5
It looked, that November, as if Gaius Marius would never succeed in becoming consul for the following year. A letter from Lucius Appuleius Saturninus drove out all hope of a plebiscite authorizing him to stand in absentia a third time.
The Senate won't stand by idly again, because most of Rome is now convinced the Germans won't come at all. Ever. In fact, the Germans have turned into a new Lamia, a monster employed to strike terror into every heart so often and for so long that eventually she holds no terror. Naturally your enemies have made a great deal out of the fact that this is your second year in Gaul-across-the-Alps repairing roads and digging ship canals, and that your presence there with a large army is costing the State more than it can afford, especially with the price of wheat what it is. I've tested the electoral water in the matter of your standing in absentia a third time, and the toe I dipped in has dropped off from the frost. Your chances would be somewhat better if you came to Rome to stand in person. But of course if you do that, your enemies will argue that the so-called emergency in Gaul-across-the-Alps does not actually exist. However, I've done what I can for you, mainly lining up support in the Senate so you will at least have your command prorogued with proconsular status. This will mean next year's consuls will be your superiors. And as a final note of cheer, the favored consular candidate for next year is Quintus Lutatius Catulus. The electors are so fed up with his standing every single year that they've decided to get rid of him by voting him in. I trust this finds you well.
When Marius finished reading Saturninus's short missive, he sat frowning for a long time. Though the news it imparted was cheerless, there was yet a faintly jaunty feel to the letter; as if Saturninus too was deciding Gaius Marius was a man of the past, and was busy realigning his priorities. Gaius Marius had no polling appeal. No more knight clout. For the Germans were much less of a threat than the Sicilian slave war and the grain supply; Lamia the monster was dead. Well, Lamia the monster wasn't dead, and Lucius Cornelius Sulla was alive to prove it. Only what was the point of sending Sulla to Rome to testify to this fact when he, Gaius Marius, had no excuse to accompany Sulla to Rome? Without support and power, Sulla wouldn't prevail; he'd have to tell his whole story to too many men alienated from his commander, men who would find the idea of a Roman aristocrat masquerading as a Gaul for almost two years so disturbing they would end in having Rome dismiss Sulla's story as unstable, unreliable, unacceptable. No, either both of them journeyed to Rome, or neither of them did. Out came blank paper, pen, ink: Gaius Marius wrote to Lucius Appuleius Saturninus.
Vindicated you may be, Lucius Appuleius, but remember it was I who enabled you to survive until you were vindicated. You are still beholden to me, and I expect a clientlike loyalty from you. Do not assume I cannot come to Rome. An opportunity may still arise. Or at least, I expect you to act as if I will indeed appear in Rome. Therefore here is what I want. The most immediate necessity is to postpone the consular elections, a job you and Gaius Norbanus as tribunes of the plebs are well able to do. You will do it. Wholeheartedly. Throwing all your energy into the job. After that, I expect you to use the brain you were born with to seize upon the first opportunity which will enable you to put pressure on the Senate and People to call me to Rome. I will get to Rome, never doubt it. So if you want to rise a great deal higher than the tribunate of the plebs, it behooves you to remain Gaius Marius's man.
And by the end of November an east wind blew Gaius Marius a smacking kiss from the goddess Fortuna, in the shape of a second letter from Saturninus that arrived by sea two days before the Senate courier and his dispatches reached Glanum. Saturninus said, very humbly:
I do not doubt you will reach Rome. Not one day after I received your chastening note, your esteemed colleague Lucius Aurelius Orestes, the junior consul, died suddenly. And, still feeling the lash of your displeasure, I seized upon this opportunity to force the Senate into recalling you. That had not been the plan formulated by the Policy Makers, who through the agency of the Leader of the House recommended that the Conscript Fathers choose a consul suffectus to fill the ivory chair left vacant by Orestes. But amazing luck! only the day before, Scaurus had delivered a long speech in the House to the effect that your presence in Gaul-across-the-Alps was an affront to the credulity of all Good Men, that you had manufactured the German panic to get yourself elected a virtual dictator. Of course the moment Orestes died, Scaurus changed his tune completely the House did not dare recall you to exercise the electoral functions of the consul with the German menace threatening Italy, so the House must appoint a suffect consul to get the elections under way. Having had no time to start using my tribunate to postpone any elections, I now found it unnecessary to do so. Instead, I rose in the House and made a very fine speech to the effect that our esteemed Princeps Senatus couldn't have it both ways. Either there was a German menace, or there was not. And I chose to accept his speech of the day before as his honest opinion there was no German menace, therefore there was no need to fill the dead junior consul's chair with a suffectus. No, I said, Gaius Marius must be recalled; Gaius Marius must finally do the job he had been elected to do carry out the duties of a consul. I didn't need to accuse Scaurus of altering his viewpoint to fit the new set of circumstances in his second speech; everyone got the message. Hopefully this will beat the courier. The time of year favors the sea over the road. Not that you are not perfectly capable of working out what must have been the sequence of events the moment you get the Senate's communication! Only that if I do beat the courier, you have a little extra time to plan your campaign in Rome. I am starting things moving among the electors, naturally, and by the time you reach Rome you should have a most respectable deputation of leading lights of the People begging you to stand for the consulship.
"We're on our way!" said Marius jubilantly to Sulla, tossing him Saturninus's letter. "Pack your things there's no time to lose. You are going to tell the House that the Germans will invade Italy on three separate fronts in the autumn of next year, and I am going to tell the electors that I am the only man capable of stopping them." "How far do I go?" asked Sulla, startled. "Only as far as you have to. I'll introduce the subject, and state the findings. You'll testify to their truth, but not in a way which gives the House to understand that you became a barbarian yourself." Marius looked rueful. "Some things, Lucius Cornelius, are best left unsaid. They don't know you well enough yet to understand what kind of man you are. Don't give them information they can use against you later on. You're a patrician Roman. So let them think your daring deeds were done inside a patrician Roman skin." Sulla shook his head. "It's manifestly impossible to go prowling among the Germans looking like a patrician Roman!" "They don't know that," said Marius with a grin. "Remember what Publius Rutilius said in his letter? The armchair generals on the back benches, he called them. Well, they're armchair spies too, on the front benches as well as the back. They would not know the rules for spying if the rules ran up their arses!" And he began to laugh. "In fact, I wish I'd asked you to keep your moustaches and long hair for a little while. I'd have dressed you as a German and paraded you around the Forum. And you know what would happen, don't you?" Sulla sighed. "Yes. No one would recognize me." "Correct. So we won't put unbearable strain on their Roman imaginations. I'll be speaking first, and you take your cue from me," said Marius.
* * *
To Sulla, Rome offered none of the political vigor or domestic warmth it did to Gaius Marius. In spite of his brilliant quaestorship under Marius and his brilliant career as a spy under Marius he was just another one of the Senate's young up-and-coming men, walking in the shadow of the First Man in Rome. Nor was his future political career going anywhere fast enough, especially considering his late entry into the Senate; he was patrician and therefore not permitted to become a tribune of the plebs, he didn't have the money to run for curule aedile, and he hadn't been in the Senate long enough to run for praetor. That was the political side of things. At home he found a bitter and enervating atmosphere polluted by a wife who drank too much and neglected her children, and by a mother-in-law who disliked him quite as much as she disliked her situation. That was the domestic side of things. Well, the political climate would improve for him, he was not so depressed he couldn't see it; but the climate in his home could do nothing else than deteriorate. And what made it harder coming to Rome this time was that he was passing from his German wife to his Roman one. For just about a year he had lived with Hermana in the midst of an environment more alien to his aristocratic world than the old world of the Suburan stews had been. And Hermana was his solace, his fortress, his one normal point of reference in that bizarre barbarian society. Tacking himself onto the Cimbric comet's tail had not been difficult, for Sulla was more than just another brave and physically strong warrior; he was a warrior who thought. In bravery and physical strength many of the Germans left him far behind. But where they were an unalloyed metal, he was the tempered finality cunning as well as brave, slippery as well as strong. Sulla was the small man facing the giant, the man who, in order to excel in armed combat, had no other way of going about it than to think. Therefore he had been noticed on the field against the Spanish tribes of the Pyrenees at once, and accepted into the warrior confraternity. Then he and Sertorius had agreed that if they were to blend into this strange world to the point where they would rise high enough to be privy to German policies (such as they were), they would have to be more than useful soldiers. They would have to carve themselves niches in tribal life. So they had separated, chosen different tribes, and then taken women from among the ranks of those women recently widowed. His eye had lighted upon Hermana because she was an outsider herself, and because she had no children. Her man had been the chief of his Cimbric tribe; otherwise the women of the tribe would never have tolerated her foreign presence among them when, in effect, she usurped a place which ought to have been filled by a Cimbric woman. And the angry women were already clubbing her to death inside their minds when Sulla a meteor among the warriors climbed into her wagon and thereby established his claim to her. They would be foreigners together. There was no sentiment or attraction of any kind in his selection of the Cheruscic Hermana; simply, she needed him more than a Cimbric woman would have within the tribal enclave, and also owed the tribe far less than a Cimbric woman would have. Thus if she should discover his Roman origins, Hermana would be far less likely to report him than a Cimbric woman. As German women went, she was very ordinary. Most were tall, strongly yet gracefully built, with long legs and high breasts, flaxen hair, the bluest of eyes and fair of face if one could forgive the ugliness of wide mouths and straight little noses. Hermana was a great deal shorter even than Sulla (who as Romans went was a respectable height at about three inches less than six feet Marius, an inch over six feet, was very tall), and plumper than most of her fellows. Though her hair was extremely thick and long, it was definitely of that indeterminate shade universally known as mouse, and her eyes were a darkish grey-fawn to match her hair. For the rest, she was German enough the bones of her skull were well defined, and her nose was like a short straight blade, fine and thin. She was thirty years old, and had been barren; if her man had not been the chief, and autocratic to the point of refusing to cast her off, Hermana would have died. What made her distinctive enough to have been the choice of two men of superior quality in succession was not obvious on the surface. Her first man had called her different and interesting, but could be no more specific; Sulla thought her a natural aristocrat, a finicky aloof lady who yet radiated a powerfully sexual message. They fitted together very well in every way, for she was intelligent enough to be undemanding, sensible enough not to trammel him, passionate enough to make bedding her a pleasure, articulate enough to make her an interesting communicant, and industrious enough to give him no additional work. Hermana's beasts were always herded together properly, branded properly, milked properly, mated properly, medicined properly. Hermana's wagon was always in tiptop condition, its canopy kept taut and patched or mended, its wooden tray oiled and chinked, its big wheels greased with a mixture of butter and beef drippings along the axle junctions and linch-pins, and never missing spokes or segments of their rims. Hermana's pots and crocks and vessels were kept clean; her provisions were carefully stored against damp and marauders; her clothing and rugs were aired and darned; her killing and quartering knives were superbly sharp; her oddments were never put away in some place she forgot. Hermana, in fact, was everything Julilla was not. Except a Roman of blood as good as his own. When she discovered she was pregnant in fact, she fell at once both of them were delighted, Hermana for one extra reason. She was now vindicated in the eyes of the tribe to which she did not belong, and the blame for her previous sterility was now thrown squarely upon the shoulders of her dead chieftain. A fact which didn't please the women of the tribe one little bit, for they had long hated her. Not that there was much they could do about it, because by spring, when the Cimbri set off on their trek northward to the lands of the Atuatuci, Sulla was the new chief. Hermana, it might safely be inferred, had more than her share of luck. And then in Sextilis, after a wearying yet uncomplaining gestation, Hermana gave birth to twin boys, big and healthy and red-haired; Sulla called one Herman, and the other Cornel. He had racked his brains to think of a name which would in some way perpetuate his gens, Cornelius, yet wouldn't sound too odd in the German tongue. "Cornel" was his solution. The babies were everything twin boys ought to be: so alike it was difficult to tell them apart, even for their mother and father; content to be together; more interested in thriving than crying. Twins were rare, and their birth to this strange outlander couple was considered an omen important enough to secure Sulla the thaneship of a whole group of small tribes. In consequence, he went to the grand council Boiorix called of all the Germans of all three peoples after the King of the Cimbri settled Atuatuci-Teutonic friction without bloodshed. For some time, of course, Sulla had known he would soon have to leave, but he put off his departure until after that grand council, aware that he worried over what should have been a very minor consideration what would happen to Hermana and his sons once he was gone? The men of his tribe he might possibly have trusted, but the women were not to be trusted, and in any domestic tribal situation, the women would prevail. The moment he disappeared, Hermana would die under the clubs, even if her sons were allowed to survive. It was September, and time was of the essence. Yet Sulla made a decision which ran counter both to self-interest and Rome's interest. Though he could ill afford the time, before he returned to Marius he would take Hermana back to her own people in Germania. That meant he had to tell her who and what he was. She was more fascinated than surprised; he saw her eyes turn to their sons with wonder in them, as if now she truly understood how important they were, these sons of a demigod. No grief appeared on her face when he told her he would have to leave her forever, but gratitude did when he told her he would first deliver her to the Marsi of Germania, in the hope that among her own settled people she would be protected and allowed to live. At the beginning of October they left the gargantuan enclave of Germans wagons, during the first hours of darkness, having chosen a site for their wagons and beasts from which their departure was less likely to attract notice. When day broke they were still wending their way between German wagons, but no one paid them any attention, and two days after that they finally drew clear of the encampment. The distance from the Atuatuci to the Marsi was no more than a hundred miles, and the countryside was fairly flat. But between Long-haired Gaul of the Belgae and Germania flowed the biggest river in all of western Europa: the Rhenus. Somehow Sulla had to get his wife's wagon across it. And somehow he had to protect his family from marauders. He did it the Sullan way, very simply and directly, by trusting to his bond with the goddess Fortuna, who did not desert him. When they reached the Rhenus, they found its banks populous and the people not interested in preying upon one lone wagon and one lone German, especially with red-haired twin boys sitting one in each of their mother's arms. A barge big enough to carry the wagon plied the great river regularly, the price a jar of most precious wheat; since the summer had been relatively dry, the water was at its quietest, and Sulla for the payment of three jars of wheat was able to get all Hermana's beasts across as well as the wagon. Once into Germania they made brisk progress, for the land this far downstream of the Rhenus was cleared of vast forests, and some simple growing was attempted, more for winter cattle fodder than human consumption. During the third week of October Sulla found Hermana's tribe of the Marsi, and delivered her into their care. And concluded his treaty of peace and friendship between the German Marsi and the Senate and People of Rome. Then when the moment of actual parting came, they wept in dreadful grief, finding it harder by far than either of them had dreamed. Carrying the twins, Hermana followed Sulla on foot until the legs of his horse wore her to a standstill, and there she stood, howling, long after he had passed out of her sight forever. While Sulla rode his horse southwest, so blinded by tears he had to trust to the instincts of this horse for many miles. Hermana's people had given him a good mount, so that he was able to trade it for another good mount at the end of the day, and so continued well mounted for the twelve days it took him to ride from the sources of the river Amisia, where lay the Marsi settlements, to Marius's camp outside Glanum. He cut cross-country the whole way, avoiding the high mountains and thickest forests by following the great rivers Rhenus to Mosella, Mosella to Arar, Arar to Rhodanus. His heart lay so heavy within him that he had to force himself to take note of the country and peoples he traversed, though once he caught himself listening with amazement to himself speaking the Gallic of the Druids, and thought, I am fluent in German of several dialects and fluent in Carnutic Gallic I, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, senator of Rome! But what neither he nor Quintus Sertorius discovered of the German dispositions among the Atuatuci did not transpire until the following spring, long after both Sulla and Sertorius were gone from their lives and wives of Germania. For when the wagons began to roll in their thousands upon thousands and the three great hosts divided up to invade Italy, the Cimbri and the Teutones and the Tigurini and the Cherusci and the Marcomanni left something behind for the Atuatuci to guard against their return. They left a force of six thousand of their finest men to ensure that the Atuatuci suffered no incursions from other tribes; and they left every last tribal treasure they, owned gold statues, gold chariots, gold harness, gold votives, gold coins, gold bullion, several tons of finest amber, and various other treasures they had picked up along their migration to swell what had been theirs for many generations. The only gold which moved with the Germans as they, started out was gold they wore on their bodies. All the rest remained hidden among the Atuatuci, in much the same way as the Volcae Tectosages of Tolosa had minded the gold of the Gallic peoples.
