“Well, soon you shall know him very well indeed!” Sulla smiled broadly. “There, it’s settled. Young Caesar’s name will be removed from the upcoming proscription lists. Even so, I’d advise you to get out of town for a while; accidents happen. Also, young Caesar may keep his wife. Meanwhile, you two shall divorce—”
“Dictator—”
“Please, call me Felix.”
“Lucius Cornelius Sulla—Felix—I beg you to reconsider. My wife and I are deeply devoted to one another. Our marriage is a—” He wanted to declare that their marriage was a love match, but it seemed obscene to speak of love in front of Sulla. “We have a young son. He’s still suckling at his mother’s breast—”
Sulla shrugged. “Then let the child stay with his mother. You shall give up all claims to him. Let Quintus Pedius adopt him.”
Lucius gaped, too stunned to speak. Julia began to sob.
Gaius stepped forward, unsteady on his feet. He was the color of chalk. “Dictator, I see that I was wrong to oppose you. I shall do as you asked. I shall divorce Cornelia—”
“You shall do no such thing!”
“Dictator, it was never my intention—”
“Your intentions mean nothing here. My will prevails. Your life is spared. Your marriage is preserved. But your sister and her husband will divorce each other.” He turned to Lucius. “Either that, or I shall see your name in the proscription lists, Pinarius, and your head on a stake!”
With a dramatic flourish worthy of Chrysogonus, Sulla turned about and left the house. His entourage welcomed him back with drunken cheers and laughter. A slave quickly closed the door to shut out the raucous noises.
Lucius stared at the floor. “After all our efforts…all our…sacrifices…our sleepless nights…the bribe I paid to Phagites…the humiliation…”
“Brother-in-law,” whispered Gaius, “I never imagined—”
“Don’t call me that! I’m your brother-in-law no longer!”
From the nursery, the baby began to wail. Julia dropped to her knees, weeping.
Lucius glared at Gaius. “It’s Julia and I who must now pay the price for your pride. To save your neck and preserve your precious dignity, we must give up everything. Everything!”
Gaius opened his mouth, but could find nothing to say.
“You owe us for this!” cried Lucius, pointing his finger at Gaius. “Never forget! Never forget the debt you owe to my son, and to his sons, for as long as you live!”
Gradually, as thousands died or fled into exile, the frenzied pace of Sulla’s proscriptions subsided, but the dictator continued to rule Roma with an iron grip.
His divorce left Lucius Pinarius a bitter and broken man. No one blamed him for his misfortune. Friends, many of whom had suffered terribly themselves, did their best to comfort him, and even praised his sacrifice. “You did what you had to, to save another man’s life,” they said. “You did it for the sake of your son and your wife; had you disobeyed, Sulla would have proscribed you, and your family would have been left destitute.”
But no argument could alleviate Lucius’s anguish and regret. To save his family, he had lost his family. To keep his head, he had surrendered his dignity.
Julia’s new husband, Quintus Pedius, did nothing to bar Lucius from seeing his son, or Julia for that matter, but Lucius was ashamed to face them. To bow before a dictator reduced a man to a status hardly better than a slave; a Roman without honor was not a Roman at all.
It would be best, he decided, if his loved ones considered him a dead man. Let Julia be as a widow who had remarried. Let his son be as an orphan. How much better it would have been if Lucius had died. If only he had caught the quartan ague from Gaius and died of that!
So, like a dead man, he prematurely bequeathed to his son a precious heirloom: the golden fascinum which had been in the family for untold generations. The amulet was very worn, its shape hardly recognizable. Nonetheless, Lucius sent it to Julia with a prayer that it might protect their son from such a disaster as had overtaken his father. The talisman was passed to the next generation.
Having no desire to remarry, despondent and forlorn, he lived alone in his house on the Palatine.
As for Gaius, he took the advice of Sulla and left Roma as soon as he was able to travel. He accepted a military posting on the Aegean coast, serving on the staff of the praetor Minucius Thermus.
Lucius thought about Gaius as little as possible, but one day, while crossing the Forum, he passed a group of men conversing and overheard a stranger mention Gaius’s name. Lucius stopped to listen.
“Yes, Gaius Julius Caesar,” the man repeated, “the one whose father dropped dead a couple of years ago.”
“Poor young fellow! I suppose King Nicomedes makes a dashing father figure, but no Roman should ever bend over to pleasure another man, not even a king.”
“Especially not a king!”
This was followed by salacious laughter. Lucius stepped forward. “What are you talking about?”
