conqueror and master, with whatever powers he needed to make all right concerning his past career. So he stepped across the pomerium without a qualm, and proceeded to give the city back some semblance of government.

The most senior magistrate left in Rome was one of the two brothers Magius from Aeclanum, a praetor; him Sulla put in charge, with the aediles Publius Furius Crassipes and Marcus Pomponius to assist him. When he heard about Soranus’s uttering the secret name of Rome aloud he frowned direfully and shuddered, though the bristling fence of speared heads around the rostra he eyed with perfect equanimity, only ordering that they be taken down and given the proper rites. He made no speeches to the people, and called no meeting of the Senate. Less than a full day after he entered he was gone again, back to Praeneste. But behind him he left two squadrons of cavalry under the command of Torquatus—to assist the magistrates to maintain order, he said blandly.

He made no attempt to see Aurelia, who had wondered; when she heard that he was gone again she presented an indifferent front to her family, especially to Caesar, who knew his mother’s meeting with Sulla outside Teanum had been fraught with all kinds of significance, but knew she wasn’t going to enlighten him.

*

The legate in charge of the investment of Praeneste was the defector Quintus Lucretius Ofella, whose orders had come directly from Sulla.

“I want Young Marius penned up in Praeneste for the rest of his days,” Sulla had said to Ofella. “You’ll build a wall thirty feet high all the way from the mountains behind on the Anio side to the mountains behind on the Tolerus side. The wall will contain a sixty-foot fortified tower every two hundred paces. Between the wall and the town you will dig a ditch twenty feet deep and twenty feet wide, and you will fix stimuli in its bottom as thick as reeds in the shallows of the Fucine Lake. When the investment is completed, you will station camps of men to guard every little track which leads from behind Praeneste across the high Apennines. No one will get in, and no one will get out. I want that arrogant pup to understand that Praeneste is now his home for as long as he has left to live.” A sour smile twisted the corners of Sulla’s mouth, a smile which would have displayed those ferally long canines in the days when he had had teeth; it was still not a pretty phenomenon. “I also want the people of Praeneste to know that they have Young Marius for the rest of his life, so you will have heralds inform them of that fact six times a day. It is one thing to succor a lovely young man with a famous name, but quite another to realize that the lovely young man with the famous name has brought death and suffering into Praeneste with him.”

When Sulla moved on to Veii to the north of Rome, he left Ofella behind with two legions to carry out the work. And work they did. Luckily the area was rich in volcanic tufa, a curious stone which cut as easily as cheese, yet hardened to the consistency of rock after it was exposed to the air. With this to quarry, the wall went up at mushroom pace, and the ditch between it and Praeneste deepened daily. Earth from the ditch was piled into a second wall, and in the large No Man’s Land which existed inside these siegeworks no tree or object tall enough to serve as a battering ram was left standing. On the mountains behind the town, every tree was also felled between the back walls and the camps of men who now guarded the snake—paths and prevented the Praenestians foraging.

Ofella was a hard taskmaster; he had a reputation to make with Sulla, and this was his chance. Thus no one paused to rest, or so much as had the time to complain about a sore back or aching muscles. Besides, the men too had a reputation to make with Sulla; one of the legions was the one which had deserted Young Marius at Sacriportus, and the other had belonged to Scipio Asiagenus. Loyalty was suspect, so a well-built wall and well-excavated ditch would show Sulla they were worthy. All they had to work with were their hands and their legionary’s digging tools; but there were over ten thousand pairs of hands and more than sufficient tools, and their centurions taught them the shortcuts and knacks in building siegeworks. To organize a task of such monumental size was no great trouble to Ofella, a typical Roman when it came to methodical execution.

In two months the wall and ditch were finished. They were over eight miles in length and bisected both the Via Praenestina and the Via Labicana in two places, thereby interrupting traffic on both these roads and rendering them useless beyond Tusculum and Bola. Those Roman knights and senators whose estates were affected by the fortifications could do nothing save glumly wait for the siege to be over—and curse Young Marius. On the other hand, the smallholders of the region rejoiced as they eyed the tufa blocks; when the siege was over the wall would come down and they would have an inexhaustible supply of material for field fences, buildings, barns, byres.

At Norba the same sort of exercise went on, though Norba did not require such massive siegeworks. Mamercus had been sent there with a legion of new recruits (dispatched from Sabine country by Marcus Crassus) to reduce it, and settled to his task with the dour and understated efficiency which had successfully carried him through many a perilous situation.

As for Sulla, at Veii he divided the five legions he had left between himself and Publius Servilius Vatia. Vatia was to take two of them and march into coastal Etruria, while Sulla and the elder Dolabella took the other three up the Via Cassia toward Clusium, further inland. It was now the beginning of May, and Sulla was very well pleased with his progress. If Metellus Pius and his larger section of the army acquitted themselves equally well, by autumn Sulla stood an excellent chance of owning all of Italy and all of Italian Gaul.

And how were Metellus Pius and his forces doing? Sulla had heard little about their progress at the time he himself started up the Via Cassia toward Clusium, but he had a great deal of faith in this loyalest of adherents—as well as a lively curiosity as to how Pompey the Great would fare. He had quite deliberately given Metellus Pius the larger army, and deliberate too were his instructions that Pompey the Great should have the command of five thousand cavalry he knew he would not need in his own maneuvers through more settled and hillier terrain.