So when Sulla saw Julilla again, he contrasted her with Hermana, and found her slipshod, careless, intellectually untutored, disordered and unmethodical, and hateful. She had at least learned enough from their previous reunion not to throw herself at him immodestly under the gaze of their servants. But, he thought wearily over dinner on that first day home, his being spared that particular ordeal was more likely to have been due to the presence of Marcia in the house rather than a wish on Julilla's part to please him. For Marcia was quite a presence stiff, straight, unsmiling, unloving, unforgiving. She hadn't aged gracefully, and after so many years of happiness as the wife of Gaius Julius Caesar, her widowhood was a great burden to her. Also, Sulla suspected, she loathed being the mother of a daughter as unsatisfactory as Julilla. Little wonder in that. He loathed being married to a wife as unsatisfactory as Julilla. Yet it was not politic to cast her off, for she was no Metella Calva, coupling indiscriminately with the lowborn, nor did she couple with the highborn. Fidelity had become perhaps her only virtue. Unfortunately the drinking had not progressed to the point where everyone in Rome knew her as a wine bibber; Marcia had worked indefatigably to conceal it. Which meant that a diffarreatio divorce (even had he been willing to undergo its hideousness) was out of the question. And yet she was impossible to live with. Her physical demands within the bedroom were so starved and scratchy that he could experience no emotion more scorching than a ghastly, all-pervading embarrassment; he only had to set eyes on Julilla, and every iota of erectile tissue belonging to his body shrank inside itself like one of Publius Vagiennius's snails. He didn't want to touch her, and he didn't want her touching him. It was easy for a woman to counterfeit sexual desire, sexual pleasure too, but a man couldn't counterfeit sexual desire any more than he could sexual pleasure. If men were by nature more truthful than women, thought Sulla, it was surely because they carried a tattletale truth teller between their legs into every sexual encounter, and this colored all aspects of masculine life. And if there was a reason why men were drawn to men, it lay in the fact that the act of love required no accompanying act of faith. None of these cogitations boded well for Julilla, who had no idea what her husband thought, but was devastated by the all-too-evident little he felt. For two nights in succession she found herself pushed away, while Sulla's patience frayed and his excuses grew more perfunctory, less convincing. And on the third morning Julilla rose even earlier than Sulla so that she could have a copious breakfast of wine, only to be caught in the act by her mother. The result was a quarrel between the two women so bitter and acrimonious that the children wept, the slaves fled, and Sulla shut himself inside his tablinum calling down curses upon the heads of all women. What snatches of the argument he overheard indicated that the subject was not new, nor this confrontation the first. The children, Marcia alleged in a voice loud enough to be heard as far away as the temple of Magna Mater, were being completely ignored by their mother. Julilla retorted in a scream audible as far away as the Circus Maximus that Marcia had stolen the children's affections, so what could she expect? The battle raged for longer than any altercation so verbally violent should have another indication, Sulla decided, that the subject and the argument had been thoroughly explored on many earlier occasions. They were proceeding almost by rote. It ended in the atrium just outside Sulla's study door, where Marcia informed Julilla that she was taking the children and their nanny for a long walk, and she didn't know when she'd be back, but Julilla had better be sober when she did come back. Hands pressed over his ears to shut out the pathetic sobs and pleas for peace both children were making of their mother and grandmother, Sulla tried to concentrate upon what beautiful children they were. He was still filled with the delight of seeing them again after so long; Cornelia Sulla was over five now, and little Lucius Sulla was four. People in their own right and quite old enough to suffer, as he well knew from the memories of his own childhood, buried yet never forgotten. If there was any mercy in his abandonment of his German twin sons, it lay in the fact that when he left them they were still very young babies, heads nodding up and down, mouths blowing bubbles, every kink in every bone from head to toe stuffed with dimples. It would be far harder to part with his Roman children because they were old enough to be people. He pitied them deeply. And loved them deeply too, a very different kind of feeling from any he had ever experienced for either man or woman. Selfless and pure, untainted and rounded. His door burst open; Julilla rushed into the room with draperies swirling, her fists knotted, her face dyed a dark rose from rage. And wine. "Did you hear that?" she demanded. Sulla laid his pen down. "How could I help hearing it?" he asked in a tired voice. "The whole Palatine heard." "That old turnip! That dried-up old troublemaker! How dare she accuse me of neglecting my children?" Do I, or don't I? asked Sulla of himself. Why am I putting up with her? Why don't I get out my little box of white powder from the Pisae foundry and dose her wine until her teeth fall out of her head and her tongue curls up into a smoking string and her tits swell up like puffballs and explode? Why don't I find a nice wet oak tree and harvest a few flawless mushrooms and feed them to her until she pours blood from every orifice? Why don't I give her the kiss she's panting for, and snap her skinny nasty neck the way I did Clitumna's? How many men have I killed with sword, dagger, arrow, poison, stone, axe, club, thong, hands? What does she have none of those others had? He found the answer at once, of course. Julilla had given him his dream. Julilla had given him his luck. And she was a patrician Roman, blood of his blood. He'd sooner kill Hermana. Even so, words couldn't kill her, this tough, sinewy Roman madam, so words he could use. "You do neglect your children," he said. "That's why I brought your mother to live here in the first place." She gasped stagily, choked, wrapped her hands about her throat. "Oh! Oh! How dare you? I have never neglected my children, never!" '' Rubbish. You've never cared a scrap for them," he said in the same tired patient voice he seemed to have adopted since he set foot in this awful, blighted house. "The only thing you care about, Julilla, is a flagon of wine." "And who can blame me?" she asked, hands falling. "Who can honestly blame me? Married to a man who doesn't want me, who can't even get it up when we're in the same bed and I've got it in my mouth sucking and licking until my jaws crack!" "If we're going to be explicit, would you please close the door?" he asked. "Why? So the precious servants can't hear? What a filthy hypocrite you are, Sulla! And whose is the shame, yours or mine? Why isn't it ever yours? Your reputation as a lover is far too well established in this town for my miserable failure to have you classified impotent! It's only me you don't want! Me! Your own wife! I've never so much as looked at another man, and what thanks do I get? After nearly two years away, you can't even get it up when I turn myself into an irrumator!" The huge hollow yellow eyes were bleeding tears. "What did I ever do? Why don't you love me? Why don't you even want me? Oh, Sulla, look at me with eyes of love, touch me with hands of love, and I will never need another sip of wine as long as I live! How can I love you the way I love you without striking so much as one tiny little spark in return?" "Perhaps that's a part of the problem," he said, clinically detached. "I don't like being loved excessively. It's not right. In fact, it's unhealthy." "Then tell me how to stop loving you!" she wept. "I don't know how! Do you think if I could stop, I wouldn't? In less time than it takes to strike that spark from a good dry flint, I'd stop! I pray to stop! I yearn to stop! But I can't stop. I love you more than I love life itself." He sighed. "Perhaps the answer is to finish growing up. You look and act like an adolescent. In mind and body, you're still sixteen. Only you're not, Julilla. You're twenty-four. You have a child of five, and another going on for four." "Maybe sixteen was the last time I was ever happy," she said, rubbing her palms around her running cheeks. "If you haven't been happy since you were sixteen, the blame for it can hardly be laid at my door," said Sulla. "Nothing's ever your fault, is it?" "Absolutely true," he said, looking superior. "Well, what about other women?" "What about them?" "Is it possible that one of the reasons why you haven't shown any interest in me since you came back is because you've got a woman tucked away in Gaul?" "Not a woman," he corrected gently, "a wife. And not in Gaul. In Germania." Her mouth dropped open, she gaped. "A wife?" "Well, according to the German custom, anyway. And twin boys about four months old now." He closed his eyes, the pain in them too private a thing to let her see. "I miss her badly. Isn't that odd?" Julilla managed to shut her mouth and swallow convulsively. "Is she that beautiful?" she whispered. His pale eyes opened, surprised. "Beautiful? Hermana? No, not at all! She's dumpy and in her thirties. Not even one hundredth as beautiful as you. Not even as blonde. Not even the daughter of a chief, let alone a king. Just a barbarian." "Why?” Sulla shook his head. "I don't know. Except that I liked her a great deal." "What does she have that I haven't?" "A good pair of breasts," said Sulla, shrugging, "but I'm not partial to breasts, so it can't be that. She worked hard. She never complained. She never expected anything of me no, that's not it. Better to say, she never expected me to be what I'm not." He nodded, smiled with obvious fondness. "Yes, I think that must be it. She belonged to herself, and so she didn't burden me with herself. You're a lead weight chained about my neck. Hermana was a pair of wings strapped to my feet." Without another word Julilla turned and walked out of the study. Sulla got up, followed her to the door, and closed it. But not enough time elapsed for Sulla to compose himself sufficiently to resume his doodling for write sensibly he couldn't that morning before the door opened again. His steward stood there, giving a superb imitation of an inanimate block of wood. "Yes?" "A caller, Lucius Cornelius. Are you in?" "Who is it?" "I would have given you his name, dominus, if I knew it," said the steward stiffly. "The caller preferred to charge me with a message for you. 'Scylax sends greetings.' " Sulla's face cleared like a breath from the surface of a polished mirror; a delighted smile dawned. One of the old gang! One of the mimes, the comedians, the actors he used to know! Oh, terrific! This nincompoop steward Julilla had bought wouldn't know, of course he wouldn't know. Clitumna's slaves weren't good enough for Julilla. "Well, bring him in!" He would have known who it was anywhere, anytime. And yet how much he had changed! From boy into man. "Metrobius," Sulla said, getting to his feet, his eyes flicking to the door automatically to make sure it was shut. It was. The windows were not shut, but they didn't matter, for there was an ironclad rule in Sulla's house: that no one was ever to stand where they could see into Sulla's study through the colonnade windows. He must be twenty-two now, thought Sulla. Quite tall for a Greek. The long mane of black curls had been barbered neatly into a manly cap, and where the skin of his cheeks and chin had once been milky-smooth, now it displayed the blue shadow of a heavy beard kept closely shaven. He still had a profile like a Praxiteles Apollo, and something of the same epicene repose, a Nicias painted marble so true to life it might step down from its plinth and begin to walk, yet remained still folded away within itself, keeping the secret of its mystery, its wellsprings. The marmoreal control of perfect beauty held perfectly broke then; Metrobius looked at Sulla with perfect love, and smilingly extended his arms. The tears stood forth in Sulla's eyes; his mouth shook. As he came around it, the corner of his desk struck his hip, but Sulla didn't notice. He just walked into Metrobius's arms and let them close about him, and put his chin on Metrobius's shoulder, and his arms about Metrobius's back. And felt as if he had come home at last. So the kiss when it happened was exquisite, the understanding heart grown up, the act of faith made without cognizance, without pain of any kind. "My boy, my beautiful boy!" said Sulla, and wept in simple gratitude that some things did not change.
Outside Sulla's open study windows Julilla stood and watched her husband walk into the lovely young man's arms, watched them kiss, heard the words of love which passed between them, watched as they moved together to the couch and sank upon it, and began the initial intimacies of a relationship so old and so satisfying to them both that this was merely a homecoming. No one needed to tell her that here was the real reason for her husband's neglect, and for her own drinking, and for her revenge in neglecting her children. Her husband's children. Before they could loosen each other's clothing Julilla turned away, and walked with head held high and eyes tearless into the bedroom she shared with Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Her husband. Beyond it was a smaller cubicle they used as a clothes repository, more cluttered now that Sulla was home again, for his dress-parade armor was suspended from a T-shaped frame, its helmet on a special stand, and his sword with its ivory eagle's head handle hung upon the wall complete with scabbard and baldric. Getting the sword down was easy; getting it free from its sheath and belt was more difficult. But she managed at last, and drew in her breath sharply when the blade sheared her hand open to the bone, so well honed was it. She experienced a twinge of surprise that she could actually feel physical pain at this moment, then dismissed both surprise and pain as irrelevant. Without hesitation she picked up the sword by its ivory eagle, turned it in upon herself, and walked into the wall. It was badly done. She fell in a sprawling tangle of blood and draperies with the sword buried in her belly, her heart beating, beating, beating, the rasp of her own breathing heavy in her ears like someone stealing up behind her to take life or virtue. Neither virtue nor life did she own anymore, so what could it matter? She felt the dreadful agony of it then, and the warmth of her own blood on her skin as it quit her. But she was a Julius Caesar; she would not cry out for help, or regret this decision for what little time she had remaining. Not a thought of her two little children crossed her mind; all she could think of was her own foolishness, that for many years she had loved a man who loved men. Sufficient reason to die. She wouldn't live to be laughed at, jeered at, made a mockery of by all those lucky lucky women out there who were married to men who loved women. As the blood flowed away carrying life along with it, her burning mind began to cool, and slow, and petrify. Oh, how wonderful, to stop loving him at last! No more torment, no more anguish, no more humiliation, no more wine. She had asked him to show her how to stop loving him, and he had shown her. So kind to her he had finally been, her darling Sulla. Her last lucid moments of thought were about her children; at least in them, something of herself she would leave behind. So she waded into the sweet shallows of the ocean Death wishing her children long life, and much happiness.
Sulla returned to his desk and sat down. "There's wine; pour me some," he said to Metrobius. How like the boy the man was, once animation stole into his face! Easier then to remember that once the boy had offered to give up every luxury for the chance to live in penury with his darling Sulla. Smiling softly, Metrobius brought the wine and sat down in the client's chair. "I know what you're going to say, Lucius Cornelius. We can't make a habit of this." "Yes. Among other things." Sulla sipped his wine, then looked at Metrobius sternly. "It isn't possible, dearest lad. Just sometimes, when the need or the pain or whatever it is becomes too much to bear. I'm the width of a whisker away from everything I want, which means I can't have you too. If this were Greece, yes. But it isn't. It's Rome. If I were the First Man in Rome, yes. But I'm not. Gaius Marius is." Metrobius pulled a face. "I understand." "Are you still in the theater?" "Of course. Acting's all I know. Besides, Scylax was a good teacher, give him his due. So I don't lack parts, and I don't rest very often." He cleared his throat and looked a little self-conscious. "The only change is, I've become serious." "Serious?" "That's right. It turned out, you see, that I didn't have the true comedic touch. I was all right when I was a child star, but once I grew out of the Cupid's wings and the mirthful imps, I discovered my real talent lay in tragedy, not comedy. So now I play Aeschylus and Accius instead of Aristophanes and Plautus. I don't repine." Sulla shrugged. "Oh well, at least that means I'll be able to go to the theater without betraying myself because you're there playing the hapless ingenue. Are you a citizen?" "No, alas." "I'll see what I can do." Sighing, Sulla put his goblet down and folded his hands together like a banker. "Let us meet by all means but not too often and never again here. I have a rather mad wife whom I can't trust." "It would be wonderful if we could meet occasionally." "Do you have a reasonably private place of your own, or are you still living with Scylax?" Metrobius looked surprised. "I thought you knew! But of course, how could you, when it's years since you've lived in Rome? Scylax died six months ago. And he left me everything he owned, including his apartment." "Then that's where we'll meet." Sulla got up. "Come, I'll show you out myself. And I'll enroll you as my client, so that if you should ever need to come here, you'll have a valid reason for doing so. I'll send a note to your place before I call round." A kiss looked out of the beautiful dark eyes when they parted at the outside door, but nothing was said, and nothing done to indicate to either the hovering steward or the door porter that the amazingly good-looking young man was anything more than a new client from the old days. "Give my love to everyone, Metrobius." "I daresay you won't be in Rome for the theatrical games?" "Afraid not," said Sulla, smiling casually. "Germans." And so they parted, just as Marcia came down the street shepherding the children and their nanny. Sulla waited for her and acted as porter himself. "Marcia, come into my study, please." Eyes wary, she sidled into the room ahead of him and went to the couch, where, Sulla saw with horror, there was a wet patch glaring at him like a beacon. "In the chair, if you don't mind," he said. She sat down, glowering at him with her chin up and her mouth set hard. "Mother-in-law, I'm well aware that you don't like me, and I have no intention of trying to woo you," Sulla began, making sure he appeared at his ease, unworried. "I didn't ask you to come and live here because I liked you, either. My concern was for my children. It still is. And I must thank you with all my heart for your good offices there. You've done a wonderful job in caring for them. They're little Romans again." She thawed a little. "I'm glad you think so." "In consequence, the children are no longer my main worry. Julilla is. I heard your altercation with her this morning." "The whole world heard it!" snapped Marcia. "Yes, that's true... " He sighed heavily. "After you took the children out, she had an altercation with me which the whole world also heard or at least heard her half of it. I wondered if you had any idea what we can do." "Unfortunately not enough people know she drinks to divorce her on those grounds, which are really your only grounds," said Marcia, knowing full well she had concealed it. "I think you just have to be patient. Her drinking is increasing, I won't be able to hide it for much longer. The moment it's general knowledge, you can put her away without condemnation," said Julilla's mother. "What if that stage should arrive while I'm away?" "I'm her mother; I can put her away. If it happens in your absence, I'll send her to your villa at Circei. Then when you return, you can divorce her and shut her up elsewhere. In time she'll drink herself to death." Marcia got up, anxious to be gone, and giving no hint as to the degree of pain she felt. "I do not like you, Lucius Cornelius," she said, "but I do not blame you for Julilla's plight." "Do you like any of your in-laws?" he asked. She snorted. "Only Aurelia." He walked out into the atrium with her. "I wonder where Julilla is?" he asked, suddenly realizing that he had neither heard nor seen her since the arrival of Metrobius. A frisson of alarm skimmed up his spine. "Lying in wait for one or the other of us, I imagine," she said. ' 'Once she starts the day with a quarrel, she usually continues to quarrel until she becomes so drunk she passes out." Sulla's distaste pulled his lips down. "I haven't seen her since she ran out of my study. An old friend called to see me not a moment later, and I was just letting him out when you came back with the children." "She's not normally so backward," said Marcia, and looked at the steward. "Have you seen your mistress?" she asked. "The last I did see of her, she was going into her sleeping cubicle," he said. "Shall I ask her maid?" , "No, don't bother." Marcia glanced sideways at Sulla. "I think we ought to see her together right now, Lucius Cornelius. Maybe if we tell her what will happen unless she pulls herself out of her pigsty, she might see reason." And so they found Julilla, twisted and still. Her fine woolen draperies had acted like a blotter and soaked up much of the blood, so that she was clad in wet, rusting scarlet, a Nereid out of some volcano. Marcia clutched at Sulla's arm, staggering; he put the arm about her and held her upright. But Quintus Marcius Rex's daughter made the effort and brought herself under iron control. "This is one solution I did not expect," she said levelly. "Nor I," said Sulla, used to slaughter. "What did you say to her?" Sulla shook his head. "Nothing to provoke this, as far as I can remember we can probably find out from the servants; they heard her half of it at least." "No, I do not think it advisable to ask them," Marcia said, and turned suddenly within Sulla's arm, seeking shelter against his body. "In many ways, Lucius Cornelius, this is the best solution of all. I'd rather the children suffered the shock of her death than the slow disillusionment of her drinking. They're young enough to forget now. But any later, and they'd remember." She laid her cheek against Sulla's chest. "Yes, it's by far the best way." A tear oozed beneath her closed eyelid. "Come, I'll take you to your room," he said, guiding her out of the blood-drenched cubicle. “I never even thought of my sword, fool that I am!" "Why should you?" "Hindsight," said Sulla, who knew exactly why Julilla had found his sword and used it; she had looked through his study windows at his reunion with Metrobius. Marcia was right. This was the best way by far. And he hadn't had to do it.
6
The magic hadn't failed; when the consular elections were held just after the new tribunes of the plebs entered office on the tenth day of December, Gaius Marius was returned as the senior consul. For no one could disbelieve the testimony of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, nor Saturninus's contention that there was still only one man capable of beating the Germans. The old German-mania rushed back into Rome like the Tiber in full spate, and once again Sicily faded from first place in the list of crises which never, never seemed to grow any less in number. "For as fast as we eliminate one, a new one pops up out of nowhere," said Marcus Aemilius Scaurus to Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle. "Including Sicily," said Lucullus's brother-in-law with venom in his voice. "How could Gaius Marius lend his support to that pipinna Ahenobarbus when he insisted Lucius Lucullus must be replaced as governor of Sicily? By Servilius the Augur, of all people! He's nothing but a New Man skulking in the guise of an old name!" " He was tweaking your tail, Quintus Caecilius,'' Scaurus said. "Gaius Marius doesn't give a counterfeit coin who governs Sicily, not now that the Germans are definitely coming. If you wanted Lucius Lucullus to remain there, you would have done better to have kept quiet; then Gaius Marius wouldn't have remembered that you and Lucius Lucullus matter to each other.'' "The senatorial rolls need a stern eye to look them over," said Numidicus. "I shall stand for censor!" "Good thinking! Who with?" "My cousin Caprarius." "Oh, more good thinking, by Venus! He'll do exactly as you tell him." "It's time we weeded the Senate out, not to mention the knights. I shall be a stringent censor, Marcus Aemilius, have no fear!" said Numidicus. "Saturninus is going, and so is Glaucia. They're dangerous men." "Oh, don't!" cried Scaurus, flinching. "If I hadn't falsely accused him of peculation in grain, he might have turned into a different kind of politician. I can never rid myself of guilt about Lucius Appuleius." Numidicus raised his brows. "My dear Marcus Aemilius, you are in strong need of a tonic! What if anything caused that wolfshead Saturninus to act the way he does is immaterial. All that matters at this present moment is that he is what he is. And he has to go." He blew through his nostrils angrily. "We are not finished as a force in this city yet," he said. "And at least this coming year Gaius Marius is saddled with a real man as his colleague, instead of those straw men Fimbria and Orestes. We'll make sure Quintus Lutatius is put into the field with an army, and every tiny success Quintus Lutatius has with his army, we'll trumpet through Rome like triumphs." For the electorate had also voted in Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar as consul, junior to Marius admittedly, but, "A thorn in my side," said Marius. "Your young brother's in as a praetor," said Sulla. "And going to Further Spain, nicely out of the way." They caught up with Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, who had parted company with Numidicus at the bottom of the Senate steps. "I must thank you personally for your industry and enterprise in the matter of the grain supply," said Marius civilly. "As long as there's wheat to be bought somewhere in the world, Gaius Marius, it's not a very difficult job," said Scaurus, also civilly. "What worries me is the day when there's no wheat to be had anywhere." "Not likely at the moment, surely! Sicily will be back to normal next harvest, I imagine." Scaurus struck immediately. "Provided, that is, we don't lose everything we've gained once that prating fool Servilius Augur takes office as governor!" he said tartly. "The war in Sicily is over," said Marius. "You'd better hope so, consul. I'm not so sure." "And where have you been getting the wheat these past two years?" Sulla asked hastily, to avert an open disagreement. "Asia Province," said Scaurus, willing enough to be sidetracked, for he genuinely did love being curator annonae, the custodian of the grain supply. "But surely they don't grow much surplus?" prompted Sulla. "Hardly a modius, as a matter of fact," said Scaurus smugly. "No, we can thank King Mithridates of Pontus. He's very young, but he's mighty enterprising. Having conquered all of the northern parts of the Euxine Sea and gained control of the grainlands of the Tanais, the Borysthenes, the Hypanis, and the Danastris, he's making a very nice additional income for Pontus by shipping this Cimmerian surplus down to Asia Province, and selling it to us. What's more, I'm going to follow my instincts, and buy again in Asia Province next year. Young Marcus Livius Drusus is going as quaestor to Asia, and I've commissioned him to act for me in the matter.'' Marius grunted. "No doubt he'll visit his father-in-law, Quintus Servilius Caepio, in Smyrna while he's there?" "No doubt," said Scaurus blandly. "Then have young Marcus Livius send the bills for the grain to Quintus Servilius Caepio," said Marius. "He's got more money to pay for it than the Treasury has!" "That's an unfounded allegation." "Not according to King Copillus." An uneasy, silence fell for a simmering moment before Sulla said, "How much of that Asian grain reaches us, Marcus Aemilius? I hear the pirate problem grows worse every year." "About half, no more," Scaurus said grimly. "Every hidden cove and harbor on the Pamphylian and Cilician coasts shelters pirates. Of course by trade they're slavers, but if they can steal grain to feed the slaves they steal, then they're sure of huge profits, aren't they? And whatever grain they have left over, they sell back to us at twice the price we originally paid for it, if for no other reason than they guarantee it will reach us without being pirated again. "Amazing," said Marius, "that even among pirates there are middlemen. Because that's what they are! Steal it, then sell it back to us. Pure profit. It's time we did something, Princeps Senatus, isn't it?" "It certainly is," said Scaurus fervently. "What do you suggest?" "A special commission for one of the praetors a roving governorship, if there is such an animal. Give him ships and marines, and charge him with flushing out every nest of pirates along the whole Pamphylian and Cilician coast," said Scaurus. "We could call him the governor of Cilicia," said Marius. "What a good idea!" "All right, Princeps Senatus, let's call the Conscript Fathers together as soon as possible, and do it." "Let's," said Scaurus, oozing charity. "You know, Gaius Marius, I may loathe everything you stand for, but I do love your capacity to act without turning the whole business into a new set of circus games." "The Treasury will scream like a Vestal invited to dinner in a brothel," said Marius, grinning. "Let it! If we don't eradicate the pirates, trade between East and West will cease to be. Ships and marines," said Scaurus thoughtfully. "How many, do you think?" "Oh, eight or ten full fleets, and, say ten thousand trained marines. If we have that many," said Marius. "We can get them," Scaurus said confidently. "If necessary we can hire some at least from Rhodes, Halicarnassus, Cnidus, Athens, Ephesus don't worry, we'll find them." "It ought to be Marcus Antonius," said Marius. "What, not your own brother?" asked Scaurus, aping surprise. But Marius grinned, unruffled. "Like me, Marcus Aemilius, my brother Marcus Marius is a landlubber. Where all the Antonii like going to sea." Scaurus laughed. "When they're not all at sea!" "True. But he's all right, our praetor Marcus Antonius. He'll do the job, I think." "I think he will too." "And in the meantime," said Sulla, smiling, "the Treasury is going to be so busy whining and complaining about Marcus Aemilius's grain purchases and pirate chasers that it won't even notice how much money it's paying out for Head Count armies. Because Quintus Lutatius will have to enlist a Head Count army too." "Oh, Lucius Cornelius, you've been too long in the service of Gaius Marius!" said Scaurus. "I was thinking the same thing," said Marius unexpectedly. But more than that he would not say.