“Young Caesar’s escapades in the East,” said one of the gossips. “The praetor Thermus sent him on a mission to King Nicomedes in Bithynia. Once Caesar got there, he didn’t want to leave. It seems he hit it off with the king a little too well, if you know what I mean. All that high living in the royal court turned the boy’s head—and Nicomedes is a handsome fellow, to judge by his coins. Meanwhile, Thermus is like a spurned husband, sending messenger after messenger demanding that Caesar return, but Caesar can’t bear to leave the king’s bed!”
“How could you possibly know such a thing?” snapped Lucius. “If Caesar’s detained on a mission, there could be a hundred other explanations—”
“Please!” The gossip rolled his eyes. “Everyone’s talking about it. Did you hear the latest joke? Sulla let him keep his head—but Nicomedes took his maidenhead!”
There was a great deal of laughter. Lucius, disgusted, stalked away with his jaw tightly clenched. He made his hands into fists. Tears welled in his eyes. Was it for this that he had sacrificed everything? So that a fatuous young man could desert his military post to live in luxury in Bithynia? What sort of Roman was Caesar, to speak admiringly of Gaius Gracchus and daydream about rebuilding the Roman state, and then to run off and play catamite to a Bithynian monarch? Lucius should have let Sulla take the young fool and do what he wanted with him!
78 B.C.
Belying the worst fears of his enemies—those few who remained alive—Sulla made good on his promise to step down from the dictatorship after two years.
Declaring that his work was done, he restored full authority to the Senate and magistrates. In retirement he dictated his memoirs, and proudly boasted that, having rid Roma of the worst of the “troublemakers” (as he called those who opposed him), he had instituted reforms that would return the Republic “to the golden days before the Gracchi stirred the pot and threw everything into confusion.”
But could even Sulla could turn back time? Since the destruction of Carthage, Roman politics had been driven by tremendous wealth and headlong expansion, and the ever-greater injustices and inequalities that resulted. Roma needed powerful generals to conquer new territories and enslave new populations; how else could more wealth be accumulated? But what was to be done when those generals grew jealous and suspicious of one another, and a citizenry riven with greed and resentment was compelled to choose sides? Civil war had resulted once. Nothing in Sulla’s reforms would stop such a war from happening again. If anything, his example was an encouragement to would-be warlords with dreams of absolute power. Sulla had shown that a man could ruthlessly exterminate all opposition, declare his actions to be legitimate and legal, and then retire to live out his days in comfort and peace, beloved by the friends and supporters who had benefited from his largesse.
In the month of Martius, at his villa on the bay near Neapolis, at the age of sixty, Sulla died of natural causes. But his death was not an easy one, and in the revolting symptoms that plagued him some saw the hand of the goddess Nemesis, who restores balance to the natural order when injustice has been done.
The disease began with an ulceration of the bowels, aggravated by excessive drinking and sumptuous living. Then the corruption spread, and converted his flesh into worms. Day and night, physicians picked the worms away, but more worms appeared to take their place. Then the pores of his flesh discharged a vile flux in such quantities that his bed and his clothing were saturated with it. No amount of bathing and scouring could stop the oozing discharge.
Even in this wretched state, Sulla continued to conduct business. On the last full day of his life, he dictated the final chapter of his memoirs, concluding with this boast: “When I was young, a Chaldean soothsayer foretold to me that I would lead an honorable, upright life and end my days at the height of my prosperity. The soothsayer was right.”
Sulla’s secretary then reminded him that he had been requested to settle the case of a local magistrate accused of embezzling public funds. The magistrate, who wished to defend himself, was in the antechamber, awaiting an interview. Sulla agreed to see him.
The magistrate entered. Before the man could say a word, Sulla ordered the slaves in the room to strangle him on the spot. The slaves were Sulla’s private servants, not assassins; when they hesitated, Sulla became furious and shouted at them. The strain caused an abscess on his neck to rupture. He began to bleed profusely. In the resulting confusion, the magistrate ran for his life.
Physicians came to stanch the bleeding, but Sulla’s end had come. He became confused and lost consciousness. He survived the night, but died the next morning.
Some perverse but powerful inclination—the wish to see a dreadful episode to its bitter end, or the need to be absolutely certain that a terrifying creature is truly dead, beyond any doubt—drove Lucius Pinarius out of his house and into the streets to witness Sulla’s funeral.
The entire city turned out to watch the procession. Lucius found a spot with a good view, and wondered at his luck until he realized why the spot was vacant. A ragged beggar was standing nearby, emitting such a foul odor that all others had been driven away. Lucius ignored the stench. If he could stand the sight of Sulla on his funeral bier, he told himself, then surely he could endure the smell of a fellow human being.