Sulla and Marius left for Gaul-across-the-Alps late in February, having dealt with the obsequies and aftermath of Julilla; Marcia had agreed to remain in Sulla's house to look after the children for the time being. "But," she said in minatory tones, "you can't expect me to be here forever, Lucius Cornelius. Now that I'm getting into my fifties, I have a fancy to move to the Campanian coast. My bones don't like the damp city weather. You had better marry again, give those children a proper mother and some half brothers or half sisters to play with.'' "It will have to wait until the Germans are dealt with," Sulla said, trying to keep his voice courteous. "Well, all right then, after the Germans," said Marcia. "Two years hence," he warned. "Two? One, surely!" "Perhaps, though I doubt it. Plan on two, Mother-in-law." "Not a moment longer, Lucius Cornelius." Sulla looked at her, one brow lifting quizzically. "You had better start looking for a suitable wife for me." "Are you joking?" "No, I'm not joking!" Sulla cried, his patience worn a trifle thin of late. "How do you think I can go away to fight the Germans and also look inside Rome for a new wife? If you want to move out as soon as I'm home, then you'd better have a wife picked out and willing to be picked out." "What sort of wife?" "I don't care! Just make sure she'll be kind to my little ones," said Sulla. For this and other reasons, Sulla was very glad to leave Rome. The longer he remained there, the greater became his hunger to see Metrobius, and the more he saw Metrobius, the more he suspected he would want to see Metrobius. Nor could he exert the same influence and control over the grown Metrobius that he had over the boy; Metrobius was now of an age to feel that he too had something to say about how the relationship was to progress. Yes, it was best to be far from Rome! Only his children would he miss, dear little people they were. Enchanting. Utterly, uncritically loving. He would be away for many moons, but the moment he reappeared, they welcomed him with open arms and millions of kisses. Why shouldn't adult love be like that? But the answer, he thought, was simple. Adult love was too concerned with self and with thinking.
Sulla and Marius had left the junior consul, Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar, in the throes of recruiting another army, and complaining loudly because it would have to be Head Count in composition. "Of course it has to be Head Count!" said Marius shortly. "And don't come grizzling and mewling to me about it it wasn't I lost eighty thousand soldiers at Arausio, nor any of the rest we've wasted in battle!" That of course shut Catulus Caesar up, but in a tight-lipped, aristocratic way. "I wish you wouldn't cast the crimes of his own sort in his face," said Sulla. "Then let him stop casting the Head Count in my face!" growled Marius. Sulla gave up. Luckily things in Gaul were very much as they ought to be; Manius Aquillius had kept the army in good condition with more construction of bridges and aqueducts and plenty of drills. Quintus Sertorius had come back, but then returned to the Germans because, he said, he could be of better use there; he would go with the Cimbri on their trek, and report to Marius whenever he could. And the troops were beginning to quiver with eager anticipation at the thought that this year they'd see action. That year should have seen an extra February intercalated inserted into the calendar, but the difference between the old Pontifex Maximus, Dalmaticus, and Ahenobarbus, the new, now showed itself: Ahenobarbus could see no virtue in keeping the calendar in time with the seasons. So when the calendar March came around, it was still winter, for the calendar now began to move ahead of the actual seasons. In a year of only 355 days, an extra 20-day month had to be intercalated each two years, traditionally at the end of February. But it was a decision made by the College of Pontifices, and if the members were not kept up to the mark by a conscientious Pontifex Maximus, the calendar fell by the wayside, as it did now. Happily a letter arrived from Publius Rutilius Rufus not long after Sulla and Marius settled back into the routine of life in an army camp on the far side of the Alps.
This is definitely going to be an event-filled year, so my main problem is knowing where to start. Of course everyone was just waiting for you to get out of the way, and I swear you hadn't got as far as Ocelum before there were mice and rats cavorting all over the lower end of the Forum. What a lovely play they're having, O Cat! All right then, I'll start with our precious pair of censors, Piggle-wiggle and his tame cousin Billy Goat. Piggle-wiggle has been going about for some time well, since he was elected, really, only he was careful not to talk in your vicinity saying that he intends to "purge the Senate," I think he put it. One thing you can say for them, they're not going to be a venal pair of censors, so all the State contracts will be gone into properly, and let according to price combined with merit. However, they've antagonized the Treasury already by demanding a large sum of money to repair and redecorate some of the temples not rich enough to pay themselves, not to mention fresh paint and marble latrine benches in the three State houses of the major flamines, also the houses of the Rex Sacrorum and the Pontifex Maximus. Personally I like my wooden latrine bench. Marble is so cold and hard! There was quite a lively little squabble when Piggle-wiggle mentioned the Domus Publicus of the Pontifex Maximus, the Treasury being of the opinion that our new P.M. is rich enough to donate paint and marble latrine benches. They then proceeded to let all the ordinary contracts and did very well, I consider. Tenders were plentiful, bidding was brisk, and I doubt there'll be much chicanery. They had moved with almost unheard-of speed to this point because what they really wanted to do, of course, was review the roll of senators and the roll of knights. Not two days after the contracts were all finished I swear they've done eighteen months of work in less than one month! Piggle-wiggle called a contio of the Assembly of the People to read out the censors' findings on the moral plenitude or turpitude of the Conscript Fathers of the Senate. However, someone must have told Saturninus and Glaucia ahead of time that their names were going to be missing, because when the Assembly met, it was stuffed with hired gladiators and other bully-boys not normally to be found attending meetings of the Comitia. And no sooner did Piggle-wiggle announce that he and the Billy Goat were removing Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Gaius Servilius Glaucia from the roll of senators, than the place erupted. The gladiators charged the rostra and hauled poor Piggle-wiggle down off it, then passed him from man to man slapping him viciously across the face with their huge and horny open hands. It was a novel technique no clubs or billets of wood, just open hands. On the theory I suppose that hands cannot kill unless bunched into fists. Minimal violence, I heard it being called. How pathetic. It all happened so quickly and was so well organized that Piggle-wiggle had been passed all the way to the start of the Clivus Argentarius before Scaurus, Ahenobarbus, and a few other Good Men managed to pick him up and race him to asylum within the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. There they found his face twice its normal size, both eyes closed, his lips split in a dozen places, his nose spurting like a fountain, his ears mangled, and his brows cut. He looked for all the world like an old-time Greek boxer at the Olympic games. How do you like the word they're attaching to the archconservative faction, by the way? Boni the Good Men. Scaurus is going round claiming to have invented it after Saturninus began calling the archconservatives the Policy Makers. But he ought to remember that there are plenty of us old enough to know that both Gaius Gracchus and Lucius Opimius called the men of their factions the boni. Now back to my story! After he learned Cousin Numidicus was safe, Cousin Caprarius managed to restore order in the Comitia. He had his heralds blow their trumpets, then shouted out that he didn't agree with his senior colleague's findings, therefore Saturninus and Glaucia would remain on the senatorial rolls. You'd have to say Piggle-wiggle lost the engagement, but I don't like friend Saturninus's methods of fighting. He simply says he had nothing to do with the violence, but that he's grateful the People are so vehemently on his side. You might be pardoned for thinking that was the end of it. But no! The censors then began their financial assessment of the knights, having had a handsome new tribunal built near the Pool of Curtius a wooden structure, admittedly, but designed for their purpose, with a flight of steps up each side so those being interviewed are kept orderly up one side, across the front of the censors' desk, and down the other side. Well done. You know the routine each knight or would-be knight must furnish documentary evidence of his tribe, his birthplace, his citizenship, his military service, his property and capital, and his income. Though it takes several weeks to discover whether in truth these applicants do have an income of at least 400,000 sesterces a year, the show always draws a good crowd on its first couple of days. As it did when Piggle-wiggle and the Billy Goat began to go through the equestrian rolls. He did look a sight, poor Piggle-wiggle! His bruises were more bilious-yellow than black, and the cuts had become a network of congested dark lines. Though his eyes had opened enough to see. He must have wished they hadn't, when he saw what he saw in the afternoon of that first day on the new tribunal! None other than Lucius Equitius, the self-proclaimed bastard son of Tiberius Gracchus! The fellow strolled up the steps when his turn came, and stood in front of Numidicus, not Caprarius. Piggle-wiggle just froze as he took in the sight of Equitius attended by a small army of scribes and clerks, all loaded down with account books and documents. Then he turned to his own secretary and said the tribunal was closing for the day, so please to dismiss this creature standing in front of him. "You've got time to see me," said Equitius. "All right then, what do you want?" he asked ominously. "I want to be enrolled as a knight," said Equitius. "Not in this censors' lustrum, you're not!" snarled our Good Man Piggle-wiggle. I must say Equitius was patient. He said, rolling his eyes toward the crowd standing around the base of the tribunal and it then became apparent that the gladiators and bully-boys were back "You can't turn me down, Quintus Caecidius. I fulfill all the criteria." "You do not!" said Numidicus. "You are disqualified on the most basic ground of all you are not a Roman citizen." "But I am, esteemed censor," said Equitius in a voice everyone could hear. "I became a Roman citizen on the death of my master, who bestowed it upon me in his will, along with all his property, and his name. That I have gone back to my mother's name is immaterial. I have the proof of my manumission and adoption. Not only that, but I have served in the legions for ten years and as a Roman citizen legionary, not an auxiliary." "I will not enroll you as a knight, and when we commence the census of the Roman citizens, I will not enroll you as a Roman citizen," said Numidicus. "But I am entitled," said Equitius, very clearly. "I am a Roman citizen my tribe is Suburana 1 served my ten years in the legions I am a moral and respectable man I own four insulae, ten taverns, a hundred iugera of land at Lanuvium, a thousand iugera of land at Firmum Picenum, a market porticus in Firmum Picenum and I have an income of over four million sesterces a year, so I also qualify for the Senate." And he snapped his fingers at his head clerk, who snapped his fingers at the minions, all of whom stepped forward holding out huge collections of papers. "I have proof, Quintus Caecilius." "I don't care how many bits of paper you produce, you vulgar lowborn mushroom and I don't care who you bring forward to witness for you, you sucking bag of greed!" cried Piggle-wiggle. "I will not enroll you as a citizen of Rome, let alone as a member of the Ordo Equester! I piss on you, pimp! Now be off!" Equitius turned to face the crowd, spread his arms wide he was wearing a toga and spoke. "Do you hear that?" he asked. "I, Lucius Equitius, son of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, am denied my citizenship as well as my knight's status!" Piggle-wiggle got to his feet so fast and moved so fast that Equitius didn't even see him coming; the next thing, our valiant censor landed a right on Equitius's jaw, and down Equitius went on his arse, sitting gaping up with his brains rattling round in their bone-box. Then Piggle-wiggle followed the punch with a kick that sent Equitius slithering off the edge of the tribunal into the crowd. "I piss on the lot of you!" he roared, shaking his fists at the spectators and gladiators. "Be off with you, and take that non-Roman turd with you!" So it happened all over again, only this time the gladiators didn't touch Piggle-wiggle's face. They dragged him off the tribunal and took to his body with fists, nails, teeth, and boots. In the end it was Saturninus and Glaucia I forgot to tell you that they were lurking in the background who stepped forward and pulled Numidicus out of the ranks of his attackers. I imagine it was no part of their plan to have Numidicus dead. Then Saturninus climbed up on the tribunal and quietened everyone enough for Caprarius to make himself heard. "I do not agree with my colleague, and I will take it upon myself to admit Lucius Equitius into the ranks of the Ordo Equester!" he yelled, white-faced, poor fellow. I don't think he ever saw so much violence on any of his military campaigns. "Enter Lucius Equitius's name!" roared Saturninus. And Caprarius entered the name in the rolls. "Home, everyone!" said Saturninus. And everyone promptly went home, carrying Lucius Equitius on their shoulders. Piggle-wiggle was a mess. Lucky not to be dead, is my opinion. Oh, he was angry! And went at Cousin Billy Goat like a shrew for giving in yet again. Poor old Billy Goat was just about in tears, and quite incapable of defending his actions. "Maggots! Maggots, the lot of them!" Piggle-wiggle kept saying, over and over, while we all tried to bind up his ribs he had several broken ones and discover what other injuries his toga was hiding. And yes, it was all very foolish, but ye gods, Gaius Marius, one has to admire Piggle-wiggle's courage!
Marius looked up from the letter, frowning. "I wonder exactly what Saturninus is up to?" he asked. But Sulla's mind was dwelling upon a far less important point. "Plautus!" he said suddenly. "What?" "The boni, the Good Men! Gaius Gracchus, Lucius Opimius, and our own Scaurus claim to have invented boni to describe their factions, but Plautus applied boni to plutocrats and other patrons a hundred years ago! I remember hearing it in a production of Plautus's Captivi put on while Scaurus was curule aedile, by Thespis! I was just old enough to be a playgoer." Marius was staring. "Lucius Cornelius, stop worrying about who coined pointless words, and pay attention to what really matters! Mention theater to you, and everything else is forgotten." "Oooops, sorry!" said Sulla impenitently. Marius resumed reading.
We now move from the Forum Romanum to Sicily, where all sorts of things have been happening, none of them good, some of them blackly amusing, and some downright incredible. As you know, but I shall refresh your memory anyway because I loathe ragged stories, the end of last year's campaigning season saw Lucius Licinius Lucullus sit down in front of the slave stronghold of Triocala, to starve the rebels out. He'd thrown terror into them by having a herald retell the tale of the Enemy stronghold which sent the Romans a message saying they had food enough to last for ten years, and the Romans sent the reply back that in that case, they'd take the place in the eleventh year. In fact, Lucullus did a magnificent job. He hemmed in Triocala with a forest of siege ramps, towers, shelter sheds, rams, catapults, and barricades, and he filled in a huge chasm which lay like a natural defense in front of the walls. Then he built an equally magnificent camp for his men, so strongly fortified that even if the slaves could have got out of Triocala, they couldn't have got into Lucullus's camp. And he settled down to wait the winter out, his men extremely comfortable, and he himself sure that his command would be prorogued. Then in January came the news that Gaius Servilius Augur was the new governor, and with the official dispatch came a letter from our dear Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle, which filled in the nasty details, the scandalous way in which the deed had been done by Ahenobarbus and his arse-boy the Augur. You don't know Lucullus all that well, Gaius Marius. But I do. Like so many of his kind, he presents a cool, calm, detached, and insufferably haughty face to the world. You know, "I am Lucius Licinius Lucullus, a noble Roman of most ancient and prestigious family, and if you're very lucky, I might deign to notice you from time to time." But underneath the facade is a very different man thin-skinned, fanatically conscious of slights, filled with passion, awesome in rage. So when Lucullus got the news, he took it on the surface with exactly the degree of calm and composed resignation you might expect. Then he proceeded to tear out every last piece of artillery, the siege ramp, the siege tower, the tortoise, the shelter sheds, the rubble-filled defile, the walled-in mountain shelves, everything. And he burned the lot he could burn, and carried every bucketload of rubble, fill, earth, whatever, far away from Triocala in a thousand different directions. After which he demolished his own camp, and destroyed the materials it contained too. You think that's enough? Not for Lucullus, who was only just getting started! He destroyed every single record of his administration in both Syracuse and Lilybaeum, and he marched his seventeen thousand men to the port of Agrigentum. His quaestor proved terrifically loyal, and connived at everything Lucullus wanted to do. The pay had come for his army, and there was money in Syracuse from spoils taken after the battle of Heracleia Minoa. Lucullus then proceeded to fine every non-Roman citizen in Sicily for putting too much strain upon Publius Licinius Nerva, the previous governor, and added that money to the rest. After which he used some of the new shipment of money which had arrived for the use of Servilius the Augur in hiring a fleet of ships to transport his soldiers. On the beach at Agrigentum he discharged his men, and gave them every last sestertius he had managed to scrape up. Now Lucullus's men were a motley collection, and proof positive that the Head Count in Italy is as exhausted these days as all the other classes when it comes to providing troops. Aside from the Italian and Roman veterans he'd got together in Campania, he had a legion and a few extra cohorts from Bithynia, Greece, and Macedonian Thessaly it was his demanding these from King Nicomedes of Bithynia which had led the King to say he had no men to give, because the Roman tax farmers had enslaved them all. A rather impertinent reference to our freeing the Italian Allied slaves Nicomedes thought his treaty of friendship and alliance with us should extend the emancipation to Bithynian slaves! Lucullus rolled him up, of course, and got his Bithynian soldiers. Now the Bithynian soldiers were sent home, and the Roman and Italian soldiers were sent home to Italy and Rome. With their discharge papers. And having removed every last trace of his governorship from the annals of Sicily, Lucullus himself sailed away. The moment he was gone, King Tryphon and his adviser Athenion spilled out of Triocala, and began to plunder and pillage Sicily's countryside all over again. They are now absolutely convinced that they'll win the war, and their catch-cry is "Instead of being a slave, own a slave!" No crops have been planted, and the cities are overflowing with rural refugees. Sicily is a very Iliad of woes once more. Into this delightful situation came Servilius the Augur. Of course he couldn't believe it. And started to bleat in letter after letter to his patron, Ahenobarbus Pipinna. In the meantime, Lucullus arrived back in Rome, and began to make preparations for the inevitable. When Ahenobarbus taxed him in the House with deliberate destruction of Roman property siegeworks and camps especially Lucullus simply looked down his nose and said he thought the new governor would want to start in his own way. He himself, said Lucullus, liked to leave everything the way he found it, and that was precisely what he had done in Sicily at the end of his term he had left Sicily the way he had found it. Servilius the Augur's chief grievance was the lack of an army he had simply assumed Lucullus would leave his legions behind. But he hadn't bothered to make a formal request of Lucullus about the troops. So Lucullus maintained that in the absence of any request from Servilius the Augur, his troops were his to do what he wanted with. And he felt they were due for discharge. "I left Gaius Servilius Augur a new tablet, wiped clean of everything I might have done," said Lucullus in the House. "Gaius Servilius Augur is a New Man, and New Men have their own ways of doing everything. I considered therefore that I was doing him a favor.'' Without an army there's very little Servilius the Augur can do in Sicily, of course. Nor, with Catulus Caesar sifting what few recruits Italy can drop into his net, is there any likelihood of another army for Sicily this year. Lucullus's veterans are scattered far and wide, most of them with plump purses, and not anxious to be found. Lucullus is well aware he's left himself wide open to prosecution. I don't think he honestly cares. He's had the infinite satisfaction of completely destroying any chance Servilius the Augur might have had to steal his thunder. And that matters more to Lucullus than avoiding prosecution. So he's busy doing what he can to protect his sons, for it's plain he thinks Ahenobarbus and the Augur will utilize Saturninus's new knight-run treason court to initiate a suit against him, and secure a conviction. He has transferred as much of his property as he possibly can to his older son, Lucius Lucullus, and given out his younger son, aged thirteen now, to be adopted by the Terentii Varrones. There is no Marcus Terentius Varro in this generation, and it's an extremely wealthy family. I heard from Scaurus that Piggle-wiggle who is very upset by all this, as well he might be, for if Lucullus is convicted, he'll have to take his scandal-making sister, Metella Calva, back says the two boys have taken a vow to have their revenge upon Servilius the Augur as soon as they're both of age. The older boy, Lucius Lucullus Junior, is particularly bitter, it seems. I'm not surprised. He looks like his father on the outside, so why not on the inside as well? To be cast into disgrace by the overweening ambition of the noisome New Man Augur is anathema. And that's all for the moment. I'll keep you informed. I wish I could be there to help you with the Germans, not because you need my help, but because I'm feeling left out of it.
* * *
It was well into April of the calendar year before Marius and Sulla had word that the Germans were packing up and beginning to move out of the lands of the Atuatuci, and another month before Sertorius came in person to report that Boiorix had kept the Germans together as a people sufficiently to ensure his plan was going to be put into effect. The Cimbri and the mixed group led by the Tigurini started off to follow the Rhenus, while the Teutones wandered southeast down the Mosa. "We have to assume that in the autumn the Germans will indeed arrive in three separate divisions on the borders of Italian Gaul," said Marius, breathing heavily. "I'd like to be there in person to greet Boiorix himself when he comes down the Athesis, but it isn't sensible. First, I have to take on the Teutones and render them impotent. Hopefully the Teutones will travel the fastest of the three groups, at least as far as the Druentia, because they don't have any alpine territory to cross until later. If we can beat the Teutones here and do it properly then we ought to have time to cross the Mons Genava Pass and intercept Boiorix and the Cimbri before they actually enter Italian Gaul.'' "You don't think Catulus Caesar can deal with Boior on his own?" asked Manius Aquillius. "No," said Marius flatly. Later, alone with Sulla, he enlarged upon his feelings about his junior colleague's chances against Boiorix; for Quintus Lutatius Catulus was leading his army north to the Athesis as soon as it was trained and equipped. "He'll have about six legions, and he has all spring and summer to get them into condition. But a real general he's not," said Marius. "We must hope Teutobod comes earliest, that we beat Teutobod, cross the Alps in a tearing hurry, and join up with Catulus Caesar before Boiorix reaches Lake Benacus." Sulla raised an eyebrow. "It won't happen that way," he said, voice certain. Marius sighed. "I knew you were going to say that!" "I knew you knew I was going to say that," said Sulla, grinning. "It isn't likely that either of the two divisions traveling without Boiorix himself will make better time than the Cimbri. The trouble is, there's not going to be enough time for you to be in each place at the right moment." "Then I stay here and wait for Teutobod," said Marius, making up his mind. "This army knows every blade of grass and twig of tree between Massilia and Arausio, and the men need a victory badly after two years of inaction. Their chances of victory are very good here. So here I must stay." "I note the 'I,' Gaius Marius," said Sulla gently. "Do you have something else for me to do?" "I do. I'm sorry, Lucius Cornelius, to cheat you of a well-deserved chance to swipe a few Teutones, but I think I must send you to serve Catulus Caesar as his senior legate. He'll stomach you in that role; you're a patrician," said Marius. Bitterly disappointed, Sulla looked down at his hands. ' 'What help can I possibly be when I'm serving in the wrong army?" "I wouldn't worry so much if I didn't see all the symptoms of Silanus, Cassius, Caepio, and Mallius Maximus in my junior consul. But I do, Lucius Cornelius, I do! Catulus Caesar has no grasp either of strategy or of tactics he thinks the gods popped them into his brain when they ordained his high birth, and that when the time comes, they'll be there. But it isn't like that, as you well know!" "Yes, I do," said Sulla. "If Boiorix and Catulus Caesar meet before I can get across Italian Gaul, Catulus Caesar is going to commit some ghastly military blunder, and lose his army. And if he's allowed to do that, I don't see how we can win. The Cimbri are the best led of the three branches, and the most numerous. Added to which, I don't know the lie of the land anywhere in Italian Gaul on the far side of the Padus. If I can beat the Teutones with less than forty thousand men, it's because I know the country." Sulla tried to stare his superior out of countenance, but those eyebrows defeated him. "But what do you expect me to do?" he asked. "Catulus Caesar is wearing the general's cape, not Cornelius Sulla! What do you expect me to do?" Marius's hand went out and closed fast about Sulla's arm above the wrist. "If I knew that, I'd be able to control Catulus Caesar from here," he said. "The fact remains, Lucius Cornelius, that you survived over a year of living among a barbarian enemy as one of them. Your wits are as sharp as your sword, and you use both superbly well. I have no doubt that whatever you might have to do to save Catulus Caesar from himself, you will do." Sulla sucked in a breath. "So my orders are to save his army at all costs?" "At all costs." "Even the cost of Catulus Caesar?" "Even the cost of Catulus Caesar."
Spring wore itself out in a smother of flowers and summer came in as triumphantly as a general on his victory parade, then stretched itself out, hot and dry. Teutobod and his Teutones came steadily down through the lands of the Aedui and into the lands of the Allobroges, who occupied all the area between the upper Rhodanus and the Isara River, many miles to the south. They were warlike, the Allobroges, and had an abiding hatred for Rome and Romans; but the German host had journeyed through their lands three years earlier, and they did not want the Germans as their overlords. So there was hard fighting, and the Teutonic advance slowed down. Marius began to pace the floor of his command house, and wonder how things were with Sulla, now a part of Catulus Caesar's army in Italian Gaul, camped along the Padus. Catulus Caesar had marched up the Via Flaminia at the head of six understrength new legions late in June; the manpower shortage was so acute he could recruit no more. When he got to Bononia on the Via Aemilia, he took the Via Annia to the big manufacturing town of Patavium; this was well to the east of Lake Benacus, but a better route for an army on the march than the side roads and lanes and tracks with which Italian Gaul was mostly provided. From Patavium he marched on one of these poorly kept-up side roads to Verona, and there established his base camp. Thus far Catulus Caesar had done nothing Sulla could fault, yet he understood better now why Marius had transferred him to Italian Gaul and what he had thought at the time was the lesser task. Militarily it might well be yet Marius, Sulla thought, had not mistaken the cut of Catulus Caesar. Superbly aristocratic, arrogant, overconfident, he reminded Sulla vividly of Metellus Numidicus. The trouble was, the theater of war and the enemy Catulus Caesar faced were very much more dangerous than those Metellus Numidicus had faced; and Metellus Numidicus had owned Gaius Marius and Publius Rutilius Rufus as legates, besides harboring the memory of a salutary experience in a pigsty at Numantia. Whereas Catulus Caesar had never encountered a Gaius Marius on his way up the chain of military command; he had served his requisite terms as a cadet and then as a tribune of the soldiers with lesser men engaged in lesser wars Macedonia, Spain. War on a grand scale had always eluded him. His reception of Sulla had not been promising, as he had sorted out his legates before leaving Rome, and when he reached Bononia found Sulla waiting for him with a directive from the commander-in-chief, Gaius Marius, to the effect that Lucius Cornelius Sulla was appointed senior legate and second-in-command. The action was arbitrary and highhanded, but of course Marius had had no choice; Catulus Caesar's manner toward Sulla was freezing, and his conduct obstructive. Only Sulla's birth stood him in good stead, but even that was weakened by his past history of low living. There was also a tiny streak of envy in Catulus Caesar, for in Sulla he saw a man who had not only seen major actions in major theaters, but had also pulled off a brilliant coup in spying on the Germans. Had he only known of Sulla's real role in that spying, he would have been even more mistrustful and suspicious of Sulla than he already was. In fact, Marius had displayed his usual genius in sending Sulla rather than Manius Aquillius, who might also have proven his worth as a watchdog-cum-guardian; for Sulla grated on Catulus Caesar's nerves, rather as if out of the corner of Catulus Caesar's eye he was always conscious that a white pard stalked him yet when he turned to confront the thing, it wasn't there. No senior legate was ever more helpful; no senior legate was ever more willing to take the burdens of day-to-day administration and supervision of the army from a busy general's shoulders. And yet and yet Catulus Caesar knew something was wrong. Why should Gaius Marius have sent this fellow at all, unless he was up to something devious? It was no part of Sulla's plan to settle Catulus Caesar down, allay his fears and suspicions; on the contrary, what Sulla aimed to do was keep Catulus Caesar fearful and suspicious, and thus gain a mental ascendancy over him which when necessary if necessary he could bring to bear. And in the meantime he made it his business to get to know every military tribune and centurion in the army, and a great many of the ranker soldiers as well. Left to his own devices by Catulus Caesar in the matter of routine training and drilling once camp was established near Verona, Sulla became the senior legate everyone below the rank of legate knew, respected, trusted. It was very necessary that this happen, in case he was obliged to eliminate Catulus Caesar. Not that he had any intention of killing or maiming Catulus Caesar; he was enough of a patrician to want to protect his fellow noblemen, even from themselves. Affection for Catulus Caesar he could not feel; affection for that man's class he did.
The Cimbri had done well under the leadership of Boiorix, who had guided both his own division and that of Getorix as far as the confluence of the Danubius with the Aenus; at that point he left Getorix with a relatively short journey to complete on his own, while the Cimbri turned south down the Aenus. Soon they were passing through the alpine lands peopled by a tribe of Celts called the Brenni, after the first Brennus. They controlled the Pass of Brennus, the lowest of all the passes into Italian Gaul, but were in no condition to prevent Boiorix and his Cimbri from using it. In late Quinctilis of the calendar, the Cimbri reached the Athesis River where it joined the Isarcus, the stream they had followed down from the Pass of Brennus. Here in verdant alpine meadows they spread out a little, and looked up to the height of the mountains against a rich and cloudless sky. And here the scouts Sulla had sent out discovered them. Though he had thought himself prepared for every contingency, Sulla hadn't dreamed of the one he now was called upon to cope with; for he didn't yet know Catulus Caesar well enough to predict how he would react to the news that the Cimbri were at the head of the Athesis Valley and about to invade Italian Gaul. "So long as I live, no German foot will touch Italian soil!" said Catulus Caesar in ringing tones when the matter was discussed in council. "No German foot will touch Italian soil!" he said again, rising majestically from his chair and looking at each of his senior officers in turn. "We march." Sulla stared. "We march?" he asked. "We march where?" "Up the Athesis, of course," said Catulus Caesar, with a look on his face that said he considered Sulla a fool. "I shall turn the Germans back across the Alps before an early snow makes that impossible." "How far up the Athesis?" Sulla asked. "Until we meet them." "In a narrow valley like the Athesis?" "Certainly," said Catulus Caesar. "We'll be in much better case than the Germans. We're a disciplined army; they're a vast and unorganized mob. It's our best chance." "Our best chance is where the legions have room to deploy," said Sulla. "There's more than enough room along the Athesis for as much deployment as we'll need." And Catulus Caesar would hear no further argument. Sulla left the council with mind reeling, the plans he had formulated to deal with the Cimbri all worse than useless; he had rehearsed how he would go about feeding whichever one of his alternatives would work the best to Catulus Caesar so that Catulus Caesar thought the scheme was his. Now Sulla found himself with no plan, and could formulate no plan. Not until he managed to persuade Catulus Caesar to change his mind. But Catulus Caesar would not change his mind. He uprooted the army and made it march upstream along the Athesis where that river flowed a few miles to the east of Lake Benacus, the biggest of the exquisite alpine lakes which filled the laps of the foothills of the Italian Alps. And the further the little army it contained twenty-two thousand soldiers, two thousand cavalry, and some eight thousand noncombatants marched northward, the narrower and more forbidding the valley of the Athesis grew. Finally Catulus Caesar reached the trading post called Tridentum. Here three mighty alps reared up, three jagged broken fangs which had given the area its name of Three Teeth. The Athesis now ran very deep and fast and strong, for its sources lay in mountains where the snows never melted fully, and so fed the river all year round. Beyond Tridentum the valley closed in even more, the road which wound down it to the village petering out where the river roared in full spate beneath a long wooden bridge set on stone piers. Riding ahead with his senior officers, Catulus Caesar sat his horse gazing around him, and nodding in satisfaction. "It reminds me of Thermopylae," he said. "This is the ideal place to hold the Germans back until they give up and turn north again." "The Spartans holding Thermopylae all died," said Sulla. Catulus Caesar raised his brows haughtily. "And what does that matter, if the Germans are pushed back?" "But they're not going to turn back, Quintus Lutatius! Turn back at this time of year, with nothing but snow to their north, their provisions low, and all the grass and grain of Italian Gaul not many miles away to their south?" Sulla shook his head vehemently. "We won't stop them here," he said. The other officers stirred restlessly; all of them had caught Sulla's jitters since the march up the Athesis began and their common sense screamed that Catulus Caesar's actions were foolish. Nor had Sulla concealed his jitters from them; if he had to prevent Catulus Caesar from losing his army, he would need the support of Catulus Caesar's senior staff. "We fight here," Catulus Caesar said, and would not be budged. His mind was full of visions of the immortal Leonidas and his tiny band of Spartans; what did it matter if the body died untimely, when the reward was enduring fame? The Cimbri were very close. It would have been impossible for the Roman army to have marched further north than Tridentum, even if Catulus Caesar had wished it. Despite this, Catulus Caesar insisted upon crossing the bridge with his whole force, and putting it into camp on the wrong side of the river, in a place so narrow the camp stretched for miles north to south, for each legion was strung behind its neighbor, with the last legion bivouacking near the bridge. "I have been atrociously spoiled," said Sulla to the primus pilus centurion of the legion closest to the bridge, a sturdy steady Samnite from Atina named Gnaeus Petreius; his legion was Samnite too, composed of Samnite Head Count, and classified as an auxiliary. "How've you been spoiled?" asked Gnaeus Petreius, staring at the flashing water from the side of the bridge; it had no railing, just a low kerb made from logs. "I've soldiered under none but Gaius Marius," Sulla said. "Half your luck," said Gnaeus Petreius. "I was hoping I'd get the chance." He grunted, a derisive sound. "But I don't think any of us will, Lucius Cornelius." They were standing with a third man, the commander of the legion, who was an elected tribune of the soldiers. None other than Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Junior, son of the Leader of the House and a keen disappointment to his doughty father. Scaurus Junior turned now from his own contemplation of the river to look at his chief centurion. "What do you mean, none of us will?" he asked. Gnaeus Petreius grunted again. "We're all going to die here, tribunus." "Die? All of us? Why?" "Gnaeus Petreius means, young Marcus Aemilius," said Sulla grimly, "that we have been led into an impossible military situation by yet another highborn incompetent." "No, you're quite mistaken!" cried young Scaurus eagerly. ' 'I noticed that you didn't seem to understand Quintus Lutatius's strategy, Lucius Cornelius, when he explained it to us." Sulla winked at the centurion. "You explain it, then, tribunus militum! I'm all agog." "Well, there are four hundred thousand Germans, and only twenty-four thousand of us. So we can't possibly face them on an open battlefield," said young Scaurus, emboldened by the intent stares of these two Military Men. "The only way we can possibly beat them is to squeeze them up into a front no wider than our own army can span, and hammer at that front with all our superior skill. When they realize we won't be budged why, they'll do the usual German thing, and turn back." "So that's how you see it," said Gnaeus Petreius. "That's how it is!" said young Scaurus impatiently. "That's how it is!" said Sulla, beginning to laugh. "That's how it is," said Gnaeus Petreius, laughing too. Young Scaurus stood watching them in bewilderment, their amusement filling him with fear. "Please, why is it so funny?" Sulla wiped his eyes. "It's funny, young Scaurus, because it's hopelessly naive." His hand went up, swept the mountain flanks on either side like a painter's brush. "Look up there! What do you see?" "Mountains," said young Scaurus, bewilderment increasing. "Footpaths, bridle tracks, cattle trails, that's what we see!" said Sulla. "Haven't you noticed those frilly little terraces that make the mountains look like Minoan skirts? All the Cimbri have to do is take to the heights along the terraces and they'll outflank us in three days and then, young Marcus Aemilius, we'll be between the hammer and the anvil. Squashed flatter than a beetle underfoot." Young Scaurus turned so white that Sulla and Petreius moved automatically to make sure he didn't pitch overboard into the water, for nothing falling into that stream would survive. "Our general has made a bad plan," said Sulla harshly. "We should have waited for the Cimbri between Verona and Lake Benacus, where we would have had a thousand alternatives to trap them properly, and enough ground to spring our trap." "Why doesn't someone tell Quintus Lutatius, then?" young Scaurus whispered. "Because he's just another stiff-rumped consul," said Sulla. "He doesn't want to hear anything except the gibberish inside his own head. If he were a Gaius Marius, he'd listen. But that's a non sequitur Gaius Marius wouldn't have needed telling! No, young Marcus Aemilius, our general Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar thinks it best to fight as at Thermopylae. And if you remember your history, you'll know that one little footpath around the mountain was enough to undo Leonidas." Young Scaurus gagged. "Excuse me!" he gasped, and bolted for his tent. Sulla and Petreius watched him weave along trying to hold his gorge. "This isn't an army, it's a fiasco," said Petreius. "No, it's a good little army," Sulla contradicted. "The leaders are the fiasco.'' "Except for you, Lucius Cornelius." "Except for me." "You've got something in your mind," Petreius said. "Indeed I do." And Sulla smiled to show his long teeth. "Am I allowed to ask what it is?" "I think so, Gnaeus Petreius. But I'd rather answer you at dusk, shall we say? In the assembly forum of your own Samnite legion's camp," said Sulla. "You and I are going to spend the rest of the afternoon summoning every primus pilus and chief cohort centurion to a meeting there at dusk." He calculated swiftly under his breath. "That's about seventy men. But they're the seventy who really count. Now on your way, Gnaeus Petreius! You take the three legions at this end of the valley, and I'll hop on my trusty mule and take the three at the far end." The Cimbri had arrived that same day just to the north of Catulus Caesar's six legions, boiling into the valley far ahead of their wagons to be brought up short by the ramparts of a Roman camp. And there remained, boiling, while the word flew through the legions and sightseers made their way north to peer over the wicker breastworks at the chilling sight of more men than any Roman had ever seen and gigantic men at that. Sulla's meeting in the assembly forum of the Samnite legion's camp took very little time. When it was over, there was still sufficient light in the sky for those who attended it to follow Sulla across the bridge and into the village of Tridentum, where Catulus Caesar had established his headquarters in the local magistrate's house. Catulus Caesar had called a meeting of his own to discuss the arrival of the Cimbri, and was busy complaining about the absence of his second-in-command when Sulla walked into the crowded room. "I would appreciate punctuality, Lucius Cornelius," he said frigidly. "Please sit down, then we can get down to the business of planning our attack tomorrow." "Sorry, but I haven't time to sit down," said Sulla, who wasn't wearing a cuirass, but was clad in his leather undersuit and pteryges, and had sword and dagger belted about him. "If you have more important things to do, then go!" said Catulus Caesar, face mottling. "Oh, I'm not going anywhere," said Sulla, smiling. "The important things I have to do are right here in this room, and the most important thing of all is that there will be no battle tomorrow, Quintus Lutatius." Catulus Caesar got to his feet. "No battle? Why?" "Because you have a mutiny on your hands, and I'm its instigator.'' Sulla drew his sword. “Come in, centuriones!'' he called. "It'll be a bit of a crush, but we'll all fit." None of the original inhabitants of the room said a word, Catulus Caesar because he was too angry, the rest either because they were too relieved not all the senior staff were happy about the projected battle of the morrow or too bewildered. Seventy centurions filed through the door and stood densely packed behind and to both sides of Sulla, thus leaving about three feet of vacant space between themselves and Catulus Caesar's senior staff who were now all standing, literally with their backs against the wall. "You'll be thrown off the Tarpeian Rock for this!" said Catulus Caesar. "If I have to, so be it," said Sulla, and sheathed his sword. "But when is a mutiny really a mutiny, Quintus Lutatius? How far can a soldier be expected to go in blind obedience? Is it true patriotism to go willingly to death when the general issuing the orders is a military imbecile?" It was nakedly obvious that Catulus Caesar just did not know what to say, could not find the perfect rejoinder to such brutal honesty. On the other hand, he was too proud to splutter inarticulate expostulations, and too sure of his ground to make no reply at all. So in the end he said, with cold dignity, "This is untenable, Lucius Cornelius!" Sulla nodded. "I agree, it is untenable. In fact, our whole presence here in Tridentum is untenable. Tomorrow the Cimbri are going to find the hundreds of paths along the slopes of the mountains made by cattle, sheep, horses, wolves. Not one Anopaea, but hundreds of Anopaeas! You are not a Spartan, Quintus Lutatius, you're a Roman, and I'm surprised your memories of Thermopylae are Spartan rather than Roman! Didn't you learn how Cato the Censor used the Anopaea footpath to outflank King Antiochus? Or did your tutor feel Cato the Censor was too lowborn to serve as an example of anything beyond hubris? It's Cato the Censor at Thermopylae I admire, not Leonidas and his royal guard, dying to the last man! The Spartans were willing to die to the last man simply to delay the Persians long enough for the Greek fleet to ready itself at Artemisium. Only it didn't work, Quintus Lutatius. It didn't work! The Greek fleet perished, and Leonidas died for nothing. And did Thermopylae influence the course of the war against the Persians? Of course it didn't! When the next Greek fleet won at Salamis, there was no prelude at Thermopylae. Can you honestly say you prefer the suicidal gallantry of Leonidas to the strategic brilliance of Themistocles?" "You mistake the situation," said Catulus Caesar stiffly, his personal pride in tatters thanks to this red-haired Ulyssean trickster; for the truth was that he cared more to extricate himself with dignitas and auctoritas unimpaired than he did about the fate of either his army or the Cimbri. "No, Quintus Lutatius, you mistake the situation," said Sulla. "Your army is now my army by right of mutiny. When Gaius Marius sent me here" he dropped the name with dulcet clarity into the pool of silence "I came with only one order. Namely, to make sure this army survives intact until Gaius Marius can take it into his personal care and he cannot do that until he has defeated the Teutones. Gaius Marius is our commander-in-chief, Quintus Lutatius, and I am acting under his orders at this very moment. When his orders conflict with yours, I obey his orders, not yours. If I permit this foolhardy escapade to continue, this army will lie dead on the field of Tridentum. Well, there is not going to be a field of Tridentum. This army is going to retreat tonight. In one piece. And live to fight another day, when the chances of victory are infinitely better." "I vowed no German foot would tread on Italian soil," said Catulus Caesar, "and I will not be forsworn." "The decision isn't your to make, Quintus Lutatius, so you are not forsworn," said Sulla. Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar was one of those old-guard senators who refused to wear a golden ring as an insignia of his senatorship; instead, he wore the ancient iron ring all senators had once worn, so when he moved his right hand imperiously at the ogling men filling the room, his index finger didn't flash a yellow beam it wrote a dull grey blur upon the air. Utterly still until they saw that grey blur, the men now stirred, moved, sighed. "Leave us, all of you," said Catulus Caesar. "Wait outside. I wish to speak alone with Lucius Cornelius." The centurions turned and filed out, the tribunes of the soldiers followed, and Catulus Caesar's personal staff, and his senior legates. When only Catulus Caesar and Sulla remained, Catulus Caesar returned to his chair and sat down heavily. He was caught in a cleft stick, and he knew it. Pride had led him up the Athesis; not pride in Rome or in his army, but that pride of person which had prompted him to announce no German foot should tread Italian soil and then prevented his recanting, even for the sake of Rome or for his army. The further he had penetrated up the valley, the stronger his feeling became that he had blundered; and yet pride of person would not allow him to admit the blunder. Higher and higher up the river Athesis, lower and lower his spirits. So when he came to Tridentum and thought how like Thermopylae it was though of course in strictly geographic terms it was not like Thermopylae at all he conceived a worthy death for all concerned, and thereby salvaged his honor, that fatal personal pride. Just as Thermopylae rang down the ages, so too would Tridentum. The fall of the gallant few confronted with the overwhelming many. Stranger, go tell the Romans that here we lie in obedience to their command! With a magnificent monument, and pilgrimages, and immortal epic poems. The sight of the Cimbri spilling into the northern end of the valley brought him to his senses, then Sulla completed the process. For of course he did have eyes, and there was a brain behind them, even if it was a brain too easily clouded by the vastness of his own dignitas; the eyes had taken note of the many terraces making giant steps out of the steep green slopes above, and the brain had understood how quickly the Cimbric warriors could outflank them. This was no gorge with cliffs; it was simply a narrow alpine valley unsuitable for deploying an army because its pastures sloped upward at an angle quite impossible for troops to take in rank and file, let alone wheel and turn in proper maneuvers. What he hadn't been able to see was how to extricate himself from his dilemma without losing face, and at first Sulla's invasion of his pre-battle conference had seemed the perfect answer; he could blame it on a mutiny, and thunder in the House, and arrange for the treason trials of every officer involved, from Sulla down to the least centurion. But that solution hadn't lasted more than a very few moments. Mutiny was the most serious crime in the military manual, but a mutiny which saw him standing alone against every other officer in his entire army (he had quickly seen from their faces that none of the men who had been closeted with him when Sulla walked in would refuse to join the mutiny) smacked a great deal more of common sense overcoming monumental stupidity. If there had never been an Arausio if Caepio and Mallius Maximus had not forever besmirched the concept of the Roman general's imperium in the eyes of the Roman People and even some factions within the Senate then it might have been different. As it was, he understood very quickly after Sulla's appearance that were he to continue to insist a mutiny had taken place, it was he himself who would suffer in the eyes of the Roman world, he himself who might well end in being arraigned in the special treason court set up by Saturninus. Consequently, Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar drew a deep breath and embarked upon conciliation. "Let me hear no more talk of mutiny, Lucius Cornelius," he said. "There was no need for you to make your feeling so public. You should have come to see me privately. Had you only done so, matters could have been sorted out between the two of us alone." "I disagree, Quintus Lutatius," said Sulla smoothly. "If I had come to you privately, you'd have sent me about my business. You needed an object lesson." Catulus Caesar's lips tightened; he looked down his long Roman nose, a handsome member of a handsome clan, fair of hair and blue of eye, his hauteur armed for battle. "You've been with Gaius Marius far too long, you know," he said. "This sort of conduct doesn't accord with your patrician status." Sulla slapped his hand against his leather skirt of straps so loudly its fringes and metal ornaments clattered. "Oh, for the sake of all the gods, let's forget this family claptrap, Quintus Lutatius! I'm fed up to vomit-point with exclusivity! And before you start ranting on about our mutual superior, Gaius Marius, let me remind you that when it comes to soldiering and generaling, he outshines us the way the Alexandrian lighthouse dims a single piddling candle! You're not a natural military man any more than I am! But where I have the advantage of you is that I learned my craft in apprenticeship to the lighthouse of Alexandria, so my candle burns brighter than yours!" "That man is overrated!" said Catulus Caesar between his clenched teeth. "Oh no, he's not! Bleat and bellow about it as hard as you like, Quintus Lutatius, Gaius Marius is the First Man in Rome! The man from Arpinum took on the lot of you single-handed, and beat you hollow." "I'm surprised you're such an adherent but I promise you, Lucius Cornelius, that I won't ever forget it." "I'll bet you won't," said Sulla grimly. "I do advise you, Lucius Cornelius, to change your loyalties somewhat in years to come," Catulus Caesar said. "If you don't, you'll never become praetor, let alone consul!" "Oh, I do like naked threats!" said Sulla conversationally. "Who are you trying to fool? I have the birth, and if the time should come when it's to your advantage to woo me, woo me you will!" He looked at Catulus Caesar slyly. "One day, you know, I'll be the First Man in Rome. The tallest tree in the world, just like Gaius Marius. And the thing about trees so tall is that no one can chop them down. When they fall, they fall because they rot from within." Catulus Caesar did not answer, so Sulla flung himself into a chair and leaned forward to pour himself wine. "Now about our mutiny, Quintus Lutatius. Disabuse yourself of any belief you might be cherishing that I don't have the gumption to follow this through to its bitterest end." "I admit I don't know you at all, Lucius Cornelius, but I've got sufficient measure of your steel these last couple of months to understand there's very little you're unwilling to do to get your own way,'' said Catulus Caesar. He looked down at his old iron senator's ring as if he could draw inspiration from it. "I said before, and I say it again now, let there be no more talk of mutiny.'' He swallowed audibly. "I shall abide by the army's decision to retreat. On one condition. That the word 'mutiny' is never mentioned to anyone ever again." "On behalf of the army, I agree," said Sulla. "I would like to order the retreat personally. After that I presume your strategy is already worked out?" "It's absolutely necessary that you order the retreat personally, Quintus Lutatius. Including to the men waiting outside for us to emerge," said Sulla. "And yes, I do have a strategy worked out. A very simple strategy. At dawn the army will pull up stakes and move out as quickly as it possibly can. Everyone must be over the bridge and south of Tridentum before tomorrow's nightfall. The Samnite auxiliaries are lying closest to the bridge, therefore they can guard it until everyone else is over, then cross it themselves in last place. I need the entire corps of engineers immediately, because the moment the last Samnite is over the bridge, it must come down. The pity of it is that it's built on stone piers we won't have the opportunity to dismantle, so the Germans will be able to rebuild the bridge. However, they're not engineers, and that means the job will take them far longer than it would us, and their structure may fall apart a few times as Boiorix brings his people across. If he wants to go south, he has to cross the river here at Tridentum. So we must slow him down." Catulus Caesar rose to his feet. "Then let's get this farce over and done with." He walked outside and stood calmly, completely in control of his outer self; the repairing of dignitas and auctoritas was already beginning. "Our position here is untenable, so I am ordering a full retreat," he said, crisply and clearly. "I have given Lucius Cornelius full instructions as to how to proceed, so you will take your orders from him. However, I wish to make it plain that the word 'mutiny' has never been spoken. Is that understood?" The officers murmured assent, profoundly glad that the word "mutiny" could be forgotten. Catulus Caesar turned to go back inside. "You are dismissed," he said over his shoulder. As the group scattered, Gnaeus Petreius fell in beside Sulla, and walked with him toward the bridge. "That went pretty well, I consider, Lucius Cornelius. He did better than I thought he would. Better than others of his kind, I swear.'' "Oh, he has a brain behind all that grand manner," said Sulla easily. "But he's right, 'mutiny' is a word never spoken." "You won't hear it from my lips!" said Petreius fervently. It was fully dark, but the bridge was lit by torches, so they crossed its chinked logs without difficulty. At its far end Sulla ran ahead of the centurions and tribunes following him and Petreius, and turned round to face them. "All troops ready to roll at the first sign of light," he said. "Corps of engineers and all centurions are to report to me here one hour before first light. Tribunes of the soldiers, come with me now." "Oh, I'm glad we've got him!" said Gnaeus Petreius to his second centurion. "So am I, but I'm not a bit glad we've got him," said the second centurion, pointing in the direction of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Junior, hurrying after Sulla and his fellow tribunes. Petreius grunted. "I agree, he is a bit of a worry. Still, I'll keep an eye on him tomorrow. 'Mutiny' may be a word none of us has heard, but our men of Samnium aren't going to be misled by a Roman idiot, no matter who his father is."
* * *
At dawn the legions began to move out. The retreat began as all maneuvers did among well-trained Roman troops with remarkable silence and no confusion whatsoever. The legion farthest from the bridge crossed it first, then was followed by the legion next farthest from the bridge, so that the army in effect rolled itself up like a carpet. Luckily the baggage train and all the beasts of burden save a handful of horses reserved for the use of the most senior officers had been kept to the south of the village and the bridge; Sulla got these started down the road at first light well ahead of the legions, and had issued orders that half of the army would bypass the baggage train when it caught up, while the other half followed it all the way down to Verona. For if they got clear of Tridentum, Sulla knew the Cimbri wouldn't move fast enough to see their dust. As it turned out, the Cimbri were so busy scouting the tracks terracing the mountainsides that it was a full hour after the sun rose before they realized the Roman force was in retreat. Then confusion reigned until Boiorix arrived in person and got his enormous mass of men into some semblance of order. In the meantime the Roman column had indeed moved fast; when the Cimbri finally formed up to attack, the farthest legion from the bridge was already marching at the double across it. The corps of engineers had worked feverishly among the beams and struts beneath the causeway from well before dawn. "It's always the same!" complained the chief of engineers to Sulla when he came to see how the work was progressing. "I always have to deal with a properly built Roman bridge just when I want the wretched thing to fall apart with a gentle tug." "Can you do it?" asked Sulla. "Hope so, legatus! There's not a bit of lashing or a bolt in the thing, though. Proper sockets and tongues, everything rabbeted together to hold it down, not up. So I can't pull it apart in a hurry without a bigger crane than any we've got with us, even if I had time to assemble a crane that big, which I don't. No, it's the hard way, I'm afraid, and that means it's going to be a bit wobbly when the last of our men are tramping across it," said the chief engineer. Sulla frowned. "What's the hard way?" "We're sawing through the main struts and beams." "Then keep at it, man! I've got a hundred oxen coming to give you that gentle tug enough?" "It'll have to be," said the chief engineer, and moved off to look at the job from a different angle. The Cimbric cavalry came shrieking and screaming down the valley, taking the deserted hurdles of five Roman camps in their stride, for these were routine walls and ditches; there hadn't been sufficient time to build anything else. Only the Samnite legion was left on the far side of the bridge, and was actually in the process of marching out of the main gate of its camp when the Cimbri flashed between them and the bridge, cutting them off. The Samnites turned files into ranks and prepared to withstand the coming charge, spears at the ready, faces set. Watching helplessly from the opposite side of the bridge, Sulla waited for the first rush of cavalry to go by and wheel their horses, straining to see what the Samnite legion commander was going to do. This was young Scaurus, and now Sulla began to fret that he hadn't removed this timid son of an intrepid father and taken over command himself. But it was too late now; he couldn't recross the bridge because he didn't have enough men with him, and he didn't trust Catulus Caesar to see to the retreat, which meant he himself had to survive. Nor did he want to draw the Cimbri's attention to the existence of the bridge, for if they turned their barbarian eyes toward it, there plain to see were five Roman legions and a baggage train marching south and begging for pursuit. If necessary, he decided, he would have the oxen start to haul on the chains connecting them to the undermined bridge; but the moment he did that, there was no hope for the Samnite legion. "Lead a charge, young Scaurus, lead a charge north!" he found himself muttering. "Roll them back, get your men to the bridge!" The Cimbric cavalry was turning, its front ranks carried far past the Samnite camp by the impetus of their charge, and the ranks in the rear pulled back on their mounts to give the front ranks room to turn and gallop back; the whole press would then fall upon the Samnite camp, leap their horses up and over, and trample everything down so that the hordes of foot warriors could finish things off. From that point on, the cavalry would turn itself into a giant scoop, pushing the Samnites north into the mass of Cimbric infantry. The only chance the Samnites had was to drive across the front of the rear ranks of horsemen and cut the front ranks off from this reinforcement, then bring down the mounts of both ranks with their spears, while those not engaged made a dash for the bridge. But where was young Scaurus? Why wasn't he doing it? A few moments more, and it would be too late! The cheering of the three centuries of men Sulla had with him actually preceded his own view of the Samnite charge, for he was looking for a horse-mounted tribune of the soldiers, while the charge was led by a man on foot. Gnaeus Petreius, the Samnite primus pilus centurion. Yelling along with the rest of his men, Sulla hopped and danced from one foot to the other as the Samnites not engaged began to stream across the bridge at a run, packing their numbers so close together that they gave the Cimbri no room to cut them off a second time. The front ranks of Cimbric horses were falling in hundreds before the rain of Samnite spears, warriors struggling to free themselves from fallen steeds, tangling themselves into an ever-increasing chaos as more Samnite spears hurtled to stick into heaving equine sides, chests, rumps, necks, flanks; and the rear ranks of Cimbric horse penned on the other side of the Samnites fared no better. In the end it was their own fallen cavalry which kept the Cimbric foot away. And Gnaeus Petreius came across the bridge behind the last of his men with hardly a German in pursuit. The oxen had been putting their shoulders to the job long before this happened, for the hundred beasts harnessed two abreast couldn't gather impetus in under many moments, the lead beasts pulling, then the next, and so on down the fifty pairs until the chains tightened and the bridge began to feel the strain. Being a good stout Roman bridge, it held for much longer than even the chief of engineers a pessimistic fellow, like all his breed had thought; but eventually one of the struts parted company with its companions, and amid groans, snaps, pops, and roars the Tridentine bridge across the Athesis gave way. Its timbers tumbled into the torrent and whirled away downstream like straws bobbing about in a garden fountain. Gnaeus Petreius was wounded in the side, but not badly; Sulla found him sitting while the legion's surgeons peeled away his mail shirt, his face streaked with a mixture of mud, sweat, and horse dung, but looking remarkably fit and alert nonetheless. "Don't touch that wound until you've got him clean, you mentulae!" Sulla snarled. "Wash every last bit of dung off him first! He's not going to bleed to death, are you, Gnaeus Petreius?" "Not Gnaeus Petreius!" said the centurion, grinning broadly. "We did it, eh, Lucius Cornelius? We got 'em all across, and only a handful of dead on the other side!" Sulla sank down beside him and leaned his head too close to the centurion's to permit of anyone's overhearing. “What happened to young Scaurus?" Down went Petreius's lips. "Got a dose of the shits while he should have been thinking, then when I kept pushing him as to what to do, he passed out on me. Just fell over in a faint. He's all right, poor young chap; some of the lads carried him over the bridge. Pity, but there it is. None of his dad's guts, none at all. Ought to have been a librarian." "I can't tell you how glad I am you were there, and not some other primus pilus. I just didn't think! The moment I did, I kicked myself because I didn't relieve him of the command myself," said Sulla. "Doesn't matter, Lucius Cornelius, it all worked out in the end. At least this way, he knows his limitations." The surgeons were back with enough water and sponges to wash off a dozen men; Sulla got up to let them get to work, extending his right arm. Gnaeus Petreius held up his own, and the two men expressed everything they felt in that handshake. "It's the grass crown for you," said Sulla. "No!" said Petreius, looking embarrassed. "But yes. You saved a whole legion from death, Gnaeus Petreius, and when a man single-handedly saves a whole legion from death, he wears the grass crown. I shall see to it myself," said Sulla. Was that the grass crown Julilla had seen in his future all those years ago? wondered Sulla as he headed off down the slope to the town to organize wagon transportation for Gnaeus Petreius, the hero of Tridentum. Poor Julilla! Poor, poor Julilla… She never had managed to do anything right, so perhaps that extended to her brushes against the strange manifestations of Fortune. The sole Julia not born with the gift of making her men happy, that had been Julilla. Then his mind passed to other, more important things; Lucius Cornelius Sulla was not about to start blaming himself for Julilla. Her fate had nothing to do with him; she brought it on herself.
Catulus Caesar had his army back in the camp outside Verona before Boiorix was able to get the last of his wagons across the last of several rickety bridges, and commence the downhill trek to the lush plains of the Padus River. At first Catulus Caesar had insisted they stand and fight the Cimbri near Lake Benacus, but Sulla, firmly in the saddle now, would not countenance it. Instead, he made Catulus Caesar send word to every city and town and village from Aquileia in the east to Comum and Mediolanum in the west: Italian Gaul-across-the-Padus was to be evacuated by all Roman citizens, Latin Rights holders, and Gauls unwilling to fraternize with the Germans. The refugees were to move south of the Padus and leave Italian Gaul-across-the-Padus completely to the Cimbri. "They'll be like pigs in acorn mush," said Sulla confidently, veteran of a year of living among the Cimbri. “When they get a taste of the pastures and the peace between Lake Benacus and the north bank of the Padus, Boiorix won't be able to hold his people together. They'll scatter in a hundred different directions, you wait and see." "Looting, wrecking, burning," said Catulus Caesar. "That and forgetting what they're supposed to be doing, namely, invading Italy. Cheer up, Quintus Lutatius! At least it's the most Gallic of the Gauls on the Italian side of the Alps, and they won't cross the Padus until they've picked it as clean as a hungry man a chicken's carcass. Our own people will be gone well ahead of the Germans, carrying everything they value. Their land will keep; we'll get it back when Gaius Marius comes." Catulus Caesar winced, but held his tongue; he had learned how biting was Sulla's tongue. But more than that, he had learned how ruthless was Sulla. How cold, how inflexible, how determined. An odd intimate for Gaius Marius, despite the fact they were brothers-in-law. Or had been brothers-in-law. Did Sulla get rid of his Julia too? wondered Catulus Caesar, who in the many hours of thought he expended upon Sulla had remembered a rumor that had circulated among the Julius Caesar brothers and their families around the time Sulla had emerged out of obscurity into public life, and married his Julia-Julilla. That he had found the money to enter public life by murdering his mother? stepmother? mistress? nephew? Well, when the time came to return to Rome, thought Catulus Caesar, he would make a point of making inquiries about that rumor. Oh, not to use it blatantly, or even right away; just to have ready for the future, when Lucius Cornelius might hope to run for praetor. Not aedile, let him have the joy of that and the ruinous drain on his purse. Praetor. Yes, praetor. When the legions had marched into camp outside Verona, Catulus Caesar knew the first thing he had to do was send word posthaste to Rome of the disaster up the Athesis; if he didn't, he suspected Sulla would via Gaius Marius, so it was important that his be the first version Rome absorbed. With both the consuls in the field, a dispatch to the Senate was addressed to the Leader of the House, so to Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus did Catulus Caesar send his report, including with it a private letter which more accurately detailed what had actually occurred. And he entrusted the report and letter, heavily sealed, to young Scaurus, son of the Princeps Senatus, ordering him to take the packet to Rome at the gallop. "He's the best horseman we've got," Catulus Caesar said blandly to Sulla. Sulla eyed him with the same ironic, superior derision he had shown during their interview about the mutiny. "You know, Quintus Lutatius, you own the most exquisitely refined kind of cruelty I've ever encountered," Sulla said. "Do you wish to countermand the order?" asked Catulus Caesar, sneering. "You have the clout to do so." But Sulla shrugged, turned away. "It's your army, Quintus Lutatius. Do what you like." And he had done what he liked, sent young Marcus Aemilius Scaurus posthaste to Rome bearing the news of his own disgrace. "I have given you this duty, Marcus Aemilius Junior, because I cannot think of a worse punishment for a coward of your family background than to bring to his own father the news of both a military failure and a personal failure," said Catulus Caesar in measured, pontifical tones. Young Scaurus pallid, hangdog, pounds lighter in weight than he had been two weeks earlier stood to attention and tried not to look at his general. But when Catulus Caesar named the task, young Scaurus's eyes a paler, less beautiful version of his father's green dragged themselves unwillingly to Catulus Caesar's haughty face. "Please, Quintus Lutatius!" he gasped. "Please, I beg of you, send someone else! Let me face my father in my own time!" "Your time, Marcus Aemilius Junior, is Rome's time," said Catulus Caesar icily, the contempt welling up in him. "You will ride at the gallop to Rome, and give the Princeps Senatus my consular dispatch. A coward in battle you may be, but you are one of the best horsemen we possess, and you have a name sufficiently illustrious to procure you good mounts all the way. You need have no fear, you know! The Germans are well to the north of us, so you'll find none to threaten you in the south." Young Scaurus rode like a sack of meal in the saddle for mile after mile after mile, down the Via Annia and the Via Cassia to Rome, a shorter journey but a rougher. His head bobbed up and down in time to the gait of his horse, his teeth clicking together in a kind of heartbeat, curiously comforting. At times he talked to himself. "If I had any courage there to screw up, don't you think I would have found it?'' he asked the phantom listeners in wind and road and sky. "What can I do when there is no courage in me, Father? Where does courage come from? Why did I not receive my share? How can I tell you of the pain and fear, the terror I felt when those awful savages came shrieking and screaming like the Furies? I couldn't move! I couldn't even control my bowels, let alone my heart! It swelled up and up and up until it burst, until I fell down inanimate, glad I was dead! And then I woke to find myself alive after all, still full of terror my bowels still loose the soldiers who carried me to safety washing themselves free of my stinking shit in the river under my very eyes, with such contempt, such loathing! Oh, Father, what is courage? Where did my share go? Father, listen to me, let me try to explain! How can you blame me for something I do not possess? Father, listen to me!" But Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus did not listen. When his son arrived with the packet from Catulus Caesar he was in the Senate, and when he came home his son had bolted himself in his room, leaving a message with the steward for his father that he had brought a packet from the consul and would wait in his room until his father read it, and sent for him. Scaurus chose to read the dispatch first, grim-faced, but thankful at least that the legions were safe. Then he read Catulus Caesar's letter, lips uttering word after dreadful word out loud, shrinking further and further into his chair until he seemed but half his normal size, and the tears gathered in his eyes and fell with great blurry splashes onto the paper. Of course he had Catulus Caesar's measure; that part did not surprise him, and he was profoundly thankful that a legate as strong and unafraid as Sulla had been on hand to protect those precious troops. But he had thought his son would discover in the throes of a vital, last-ditch emergency that courage, that bravery Scaurus truly believed lived inside all men. Or all men named Aemilius, anyway. The boy was the only son he had sired the only child, for that matter. And now his line would end in such disgrace, such ignominy ! Fitting it did, if such was the mettle of his son, his only child. He drew a breath, and came to a decision. There would be no disguise, no coat of whitewash, no excuses, no dissimulation. Leave that kind of ploy to Catulus Caesar. His son was a proven coward; he had deserted his troops in their hour of gravest danger in a way more craven, more humiliating than mere flight he had shit himself and fainted. His troops carried him to safety, when it should have been the other way around. The shame Scaurus resolved to bear with that courage he himself had always possessed. Let his son feel the scourge of a whole city's scorn! His tears dried, his face composed, he clapped his hands for his steward, and when the man came he found his master sitting erect in his chair, his hands folded loosely on the desk. "Marcus Aemilius, your son is most anxious to see you," said the steward, very aware something was wrong, for the young man was acting strangely. "You may take a message to Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Junior," said Scaurus stiffly, "to the effect that though I disown him, I will not strip him of our name. My son is a coward a white-livered mongrel dog but all of Rome shall know him a coward under our name. I will never see him again as long as I live, you will tell him. And tell him too that he is not welcome in this house, even as a beggar at its door. Tell him! Tell him I will never have him come into my presence again as long as I shall live! Go, tell him! Tell him!" Shivering from the shock of it and weeping for the poor young man, of whom he was fond and about whom he could have told the father any time during these past twenty years that his son had no courage, no strength, no internal resources the steward went and told young Scaurus what his father had said. "Thank you," said young Scaurus, and closed his door, but did not bolt it. When the steward ventured into his room several hours later because Scaurus had demanded to know whether his no-son had quit the house yet, he found young Scaurus dead upon the floor. The only quarry his sword deemed too unworthy to live turned out to be himself, so he bloodied it at last upon himself. But Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus remained true to his words. He refused to see his son, even in death. And in the Senate he gave the litany of the disasters in Italian Gaul with all of his customary energy and spirit, including the hideously frank, unvarnished story of his son's cowardice and suicide. He didn't spare himself, nor did he show grief. When after the meeting Scaurus made himself wait on the Senate steps for Metellus Numidicus, he did wonder if perhaps the gods had meted out so much courage to him that there was none left in the family cupboard for his son, so great was the fund of courage it took to wait there for Metellus Numidicus while the senators hustled themselves past him, pitying, anxious, shy, unwilling to stop. "Oh, my dear Marcus!" cried Metellus Numidicus as soon as there were no ears to hear. "My dear, dear Marcus, what can I possibly say?” "About my son, nothing," said Scaurus, a thin splinter of warmth piercing the icy wastes inside his chest; how good it was to have friends! "About the Germans, how do we manage to keep Rome from panicking?" "Oh, don't worry your head about Rome," said Metellus Numidicus comfortably. "Rome will survive. Panic today and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and by the next market day business as usual! Have you ever known people to move because the place where they're living is unusually prone to suffer earthquakes, or there's a volcano belching outside the back door?" "That's true, they don't. At least, not until a rafter falls down and squashes Granny, or the old girl falls into a pool of lava," said Scaurus, profoundly glad to find that he could conduct a normal discussion, and even smile a little. "We'll survive, Marcus, never fear." Metellus Numidicus swallowed, then demonstrated that he too was not without his share of courage by saying manfully, "Gaius Marius is still waiting for his share of the Germans to come. Now if he goes down to defeat then we had better worry. Because if Gaius Marius can't beat them, nobody can." Scaurus blinked, deeming Metellus Numidicus's gesture so heroic he had better not comment; furthermore, he had better instruct his memory to forget for all eternity that Metellus Numidicus had ever ever ever admitted Gaius Marius was Rome's best chance and best general. "Quintus, there is one thing I must mention about my son, and then we can close that book," said Scaurus. "What's that?" "Your niece your ward, Metella Dalmatica. This wretched episode has caused you and her great inconvenience. But tell her she's had a lucky escape. It would have been no joy to a Caecilia Metella to find herself married to a coward," said Scaurus gruffly. Suddenly he found himself walking alone, and turned to see Metellus Numidicus standing looking thunderstruck. "Quintus? Quintus? Is anything the matter?" Scaurus asked, returning to his friend's side. "The matter?" asked Metellus Numidicus, returning to life. "Good Amor, no, nothing's the matter! Oh, my dear, dear Marcus! I have just been visited by a splendid idea!" "Oh?" "Why don't you marry my niece Dalmatica?" Scaurus gaped. "I?" "Yes, you! Here you are, a widower of long standing, and now with no child to inherit your name or your fortune. That, Marcus, is a tragedy," said Metellus Numidicus in tones of great warmth and urgency. "She's a sweet little girl, and so pretty! Come, Marcus, bury the past, start all over again! She's very rich, into the bargain." "I'd be no better than that randy old goat Cato the Censor," said Scaurus, just enough doubt in his voice to signal Metellus Numidicus that he might be won round if the offer was really a serious one. "Quintus, I am fifty-five years old!" "You look good for another fifty-five years." "Look at me! Go on, look at me! Bald a bit of a paunch more wrinkled than Hannibal's elephant getting stooped plagued by rheumatics and haemorrhoids alike no, Quintus, no!" "Dalmatica is young enough to think a grandfather exactly the right sort of husband," said Metellus Numidicus. "Oh, Marcus, it would please me so much! Come on, what do you say?" Scaurus clutched at his hairless pate, gasping, yet also beginning to feel a new wellspring trickle through him. "Do you honestly think it could work? Do you think I could have another family? I'd be dead before they grew up!" "Why should you die young? You look like one of those Egyptian things to me preserved well enough to last another thousand years. When you die, Marcus Aemilius, Rome will shake to her very foundations." They began to walk across the Forum toward the Vestal Steps, deep in their discussion, right hands waving emphasis. "Will you look at that pair?" asked Saturninus of Glaucia. "Plotting the downfall of all demagogues, I'll bet." "Coldhearted old shit, Scaurus," said Glaucia. "How could he get up and speak that way about his own son?" Saturninus lifted his lip. "Because family matters more than the individuals who make up family. Still, it was brilliant tactics. He showed the world his family's not lacking in courage! His son almost lost Rome a legion, but no one is going to blame Marcus Aemilius, nor hold it against his family."
By the middle of September the Teutones had passed through Arausio, and were nearing the confluence of the Rhodanus and the Druentia; spirits in the Roman fortress outside Glanum rose higher and higher. "It's good," said Gaius Marius to Quintus Sertorius as they did a tour "of inspection. "They've been waiting years for this," said Sertorius. "Not a bit afraid, are they?" "They trust you to lead them well, Gaius Marius." The news of the fiasco at Tridentum had come with Quintus Sertorius, who had abandoned his Cimbric guise for the time being; he had seen Sulla in secret, and picked up a letter for Marius which described events graphically, and concluded by informing Marius that Catulus Caesar's army had gone into a winter camp outside Placentia. Then came a letter from Publius Rutilius Rufus in Rome, giving Rome's view of the affair.
I presume it was your personal decision to send Lucius Cornelius to keep an eye on our haughty friend Quintus Lutatius, and I applaud it heartily. There are all kinds of peculiar rumors floating about, but what the truth is, no one seems able to establish, even the boni. No doubt you already know through the offices of Lucius Cornelius later on, when all this German business is over, I shall claim sufficient friendship with you to be given the true explanation. So far I've heard mutiny, cowardice, bungling, and every other military crime besides. The most fascinating thing is the brevity and dare I say it? honesty of Quintus Lutatius's report to the House. But is it honest? A simple admission that when he encountered the Cimbri he realized Tridentum was not a suitable place for a battle, and so turned round and retreated to save his army, having first destroyed a bridge and delayed the German advance? There has to be more to it than that! I can see you smiling as you read. This is a very dead place without the consuls. I was extremely sorry for Marcus Aemilius, of course, and I imagine you are too. What does one do when one finally realizes one has sired a son not worthy to bear one's name? But the scandal died a quick death, for two reasons. The first, that everyone respects Scaurus (this is going to be a long letter, so you will forgive the use of the cognomen) enormously, whether they like him or not, and whether they agree with his politics or not. The second reason is far more sensational. The crafty old culibonia (how's that for a pun?) provided everyone with a new talking point. He's married his son's betrothed, Caecilia Metella Dalmatica, now in the ward of Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle. Aged seventeen, if you please! If it wasn't so funny, I'd weep. Though I've not met her, I hear she's a dear little thing, very gentle and thoroughly nice a trifle hard to believe coming out of that stable, but I believe, I do believe! You ought to see Scaurus how you'd chuckle! He's positively prancing. I am seriously thinking of taking a prowl through Rome's better-type schoolrooms in search of a nubile maiden to be the new Mrs. Rutilius Rufus! We face a serious grain shortage this winter, O senior consul, just to remind you of the duties attached to your office the Germans have rendered it impossible for you to deal with. However, I hear that Catulus Caesar will be leaving Sulla in command at Placentia shortly, and will return to Rome for the winter. No news as far as you're concerned, I'm sure. The business at Tridentum has strengthened your own candidacy in absentia for yet another consulship, but Catulus Caesar won't be holding any elections until after you meet your Germans! It must be very difficult for him, hoping for Rome's sake that you have a great victory, yet hoping for his own sake that you fall flat on your peasant podex. If you win, Gaius Marius, you will certainly be consul next year. It was a clever move, by the way, to free Manius Aquillius to stand for consul. The electorate was terrifically impressed when he came, declared his candidacy, and then said very firmly that he was going back to you to face the Germans, even if that meant he wouldn't be in Rome for the elections, and so missed out on standing after all. If you defeat the Germans, Gaius Marius and you send Manius Aquillius back immediately afterward you will have a junior colleague you can actually work with for a change. Gaius Servilius Glaucia, boon companion of your quasi-client Saturninus unkind comment, I know! has announced that he will run for tribune of the plebs. What a great big furry grey cat among the pigeons he'll be! Talking of Serviliuses and getting back to the grain shortage, Servilius the Augur continues to do abysmally in Sicily. As I told you in an earlier missive, he really did expect that Lucullus would meekly hand over everything he'd worked so hard to establish. Now the House gets a letter once every market day, as regular as a prune eater's bowel movements, in which Servilius the Augur bemoans his lot and reiterates that he'll be prosecuting Lucullus the minute he gets back to Rome. The slave-king is dead Salvius or Tryphon, he called himself and another has been elected, the Asian Greek named Athenion. He's cleverer than Salvius/Tryphon. If Manius Aquillius gets in as your junior consul, it might be an idea to send him off to Sicily and end that business once and for all. At the moment King Athenion is ruling Sicily, not Servilius the Augur. However, my real complaint about the Sicilian mess is purely semantic. Do you know what that despicable old culibonia had the gall to say in the House the other day? Scaurus, I am referring to, may his pro-creative apparatus drop off from overuse in overjuice! "Sicily," he roared, "is become a very Iliad of woes!" And everyone rushed up to him after the meeting and poured syrupy praise all over him for coining such a neat epigram! Well, as you know from my earlier missive, that's my neat epigram! He must have heard me say it, rot his entire back and front everythings. Now I leap lightly back to the subject of tribunes of the plebs. They have been a most dismal and uninspiring lot this year one reason why, though I shudder as I say it, I'm rather glad Glaucia is standing for next year. Rome is a very boring place without a decent brawl or two going on in the Comitia. But we have just had one of the oddest of all tribunician incidents, and the rumors are absolutely whizzing around. About a month ago some twelve or thirteen fellows arrived in town, clad in remarkable raiment coats of brilliant colors interwoven with pure gold flowing about their feet jewels dripping from their beards and curls and earlobes heads trailing gorgeous embroidered scarves. I felt as if I was in the midst of a pageant! They presented themselves as an embassage, and asked to see the Senate in a special sitting. But after our revered rejuvenated phrase-pinching Scaurus Princeps Senatus friskily examined their credentials, he denied them an audience on the grounds that they had no official status. They purported to have come from the sanctuary of the Great Goddess at Pessinus in Anatolian Phrygia, and to have been sent to Rome by the Great Goddess herself to wish Rome well in her struggle against the Germans! Now why, I can hear you asking, should the Anatolian Great Goddess give tuppence about the Germans? It has us all scratching our heads, and I'm sure that's why Scaurus refused to have anything to do with these gaudy fellows. Yet no one can work out what they're after. Orientals are such confidence tricksters that any Roman worth his salt sews his purse shut and straps it into his left armpit the moment he encounters them. However, not this lot! They're going around Rome distributing largesse as if their own purses were bottomless. Their leader is a splendidly showy specimen called Battaces. The eye positively glazes in beholding him, for he's clad from head to foot in genuine cloth of gold, and wears a huge solid-gold crown on his head. I'd heard of cloth of gold, but I never thought I'd live to see it unless I took a trip to see King Ptolemy or the King of the Parthians. The women of this silly city of ours went wild over Battaces and his entourage, dazzled at the sight of so much gold and holding their greedy little hands out for any stray pearls or carbuncles which might happen to fall off a beard or a say no more, Publius Rutilius! I merely add with exquisite delicacy that they are not repeat, not! eunuchs. Anyway, whether because his own wife was one of the bedazzled Roman ladies or for more altruistic motives, the tribune of the plebs Aulus Pompeius got up on the rostra and accused Battaces and his fellow priests of being charlatans and imposters, and called for their forcible ejection from our fair city preferably riding backward on asses and bedaubed with pitch and feathers. Battaces took great exception to Aulus Pompeius's diatribe, and marched off to complain to the Senate. A few wives within that worthy body must have been infected or injected with enthusiasm for the ambassadors, for the House promptly ordered Aulus Pompeius to cease and desist his badgering of these Important Personages. The purists among us Conscript Fathers sided with Aulus Pompeius because it is not the province of the Senate to discipline a tribune of the plebs for his conduct within the Comitia. There was then a row about whether Battaces and his gang were an embassage or not an embassage, despite Scaurus's previous ruling. Since no one could find Scaurus I presume he was either looking up my old speeches for more epigrams, or looking up his wife's skirts for more epidermis the point remained unresolved. So Aulus Pompeius went on roaring like a lion from the rostra, and accusing Rome's ladies of cupidity as well as unchastity. The next thing, Battaces himself comes striding down to the rostra trailing gorgeous priests and gorgeous Roman ladies behind him like a fishmonger stray cats. Luckily I was there well, you know what Rome's like! I was tipped off, of course, as was half the rest of the city and witnessed a terrific farce, much better than anything Sulla could hope for in a theater. Aulus Pompeius and Battaces went at it alas, verbally only faster than Plautus, our noble tribune of the plebs insisting his opponent was a mountebank, and Battaces insisting Aulus Pompeius was dicing with danger because the Great Goddess didn't like hearing her priests insulted. The scene ended with Battaces pronouncing a blood-curdling curse of death upon Aulus Pompeius in Greek, which meant everyone understood it. I would have thought she liked being hailed in Phrygian. Here comes the best bit, Gaius Marius! The moment the curse was pronounced, Aulus Pompeius began to choke and cough. He tottered off the rostra and had to be helped home, where he took to his bed for the next three days, growing sicker and sicker. And at the end of three days he died! Turned up his toes and breathed no more. Well, you can imagine the effect it's had upon everyone from the Senate to the ladies of Rome. Battaces can go where he likes, do what he likes. People hop out of his path as if he suffered from a kind of golden leprosy. He gets free dinners, the House changed its mind and received his embassage formally (still no sign of Scaurus!), the women hang all over him, and he smiles and waves his hands about in blessing and generally acts like Zeus. I am amazed, disgusted, sickened, and about a thousand other equally unpalatable things. The big question is, how did Battaces do it? Was it divine intervention, or some unknown poison? I am betting on the last, but then, I am of the Skeptic persuasion if not an out-and-out Cynic.
Gaius Marius laughed himself sore in the sides, then went out to deal with the Germans.
A quarter of a million Teutones crossed the Druentia River just east of the spot where it entered the Rhodanus, and began to stream toward the Roman fortress. The ragged column was spread out for miles, its flanks and vanguard made up of the warriors, one hundred and thirty thousand strong, its meandering tail a vast congregation of wagons and cattle and horses shepherded by the women and children; there were few old men, fewer still old women. In the foreground of the fighting men there strode the tribe called the Ambrones, fierce, proud, valorous. The very last group of wagons and animals were twenty-five miles to their rear. German scouts had found the Roman citadel, but Teutobod the King was confident. They would march to Massilia in spite of Rome, for in Massilia the biggest city aside from Rome any of them had ever heard of they would find women, slaves, food, luxuries. After the satisfaction of sacking and burning it, they would turn east along the coast for Italy, for though Teutobod had discovered the Via Domitia over the Mons Genava Pass was in excellent condition, he still believed the coastal route would get him to Italy faster. The harvest still stood in the fields, and so was trampled down by the passing of the host; to none of them, even Teutobod, did it seem to matter that a modicum of care might have preserved the grain for reaping and storing against the coming winter. The wagons were full of provisions plundered from all who had been in the German path; as for the crops in the field, what human foot had trodden down could still be chewed by bovine and equine mouths. Unharvested crops simply meant grazing fodder. When the Ambrones reached the foot of the hill upon which the Roman fortress perched, nothing happened. Marius didn't stir, nor did the Germans bother storming him. But he did present a mental barrier, so the Ambrones stopped and the rest of the warriors piled up behind until Germans milled like ants all about the hill, and Teutobod himself arrived. First they tried to tempt the Roman army out by catcalls, boos, jeers, and a parade of captured civilians who had all been put to the torture. No Roman answered; no Roman ventured out. Then the host attacked en masse, a simple frontal assault which broke and ebbed away fruitlessly against the magnificent fortifications of Marius's camp; the Romans hurled a few spears at easy targets, but did nothing else. Teutobod shrugged. His thanes shrugged. Let the Romans stay there, then! It didn't really matter. So the German host rolled around the base of the hill like a syrupy sea around a great rock and disappeared to the south, the thousands of wagons creaking in its wake for seven days, every German woman and child staring up at the apparently lifeless citadel as the cavalcade plodded on toward Massilia. But the last wagon had scarcely dipped below the horizon when Marius moved with all six overstrength legions, and moved at the double. Quiet, disciplined, overjoyed at the prospect of battle at last, the Roman column skirted the Germans undetected as they pushed and jostled along the road from Arelate to Aquae Sextiae, from which point Teutobod intended to lead his warriors down to the sea. Crossing the river Ars, Marius took up a perfect position on its south bank at the top of a strong, sloping ridge surrounded by gently rolling hills, and there dug himself in, looking down on the river. Still in the lead, thirty thousand Ambrone warriors came to the ford and looked up to find a Roman camp bristling with plumed helmets and spears. But this was an ordinary camp, easy meat; without waiting for reinforcements, the Ambrones took the shallow stream at a run and attacked. Uphill. The Roman legionaries simply stepped over their wall along its entire front length and moved downhill to meet a shrieking horde of undisciplined barbarians. First they cast their pila with devastating effect, then they drew their swords and swung their shields around and waded into battle like the intermeshed components of one gigantic machine. Hardly an Ambrone lived to stagger back across the ford; thirty thousand Ambrone dead sprawled along the sloping ridge. Of casualties, Marius suffered almost none. The action was over in less than half an hour; within an hour the Ambrone bodies had been piled into a denuded rampart swords, torcs, shields, bracelets, pectorals, daggers, and helmets were thrown into the Roman camp along the edge of the ford; the first obstacle the next wave of Germans would have to surmount was this rampart of their own dead. The far bank of the Ars was now a roiling mass of Teutones, gazing in confusion and anger at the huge wall of dead Ambrones, and the Roman camp atop the ridge beyond lined with thousands of jeering, whistling, singing, booing, hissing, whooping soldiers, lifted out of themselves in a victory euphoria; for this was the first time a Roman army had killed great numbers of German Enemy. It was, of course, only a preliminary engagement. The major action was yet to come. But it would come, nothing surer. To complete his plan, Marius peeled off three thousand of his best troops and sent them that evening under the command of Manius Aquillius way downstream to cross the river; they were to wait until the general engagement took place, then fall upon the Germans from behind when the battle was at its height. Hardly a legionary slept that night, so great was the elation; but when the next day brought no aggressive move on the part of the Germans, tiredness didn't matter. The barbarian inactivity worried Marius, who didn't want the outcome postponed because the Germans decided not to attack. He needed a decisive victory, and he was determined to have it. But on the far bank of the river the Teutones had camped in their myriad thousands, unfortified save by sheer numbers, while Teutobod so tall on his little Gallic horse that his dangling feet nearly brushed the ground prowled the ford accompanied by a dozen of his thanes. Up and down and back and forth he walked his miserably overloaded steed all that day, two great flaxen braids straying across his golden breastplate, the golden wings on his helmet above each ear glittering in the sun. Even at the distance, anxiety and indecision could be discerned upon his clean-shaven face. The following morning dawned as cloudless as the days before, promising a degree of heat which would turn the area into a seething mass of Ambrone putrefaction all too soon; it was no part of Marius's plan to remain where he was until disease became a greater threat than the Enemy. "All right," he said to Quintus Sertorius, "we'll risk it. If they won't attack, I'll induce the battle by coming out myself and moving to attack them. We'll lose the advantage of their charge uphill, but even so, our chances are better here than anywhere else, and Manius Aquillius is in position. Sound the bugles, marshal the troops, and I'll address them." That was standard practice; no Roman army ever went into a major action unharangued. For one thing, it gave everyone a good look at the general in his war gear; for another, it served as a morale booster; and finally, it was the general's only opportunity to inform even the least legionary how he intended to win. The battle never went strictly according to plan everyone understood that but the general's address did give the soldiers an idea of what the general wanted them to do; and if more confusion than normal reigned, it enabled the troops to think for themselves. Many a Roman army had won its battle because its soldiers knew what the general wanted of them, and did it without a tribune in earshot. The defeat of the Ambrones had acted like a tonic. The legions were out to win, in perfect physical condition down to the last man, arms and armor polished, equipment immaculate. Massed in the open space they called their assembly forum, the ranks stood in file to listen to Gaius Marius. They would have followed him into Tartarus, of course, for they adored him. "All right, you cunni, today's the day!" Marius shouted from his makeshift rostra. "We were too good, that's our trouble! Now they don't want to fight! So we're going to make them so hopping mad they'd fight the legions of the dragon's teeth! We're going across our wall and down the slope, and then we're going to start pushing dead bodies around! We're going to kick their dead, spit on their dead, piss on their dead if we have to! And make no mistake, they're going to come across that ford in more thousands than you ignorant mentulae can count in units! And we won't have the advantage of sitting up here like cocks on a fence; we're going to have to take them on eye to eye and that means looking up! Because they're bigger than us! They're giants! Does that worry us? Does it?" "No!" they roared with one voice. "No, no, no!" "No!" echoed Marius. "And why? Because we're the legions of Rome! We're following the silver eagles to death or glory! Romans are the best soldiers the world has ever seen! And you Gaius Marius's own soldiers of the Head Count are the best soldiers Rome has ever seen!" They cheered him for what seemed an eternity, hysterical with pride, tears running down their faces, every fiber of their beings geared to an unbearable pitch of readiness. "All right, then! We're going over the wall and we're going into a slogging match! There's no other way to win this war than to beat those mad-eyed savages to their knees! It's fight, men! It's keep going until there's not one mad-eyed savage left on his gigantic feet!" He turned to where six men wrapped in lion skins fanged muzzles engulfing their helmets, empty clawed paws knotted across their mail-shirted chests stood with their hands clasped about the polished silver shafts of standards bearing six open-winged silver eagles. "There they are, your silver eagles! Emblems of courage! Emblems of Rome! Emblems of my legions! Follow the eagles for the glory of Rome!" Even in the midst of such exaltation there was no loss of discipline; ordered and unhurried, Marius's six legions moved out of the camp and down the slope, turning to protect their own flanks, as this was not a site for cavalry. Like a sickle they presented their ranks to the Germans, who made up King Teutobod's mind for him at the first demonstration of Roman contempt for the Ambrone dead. Through the ford they came, into the Roman front, which didn't even falter. Those in the German forefront fell to a volley of pila thrown with stunning accuracy; for Marius's troops had been practising for over two years against this day. The battle was long and grueling, but the Roman lines could not be broken, nor the silver eagles borne by their six aquiliferi be taken. The German dead piled up and up, joining their Ambrone fellows, and still more Germans kept coming across the ford to replace the fallen. Until Manius Aquillius and his three thousand soldiers descended upon the German rear, and slaughtered it. By the middle of the afternoon, the Teutones were no more. Fueled by the military tradition and glory of Rome and led by a superb general, thirty-seven thousand properly trained and properly equipped Roman legionaries made military history at Aquae Sextiae by defeating well over a hundred thousand German warriors in two engagements. Eighty thousand corpses joined the thirty thousand Ambrones along the river Ars; very few of the Teutones had elected to live, preferring to die with pride and honor intact. Among the fallen was Teutobod. And to the victors went the spoils, many thousands of Teutonic women and children, and seventeen thousand surviving warriors. When the slave traders swarmed up from Massilia to buy the spoils, Marius donated the proceeds to his soldiers and officers, though by tradition money from the sale of slave-prisoners belonged solely to the general. "I don't need the money, and they earned it," he said. He grinned, remembering the colossal sum the Massiliotes had charged Marcus Aurelius Cotta for a single ship to take him to Rome bearing the news of Arausio. "I see the magistrates of Massilia have sent us a vote of thanks for saving their fair city. I think I'll send them a bill for saving it." To Manius Aquillius he gave his report to the Senate, and sent him at the gallop for Rome. "You can bring the news, and stand for the consulship," he said. "Only don't delay!" Manius Aquillius didn't delay, reaching Rome by road in seven days. The letter was handed to the junior consul, Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar, to read out to the assembled Senate, a wooden Manius Aquillius having refused to say a word.
I, Gaius Marius, senior consul, find it my duty to report to the Senate and People of Rome that this day on the field of Aquae Sextiae in the Roman province of Gaul-across-the-Alps, the legions under my command have defeated the entire nation of the German Teutones. The German dead are numbered at one hundred and thirteen thousand, the German captives at seventeen thousand men, and one hundred and thirty thousand women and children. Of wagons there are thirty-two thousand, of horses forty-one thousand, of cattle two hundred thousand. I have decreed that all the spoils including those sold into slavery are to be divided up in the correct proportions among my men. Long live Rome!
The whole of Rome went mad with joy, its streets filled with weeping, dancing, cheering, embracing hordes of people, from slaves to the most august. And Gaius Marius was voted senior consul for the next year in absentia, with Manius Aquillius his junior colleague. The Senate voted him a thanksgiving of three days, and the People two days more. . "Sulla referred to it," Catulus Caesar remarked to Metellus Numidicus after the fuss died down. "Oho! You "don't like our Lucius Cornelius! 'Sulla,' eh? What did he refer to?" "He said something to the effect that the tallest tree in the world couldn't be cut down by anyone. He has all the luck, Gaius Marius. I couldn't persuade my army to fight, while he defeats a whole nation and hardly loses a man doing it," said Catulus Caesar gloomily. "He's always had the luck," said Metellus Numidicus. "Luck, nothing!" said the eavesdropping Publius Rutilius Rufus vigorously. "Give credit where credit's due!"
Which left them with little more to say [wrote Rutilius Rufus to Gaius Marius]. As you well know, I cannot condone all these consecutive consulships, nor some of your more wolfy friends. But I do confess to exasperated annoyance when I am faced with envy and spite from men who ought to be big enough to be magnanimous. Aesop summed them up nicely sour grapes, Gaius Marius. Did you ever hear such nonsense as attributing your success and their lack of success to luck? A man makes his luck, and that's the truth of it. I could spit when I hear them depreciating your wonderful victory. Enough about that, I'll give myself an apoplexy. Speaking of your more wolfy friends, Gaius Servilius Glaucia having entered into his tribunate of the plebs eight days ago is already stirring up a nice little storm in the Comitia. He has called his first contio to discuss a new law he proposes to promulgate, his intent being to undo the work of that hero of Tolosa, Quintus Servilius Caepio, may his exile in Smyrna last forever. I do not like that man; I never did like that man! Glaucia is going to give the extortion court back to the knights, with all sorts of frills attached to it too. From now on if the law is passed, which I suppose it will be the State will be able to recover damages or misappropriated property or peculated funds from their ultimate recipients as well as from the original culprits. So where before a rapacious governor could sign his ill-gotten gains over to his Auntie Liccy or his wife's tata Lucius Tiddlypuss or even someone as obvious as his son, under Glaucia's new law Auntie Liccy and Lucius Tiddlypuss and the son will have to cough up as well. I suppose there is some justice in it, but where does legislation like this lead, Gaius Marius? It gives the State too much power, not to mention too much money! It breeds demagogues and bureaucrats, that's what! There is something terribly reassuring about being in politics to enrich oneself. It's normal. It's human. It's forgivable. It's understandable. The ones to watch are the ones who are in politics to change the world. They do the real damage, the power-men and the altruists. It isn't healthy to think about other people ahead of oneself. Other people are not as deserving. Did I tell you I was a Skeptic? Well, I am. Though sometimes just sometimes! I wonder if I'm not becoming a little bit of a Cynic too. We hear that you'll be back in Rome briefly. I cannot wait! I want to see Piggle-wiggle's face at the instant he first sets eyes on you. Catulus Caesar has been made proconsul of Italian Gaul, as you might have expected, and has already gone to rejoin his army in Placentia. Watch him, he'll try to take the credit of the next victory off you if he can. I hope your Lucius Cornelius Sulla is as loyal as he used to be, now Julilla's dead. On the diplomatic front, Battaces and his priests have finally seen fit to go home, and the wails from various highborn ladies can be heard at least as far as Brundisium. Now we are playing host to a much less awesome and infinitely more ominous embassage. It's come from none other than that very dangerous young man who has managed to collar most of the territory around the Euxine Sea King Mithridates of Pontus. He's asking for a treaty of friendship and alliance. Scaurus is not in favor. I wonder why? Could it possibly have something to do with the fierce lobbying of the agents of King Nicomedes of our friendly allied Bithynia? Edepol, edepol, there goes that dreadful Skeptic streak again! No, Gaius Marius, it is not a Cynical streak! Not yet, anyway. To conclude, a little gossip and personal news. The Conscript Father Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus has a little son and heir, giving rise to great expressions of joy on the part of various Domitii Ahenobarbi and Servilii Caepiones, though I note the Calpurnii Pisones have managed to maintain their air of indifference. And while it may be the fate of some venerable elders to marry schoolgirls, it is a more usual fate to yield to the arms of Death. Our very own literary giant Gaius Lucilius is dead. I'm quite sorry about it, really. He was a horrible bore in the flesh, but oh he was witty on paper! I am also sorry and with deep sincerity this time that your old Syrian seer Martha is dead. No news to you, I know Julia wrote, but I shall miss the old harridan. Piggle-wiggle used to foam at the mouth whenever he saw her being toted around Rome in her lurid purple litter. Your dear wonderful Julia vows she'll miss Martha too. I hope you appreciate the treasure you married, by the way. It isn't every wife I know would grieve at the passing of a houseguest who came for a month and stayed for the duration, especially a houseguest who thought it etiquette to spit on the floor and piss in the fishpond. I close by echoing your own remark. How could you, Gaius Marius? "Long live Rome!" indeed! What a conceit!
THE TENTH YEAR (101 - 100 B.C.); IN THE CONSULSHIP OF GAIUS MARIUS (V) AND MANIUS AQUILLIUS
THE ELEVENTH YEAR (100 B.C.): IN THE CONSULSHIP OF GAIUS MARIUS (VI) AND LUCIUS VALERIUS FLACCUS
Sulla was right: the Cimbri weren't even interested in crossing the Padus. Like cows let loose in a huge river-flat pasture, they browsed contentedly across the eastern half of Italian Gaul-across-the-Padus, surrounded by so much agricultural and pastoral plenty that they took no heed of the exhortations of their king. Alone among them Boiorix worried; alone among them Boiorix was deeply depressed when he got the news of the defeat of the Teutones at Aquae Sextiae. When to this was joined the news that the Tigurini-Marcomanni-Cherusci had grown discouraged and turned back toward their original homelands, Boiorix despaired. His grand strategy had been ruined by a combination of Roman superiority in arms and German fecklessness, and now he was beginning to doubt his ability to control his people, the Cimbri. He still felt they, the most numerous of the three divisions, could conquer Italy unaided but only if he could teach them the priceless lessons of collective unity and individual self-discipline. All through the winter following Aquae Sextiae he kept to himself, understanding that he could accomplish nothing until his people either tired of this place, or ate it out. Since they were not farmers, the second possibility was a probability, but nowhere on his travels had Boiorix seen such fertility, such a capacity to feed, and keep on feeding. If Italian Gaul-across-the-Padus was in the fief of the Romans, no wonder Rome was so great. Unlike Long-haired Gaul, here no vast forests were left standing; instead, carefully culled stands of oaks provided a bounteous crop of acorns for many thousands of pigs let loose to graze among them during the winter. The rest of the countryside was tilled: millet where the Padus made the ground too boggy, wheat where the ground was dry enough; chick-peas and lentils, lupines and beans in every kind of soil. Even when in the spring the farmers were either fled or too afraid to sow their crops, still the crops came up, so many seeds already lay dormant on the ground. What Boiorix failed to understand was the physical structure of Italy; had he done so, he might have elected after all to announce that here in Gaul-across-the-Padus was the new Cimbric homeland; and had he done that, it may have suited Rome to let him be, since Italian Gaul-across-the-Padus was not considered of vital importance, and its populace was mostly Celtic. For the physical structure of Italy largely prevented the incredible riches of the Padus River valley being of any use to the Italian peninsula itself. All the rivers ran between east and west, west and east, and the daunting mountain chain of the Apennines divided peninsular Italy from Italian Gaul all the way from the Adriatic seaboard to the coast of Liguria. In effect, Italian Gaul-of-the-Padus was a separate country divided itself into two countries, north of the great river and south of the great river. As it was, Boiorix regained his purpose when spring slid into summer and the first tiny evidences of an eaten-out land began to appear. Crops had indeed sown themselves, but they were thin and did not seem to be forming ears or pods or tufts; crafty in the extreme, being intelligent creatures, the pigs conserved their dwindling numbers by disappearing completely; and the half-million beasts the Cimbri themselves had brought with them had trampled what they hadn't grazed into chaffy dust. It was time to move on; when Boiorix went among his thanes and stirred them up, they in turn went among the people, stirring. And so in early June the cattle were driven in, the horses mustered, the wagons hitched up. The Cimbri, united once more into a single vast mass, moved westward upstream along the north bank of the Padus, heading for the more Romanized regions around the big town of Placentia.
In Placentia lay the Roman army, fifty-four thousand strong. Marius had donated two of his legions to Manius Aquillius, who had gone to Sicily early in the year to deal with the slave-king Athenion; so thoroughly had the Teutones been vanquished that it was not even necessary to leave any soldiers behind to garrison Gaul-across-the-Alps. The situation had certain parallels to the command situation at Arausio: again the senior commander was a New Man, again the junior commander was a formidable aristocrat. But the difference between Gaius Marius and Gnaeus Mallius Maximus was enormous; the New Man Marius was not the man to take any nonsense from the aristocrat Catulus Caesar. Catulus Caesar was brusquely told what to do, where to go, and why he was doing and going. All that was required of him was that he obey, and he knew exactly what would happen if he didn't obey, because Gaius Marius had taken the time to tell him. Very frankly. "You might say I've drawn a line for you to tread, Quintus Lutatius. Put one toe either side of it, and I'll have you back in Rome so fast you won't know how you got there," said Marius. "I'll have no Caepio tricks played on me! I'd much prefer to see Lucius Cornelius in your boots anyway, and that's who will go into them if you so much as think of deviating from your line. Understood?" "I am not a subaltern, Gaius Marius, and I resent being treated like one," said Catulus Caesar, a crimson spot burning in each cheek. "Look, Quintus Lutatius, I don't care what you feel!" said Marius with exaggerated patience. "All I care about is what you do. And what you do is what I tell you to do, nothing else." "I do not anticipate any difficulty following your orders, Gaius Marius. They're as specific as they are detailed," said Catulus Caesar, curbing his temper. "But I repeat, there is no need to speak to me as if I were a junior officer! I am your second-in-command." Marius grinned unpleasantly. "I don't like you either, Quintus Lutatius," he said. "You're just another one of the many upper-class mediocrities who think they've got some sort of divine right to rule Rome. My opinion of you as an individual is that you couldn't run a wine bar sitting between a brothel and a men's club! So this is how you and I are going to collaborate I issue the instructions; you follow them to the letter." "Under protest," said Catulus Caesar. "Under protest, but do it," said Marius. "Couldn't you have been a little more tactful?" asked Sulla of Marius later that day, having endured Catulus Caesar striding up and down his tent ranting about Marius for a full hour. "What for?" asked Marius, genuinely surprised. "Because in Rome he matters, that's what for! And he also matters here in Italian Gaul!" snapped Sulla. His spurt of anger died, he looked at the unrepentant Gaius Marius and shook his head. "Oh, you're impossible! And getting worse, I swear." "I'm an old man, Lucius Cornelius. Fifty-six. The same age as our Princeps Senatus, whom everybody calls an old man." "That's because our Princeps Senatus is a bald and wrinkled Forum fixture," said Sulla. "You still represent the vigorous commander in the field, so no one thinks of you as old." "Well, I'm too old to suffer fools like Quintus Lutatius gladly," said Marius. "I do not have the time to spend hours smoothing down the ruffled feathers of cocks-on-dungheaps just to keep them thinking well of themselves." "Don't say I didn't warn you!" said Sulla.
By the second half of Quinctilis the Cimbri were massed at the foot of the western Alps, spread across a plain called the Campi Raudii, not far from the small town of Vercellae. "Why here?" asked Marius of Quintus Sertorius, who had been mingling with the Cimbri off and on as they moved westward. "I wish I knew, Gaius Marius, but I've never managed to get close to Boiorix himself," said Sertorius. "The Cimbri seem to think they're going home to Germania, but a couple of the thanes I know think Boiorix is still determined to go south." "He's too far west," said Sulla. "The thanes think he's trying to placate the people by leading them to believe they'll be crossing the Alps back into Long-haired Gaul very soon, and next year will be home again in the Cimbrian Chersonnese. But he's going to keep them in Italian Gaul just long enough to close the alpine passes, and then present them with a pretty poor alternative stay in Italian Gaul and starve through the winter, or invade Italy." "That's a very complicated maneuver for a barbarian," said Marius skeptically. "The three-pronged fish spear into Italian Gaul wasn't your typical barbarian strategy either," Sulla reminded him. "They're like vultures," said Sertorius suddenly. "How?" asked Marius, frowning. "They pick the bones of wherever they are clean, Gaius Marius. That's really why they keep moving, it seems to me. Or maybe a plague of locusts is a better comparison. They eat everything in sight, then move on. It will take the Aedui and the Ambarri twenty years to repair the ravages of playing host to the Germans for four years. And the Atuatuci were looking very dismayed when I left, I can tell you." "Then how did they manage to stay in their original homeland without moving for so long?" asked Marius. “There were less of them, for one thing. The Cimbri had their huge peninsula, the Teutones all the land to the south of it, the Tigurini were in Helvetia, the Cherusci were along the Visurgis in Germania, and the Marcomanni lived in Boiohaemum," said Sertorius. "The climate is different," said Sulla when Sertorius fell silent. "North of the Rhenus, it rains all year round. So the grass grows very quickly, and it's juicy, sweet, tender grass. Nor are the winters so very hard, it seems at least as close to Oceanus Atlanticus as the Cimbri, the Teutones, and the Cherusci were. Even at dead of winter they get more rain than snow and ice. So they can graze rather than grow. I don't think the Germans live the way they do because it's their nature. I think the Germans live the way their original homelands dictated." Marius looked up from beneath his brows. "So if, for instance, they fetched up long enough in Italy, they'd learn to farm, you think?" "Undoubtedly," said Sulla. "Then we'd better force a conclusive fight this summer, and make an end to it and them. For nearly fifteen years Rome has been living under their shadow. I can't rest peacefully in my bed if the last thing I think of before I close my eyes is half a million Germans wandering around Europa looking for an Elysium they left behind somewhere north of the Rhenus. The German migration has to stop. And the only way I can be sure it's stopped is to stop it with Roman swords." "I agree," said Sulla. "And I," said Sertorius. "Haven't you got a sprog among the Cimbri somewhere?" asked Marius of Sertorius. "I have." "Do you know where?" "Yes." "Good. After it's over, you can send the sprog and his mother wherever you want, even Rome." "Thank you, Gaius Marius. I'll send them to Nearer Spain," said Sertorius, smiling. Marius stared. "Spain? Why Spain?" "I liked it there, when I was learning to be a Celtiberian. The tribe I stayed with will look after my German family." "Good! Now, good friends, let's see how we can bring on a battle with the Cimbri."
Marius brought on his battle; the date was the last day of Quinctilis by the calendar, and it had been formally fixed at a conference between Marius and Boiorix, For Marius was not the only one fed up with years of indecision. Boiorix too was keen to see an end to it. "To the victor goes Italy," said Boiorix. "To the victor goes the world," said Marius. As at Aquae Sextiae, Marius fought an infantry engagement, his scant cavalry drawn up to protect two massive infantry wings made up of his own troops from Gaul-across-the-Alps, split up into two lots of fifteen thousand. Between them he put Catulus Caesar and his twenty-four thousand less experienced men to form the center; the veteran troops in the wings would keep them steady and contained. He himself commanded the left wing, Sulla the right wing, and Catulus Caesar the center. Fifteen thousand Cimbric cavalry began the battle, magnificently clad and equipped, and riding the huge northern horses rather than little Gallic ponies. Each German trooper wore a towering helmet shaped like a mythical monster's head with gaping jaws, stiff tall feathers on either side to give the rider even more height; he wore an iron breastplate and a long-sword, and carried a round white shield as well as two heavy lances. The horsemen massed four deep along a line nearly four miles long, with the Cimbric infantry directly behind them, but when they charged they swung to their right, and drew the Romans with them; a tactic designed to move the Roman line far enough to the Roman left to enable the Cimbric infantry to outflank Sulla's right, and take the Romans from behind. So eager were the legions to come to grips that the German plan very nearly succeeded; then Marius managed to pull his troops to a halt and took the brunt of the cavalry charge, leaving Sulla to deal with the first onslaught of the Cimbric foot, while Catulus Caesar in the middle battled horse and foot. Roman fitness, Roman training, and Roman guile won on the field of Vercellae, for Marius had banked on a battle fought mostly before noon, and thus formed up with his lines facing west. It was the Cimbri who had the morning sun in their eyes, the Cimbri who couldn't keep up the pace. Used to a cooler, kinder climate and having breakfasted as always upon huge amounts of meat they fought the Romans two days after the summer solstice beneath a cloudless sky and in a choking pall of dust. To the legionaries it was a mild inconvenience, but to the Germans it was a pitiless furnace. They went down in thousands upon thousands upon thousands, tongues parched, armor as fiery as the hair shirt of Hercules, helmets a roasting burden, swords too heavy to lift. And by noon the fighting men of the Cimbri were no more. Eighty thousand fell on the field, including Boiorix; the rest fled to warn the women and children in the wagons, and take what they could across the Alps. But fifty thousand wagons couldn't be driven away at a gallop, nor half a million cattle and horses mustered in an hour or two. Those closest to the alpine passes of the Vale of the Salassi escaped; the rest did not. Many of the women rejected the thought of captivity and killed themselves and their children; some of the women killed the fleeing warriors as well. Even so, sixty thousand live Cimbric women and children were sold to the slavers, as were twenty thousand warriors. Of those who fled up the Vale of the Salassi and got away to Gaul-across-the-Alps through the Lugdunum Pass, few succeeded in running the gauntlet of the Celts. The Allobroges assailed them with fierce delight, as did the Sequani. Perhaps two thousand Cimbri finally rejoined the six thousand warriors left among the Atuatuci; and there where the Mosa received the Sabis, the last remnants of a great migration settled down for good, and in time came to call themselves Atuatuci. Only the vast accumulation of treasure reminded them that they had once been a German host more than three quarters of a million strong; but the treasure was not theirs to spend, only theirs to guard against the coming of other Romans. Catulus Caesar came to the council Marius called after Vercellae girt for war of a different kind, and found a mellow, affable Marius only too happy to grant his every request. "My dear fellow, of course you shall have a triumph!" said Marius, clapping him on the back. "My dear fellow, take two thirds of the spoils! After all, my men have the spoils from Aquae Sextiae as well, and I donated the proceeds from sale of slaves to them, so they'll come out of the campaign far ahead of your fellows, I imagine unless you too intend to donate the slave money ? No? Perfectly understandable, my dear Quintus Lutatius!" said Marius, pushing a plate of food into his hands. "My dear fellow, I wouldn't dream of taking all the credit! Why should I, when your soldiers fought with equal skill and enthusiasm?" said Marius, taking the plate of food off him and replacing it with a brimming goblet of wine. "Sit down, sit down! A great day! I can sleep in peace." "Boiorix is dead," said Sulla, smiling contentedly. "It is all over, Gaius Marius. Definitely, definitely over." "And your woman and child, Quintus Sertorius?" asked Marius. "Safe." "Good. Good!" Marius looked around the crowded general's tent, even his eyebrows seeming to beam. "And who wants to bring the news of Vercellae to Rome?" he asked. Two dozen voices answered; several dozen more said nothing but put eager expressions on their faces. Marius looked them over one by one, and finally let his eyes rest where he had already made up his mind. "Gaius Julius," he said, "you shall have the job. You are my quaestor, but I have even better grounds. In you is vested a part of all of us in senior command. We must stay in Italian Gaul until everything is properly tidied up. But you are the brother-in-law of Lucius Cornelius and myself; our children have your family's blood in their veins. And Quintus Lutatius here is a Julius Caesar by birth. So it's fitting that a Julius Caesar should bring the news of victory to Rome." He turned to look at everyone present. "Is that fair?" he asked. "It's fair," everyone said in chorus.
2
'' What a lovely way to enter the Senate,'' said Aurelia, unable to take her eyes off Caesar's In face; how brown he was, how very much a man! "I'm glad now that the censors didn't admit you before you left to serve Gaius Marius." He was still elated, still half-living those glorious moments when, after handing Marius's letter to the Leader of the House, he had actually seen with his own eyes the Senate of Rome receive the news that the threat of the Germans was no more. The applause, the cheers, the senators who danced and the senators who wept, the sight of Gaius Servilius Glaucia, head of the College of Tribunes of the Plebs, running with toga hugged about himself from the Curia to the Comitia to scream the news from the rostra, august presences like Metellus Numidicus and Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus solemnly shaking each other's hands and trying to be more dignified than excited. "It's an omen," he said to his wife, eyes dwelling upon her in besotted admiration. How beautiful she was, how unmarked by her more than four years of living in the Subura and acting as the landlady of an insula. "You'll be consul one day," she said confidently. "Whenever they think of our victory at Vercellae, they'll remember that it was you who brought the news to Rome." "No," he said fairly, "they'll think of Gaius Marius." "And you," the doting wife insisted. "Yours was the face they saw; you were his quaestor.'' He sighed, snuggled down on the dining couch, and patted the vacant space next to himself. "Come here," he said. Sitting correctly on her straight chair, Aurelia looked toward the door of the triclinium. "Gaius Julius!" she said. "We're alone, my darling wife, and I'm not such a stickler that on my first evening home I like being separated from you by the width of a table." Another pat for the couch. "Here, woman! Immediately!"
When the young couple had first made their home in the Subura, their arrival was sufficiently remarkable to have made them the object of ongoing curiosity to everyone who lived within several streets of Aurelia's insula. Aristocratic landlords were common enough, but not resident aristocratic landlords; Gaius Julius Caesar and his wife were rare birds, and as such came in for more than the usual amount of attention. In spite of its mammoth size, the Subura was really a teeming, gossipy village which liked nothing better than a new sensation. All the predictions were that the young couple would never last; the Subura, that great leveler of pretensions and pride, would soon show them up for what they were, Palatine people. What hysterical seizures milady was going to throw! What sniffy tantrums milord was going to throw! Ha, ha. So said the hard cases of the Subura. And waited gleefully. None of it ever happened. Milady, they discovered, was not above doing her own marketing nor above being explicitly obnoxious to any leering fellow who tried to proposition her nor frightened when a group of local women surrounded her as she crossed the Vicus Patricii and tried to tell her to go back to the Palatine where she belonged. As for milord, he was and there could be no other word applied to him a true gentleman: unruffled, polite, interested in everything said to him by every element in the community, helpful about wills and leases and contracts. Very soon they were respected. Eventually they were loved. Many of their qualities were novelties, like their tendency to mind their own business and not inquire into everyone else's business; they never complained or criticized, and they never held themselves better than those around them. Speak to them, and you could be sure of a ready and genuine smile, true interest, courtesy, and sensitivity. Though at first this was deemed an act, in the end the residents of their part of the Subura came to understand that Caesar and Aurelia were exactly what they seemed to be. For Aurelia this local acceptance was more important by far than for Caesar; she was the one engaged in Suburan affairs, and she was the landlady of a populous apartment building. It hadn't been easy in the beginning, though it wasn't until after Caesar left Rome that she fully understood why. At first she deemed her difficulties the result of un-familiarity and lack of experience. The agents who had sold the insula offered to act on her behalf when it came to collecting the rents and dealing with the tenants, and Caesar had thought this a good idea, so the obedient new wife agreed. Nor did Caesar grasp the unconscious message she relayed to him a month after they had moved in, when she told him all about their tenants. "It's the variety I find hardest to believe," she said, face animated, her customary composure not so noticeable. He humored her by asking, "Variety?" "Well, the two top floors are mostly freedmen Greek in the main who all seem to eke out a living running after their ex-masters, and have terrific worry lines on their faces, and more boyfriends than wives. On the main floors there are all sorts a fuller and his family Roman; a potter and his family Roman; a shepherd and his family did you realize there were shepherds in Rome? He looks after the sheep out on the Campus Lanatarius while they wait to be sold for slaughter, isn't that fascinating? I asked him why he didn't live closer to his job, but he said he and his wife were both Suburans, and couldn't think of living anywhere else, and he doesn't mind the walk at all," said Aurelia, becoming more animated still. But Caesar frowned. "I am not a snob, Aurelia, yet I'm not sure it's a good thing to strike up conversations with any of your tenants. You're the wife of a Julius, and you have certain standards of conduct. One must never be peremptory or uncivil to these people, nor above being interested in them, but I'll be going away soon, and I don't want my wife making friends out of acquaintances. You must keep yourself a little aloof from the people who rent living accommodation from you. That's why I'm glad the agents are acting as your rent collectors and business consultants." Her face had dropped, she was staring at him in dismay, and stammered, "I I'm sorry, Gaius Julius, I I didn't think. Truly I've made no real advances; I just thought it would be interesting to find out what everyone did." "Of course it is," he soothed, aware that in some way he had blighted her. "Tell me more." "There's a Greek rhetor and his family, and a Roman schoolteacher and his family he's interested in renting the two rooms next door to his apartment when they fall vacant, so he can conduct his school on the premises." She shot Caesar a quick look, and added, "The agents told me," thereby telling her first lie to her husband. "That sounds satisfactory," he said. "Who else have we got, my love?" "The next floor up from us is very odd. There's a spice merchant with a frightfully superior wife, and an inventor! He's a bachelor, and his flat is absolutely stuffed with all these amazing little working models of cranes and pumps and mills," she said, her tongue getting the better of her again. "Do you mean to say, Aurelia, that you have been inside the apartment of a bachelor?" asked Caesar. She told her second lie, heart beating uncomfortably. "No, Gaius Julius, truly! The agent thought it would be a good thing if I accompanied him on his rounds, and inspected the tenants as well as how they live." Caesar relaxed. "Oh, I see! Of course. What does our inventor invent?'' "Brakes and pulleys mostly, I gathered. He did show me how they work on a model of a crane, but I don't have a technical mind, he said, so I'm afraid it didn't make any sense to me." "His inventing obviously pays him well, if he can afford to live on the next floor up," said Caesar, uncomfortably aware that his wife had lost a great deal of her original animation, but having insufficient intuition to see whose fault that was. "For his pulleys he has a deal with a foundry that does a lot of work for big building contractors, where his brakes he manufactures in tiny premises of his own somewhere down the street from here." She drew a rather shaky breath, and passed on to her most unusual tenants. "And we have a whole floor of Jews, Gaius Julius! They like to live surrounded by other Jews, they were telling me, because they have so many rules and regulations which, incidentally, they seem to have inflicted upon themselves. Very religious people! I can understand the xenophobia they make the rest of us look a shabby lot morally. They're all self-employed, chiefly because they rest every seventh day. Isn't that a strange system? With Rome having a market holiday every eighth day, and then the feasts and festivals, they can't fit in with non-Jewish employers. So they contract themselves out, rather than take regular jobs." "How extraordinary!" said Caesar. "They're all artisans and scholars," said Aurelia, careful to keep her voice disinterested. "One of the men his name's Shimon, I think is the most exquisite scribe. Beautiful work, Gaius Julius, truly beautiful! He works in Greek only. None of them has a very good grasp of Latin. Whenever a publisher or an author has a special edition of a work to put out at a higher than normal price, he goes to Shimon, who has four-sons all learning to be scribes too. They're going to school with our Roman teacher as well as to their own religious school, because Shimon wants them to be as fluent in Latin as in Greek and Aramaic and Hebrew, I think he said. Then they'll have plenty of work in Rome forever." "Are all the Jews scribes?" "Oh, no, only Shimon. There's one who works with gold, and contracts himself out to some of the shops in the Porticus Margaritaria. And we have a portrait sculptor a tailor an armorer a textile maker a mason and the last one is a balsam merchant." "Surely not all working upstairs?" asked Caesar, alarmed. "Only the scribe and the goldsmith, Gaius Julius. The armorer has a workshop at the top of the Alta Semita, the sculptor rents space from a big firm in the Velabrum, and the mason has a yard near the marble wharves in the Port of Rome." In spite of herself, Aurelia's purple eyes began to shine. "They sing a lot. Religious, I gather. It's a very strange sort of singing you know, Oriental and tuneless? But it's a nice change from crying babies." Caesar reached out a hand to tuck back a strand of hair which had fallen forward onto her face; she was all of eighteen years old, this wife of his. "I take it our Jews like living here?" he asked. "Actually everyone seems to like living here," she said. That night after Caesar had fallen asleep, Aurelia lay beside him and sprinkled her pillows with a very few tears. It hadn't occurred to her that Caesar would expect the same sort of conduct from her here in an insula of the Subura as he would have from a Palatine wife; didn't he understand that in these cramped quarters there were not the diversions or hobbies available to a woman of the Palatine? No, of course he didn't. His time was taken up with his burgeoning public career, so his days were spent between the law courts, important senators like Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus, the mint, the Treasury, the various arcades and colonnades where an incipient senator went to learn his profession. A gentler, more kindly disposed and considerate husband did not live; but Gaius Julius Caesar still regarded his wife as a special case. The truth was that Aurelia had conceived a wish to run the insula herself, and dispense with the agents. So she had taken herself around to every tenant of every floor, and chatted with them, and discovered what kind of people they were. She had liked them, couldn't see any reason why she should not deal with them personally. Until she talked to her husband, and understood that the precious person of his wife was a woman apart, a woman high on the plinth of Julian dignitas; she would never be permitted to do anything which might detract from his family. Her own background was sufficiently like his for her to appreciate this, and understand it; but oh, how was she going to fill her days? She didn't dare think about the fact that she had told her husband two lies. Instead, she sniffled herself to sleep. Luckily her dilemma was temporarily solved by a pregnancy. It slowed her down somewhat, though she suffered none of the traditional ailments. In the pink of health and youth, she had enough relatively new blood in her from both sides to ensure that she didn't possess the frailty of purely old-nobility girls; besides which, she had got into the habit of walking miles each day to keep herself from going mad with boredom, her gigantic serving maid, Cardixa, more than adequate protection on the streets. Caesar was seconded to the service of Gaius Marius in Gaul-across-the-Alps before their first child was born, and fretted at leaving behind a wife so heavy, so vulnerable. "Don't worry, I'll be perfectly all right," she said. "Make sure you go home to your mother's house well ahead of your time," he instructed. "Leave all that to me, I'll manage" was as far as she would commit herself. Of course she didn't go home to her mother; she had her baby in her own apartment, attended by no fashionable Palatine practitioners, only the local midwife and Cardixa. An easy and fairly short labor produced a girl, yet another Julia, and as blonde and blue-eyed and gorgeous as any Julia needed to be. "We'll call her 'Lia' for short," she said to her mother. "Oh, no!" cried Rutilia, deeming "Lia" too commonplace and unimposing. "How about 'Julilla'?" Aurelia shook her head very firmly. "No, that's an unlucky diminutive," she said. "Our girl will be 'Lia.' " But Lia didn't thrive; she cried and cried and cried for six solid weeks, until Shimon's wife, Ruth, came marching down to Aurelia's apartment and sniffed scornfully at Aurelia's tales of doctors, worried Cottae grandparents, colic, and colds. "You just got a hungry baby there," said Ruth in her heavily accented Greek. "You got no milk, silly girl!" "Oh, where am I going to put a wet nurse?" asked Aurelia, profoundly relieved at what she instantly saw was the truth, but at her wits' end to persuade the staff they must share the servants' quarters with yet another body. "You don't need no wet nurse, silly girl," said Ruth. "This building's full of mothers feeding babies. Don't you worry, we'll all give the little one a drink." "I can pay you," Aurelia offered tentatively, sensitive enough to know that she ought not sound patronizing. "For what, nature? You leave it to me, silly girl. And I make sure they all wash their teats first! The little one's got some catching up to do; we don't want her sick," said Ruth. So little Lia acquired a whole insula of wet nurses, and the bewildering array of nipples popped into her mouth seemed to worry the baby's feelings as little as the mixture of Greek milk, Roman milk, Jewish milk, Spanish milk, and Syrian milk worried her digestion. Little Lia began to thrive. As did her mother, once she was recovered from the birth process and the worry of a perpetually crying baby. For with Caesar gone, Aurelia's true character began to assert itself. First she made mincemeat of her male relatives, all of whom had been charged by Caesar to keep an eye on her. "If I do need you, Father," she said to Cotta firmly, "I will send for you." "Uncle Publius, leave me alone!" she said to Rutilius Rufus. "Sextus Julius, go away to Gaul!" she said to her husband's older brother. Then she looked at Cardixa and rubbed her hands together gleefully. "My life is my own at last!" she said. "Oh, there are going to be some changes!" She started within the walls of her own apartment, where the slaves she and Caesar had bought just after their marriage were running the young couple rather than the other way around. Led by the steward, a Greek named Eutychus, they worked well enough that Aurelia found herself without sufficient grounds to impeach them to Caesar; for she had learned that Caesar did not see things as she saw them, and was absent-minded enough not to see some things at all, especially domestic things. But within the space of a single day Aurelia had the servants hopping to her tune, working her will upon them with a speech first and a schedule after that. Gaius Marius would have approved the speech mightily, for it was short and breathtakingly frank, delivered in the tone and manner of a general. "Oooooo-er!" said the cook, Murgus, to the steward, Eutychus. "And I thought she was a nice little thing!" The steward rolled his long-lashed beguiling eyes. "What about me! I thought I might just sneak into her bedroom and console her a bit during Gaius Julius's absence what an escape! I'd sooner crawl into bed with a lion." "Do you really think she'd have the guts to take such a terrible financial loss by selling us all with bad references?" asked the cook, Murgus, shivering at the very thought. "She'd have the guts to crucify us," said the steward. "Oooooo-er!" wailed the cook. From this encounter, Aurelia went straight to deal with the tenant of the other ground-floor apartment. That initial conversation with Caesar about the tenants had robbed her of all her original resolve to be rid of the ground-floor tenant immediately; in the end she hadn't mentioned the man to her husband, realizing that he wouldn't see the situation the way she did. But now she could act, and act she did. The other ground-floor apartment was accessible from within the insula; all Aurelia had to do was walk across the courtyard at the bottom of the light-well. However, that would give her visit an informality she definitely didn't want. So she approached through her tenant's front door. This meant that she was obliged to go out her own front door onto the Vicus Patricii, turn right, and walk up along the row of shops she rented out, to the apex of the building where the crossroads tavern stood; from there she turned right into the Subura Minor and walked down the other row of shops she rented out, until she finally came to the front door of the second ground-floor apartment. Its tenant was a famous actor named Epaphroditus, and according to the books, he had been living there for well over three years. "Tell Epaphroditus that his landlady wishes to see him," said Aurelia to the porter. While she waited in the reception room as large as the one in her own apartment she assessed its condition with an eye grown expert in the matter of cracks, chips, peeling paint, and the like, and sighed; it was better than her own reception room, and had recently been frescoed with swathes of fruit and flowers dangled by dimpled Cupids between convincing-looking painted purple curtains. "I don't believe it!" cried a beautiful voice, in Greek. Aurelia swung round to face her tenant. He was much older than voice or reputation upon the stage or the view across the courtyard suggested, a fiftyish man with a golden-yellow wig upon his head and an elaborately made-up face, wearing a floating robe of Tyrian purple embroidered with clusters of golden stars. Though many wearers of purple pretended it was Tyrian, this was the real thing, a color as much black as purple, of a luster which changed its hue as the light changed, suffusing it with sheens of plum and deepest crimson; in tapestry one saw it, but only once in her life had Aurelia seen genuine Tyrian purple raiment, on her visit to the villa of Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi, who had displayed with pride a robe taken from King Perseus of Macedonia by Aemilius Paullus. "You don't believe what?" asked Aurelia, also in Greek. "You, darling! I'd heard our landlady was beautiful and owned a pair of purple eyes, but the reality pales what I had imagined from the distance across the courtyard!" he fluted; his voice was more melodious than ridiculous, despite the effeminate accent. "Sit down, sit down!" he said. "I prefer to stand." He stopped in his tracks and turned back toward her, his thin plucked black brows lifting. "You mean business!" "I certainly do." "How may I assist you, then?" he asked. "You can move out," said Aurelia. He gasped; he staggered; his hands flew to clutch at his chest; an expression of horror fell upon his face. "What?" "I'm giving you eight days' notice," said the landlady. "But you can't! My rent's paid up and it always has been! I look after this place as if I owned it! Give me your grounds, domina," he said, voice now very hard, and a look about him which made the painted face seem an utterly masculine lie. "I don't like the way you live," said Aurelia. "The way I live is my business," said Epaphroditus. "Not when I have to bring up my family looking across a courtyard into scenes not fit for my eyes, let alone a child's," she said. "Not when the harlots of both sexes spill out into the courtyard to continue their activities." "Put up curtains," said Epaphroditus. "I'll do no such thing. Nor will it satisfy me if you put up curtains. My household has ears as well as eyes." "Well, I'm very sorry you feel this way, but it can make no difference," he said briskly. "I refuse to leave." "In that case, I shall hire bailiffs and evict you." Using his considerable arts to grow in stature until he seemed to tower over her, Epaphroditus came closer to her, and succeeded in reminding the uncowed Aurelia of Achilles hiding in the harem of King Lycomedes of Skyros. "Now listen to me, little lady," he said, "I've spent a fortune turning this place into my kind of place, and I have no intention of leaving it. If you try any tricks like sending bailiffs in, I'll sue you for everything you've got. In fact, after I've ushered you off my premises, I'm going straight to the tribunal of the urban praetor to lay charges against you." The purple of her eyes made a cheap mockery of Tyrian imitations; so did the look on her face. "Do that!" she said sweetly. "His name is Gaius Memmius, and he's a cousin of mine. However, it's a busy time for litigation at the moment, so you will have to see his assistant first. He's a new senator, but I know him well. Ask for him by name, do! Sextus Julius Caesar. He's my brother-in-law." She moved away and inspected the newly decorated walls, the expensive mosaic floor no rented apartment ever boasted. "Yes, this is all very nice! I'm glad your taste in interior design is superior to your taste in companions. But you realize, of course, that any improvements made to rented premises belong to the landlord, and that the landlord is not obliged under the law to pay a single penny's compensation." Eight days later Epaphroditus was gone, calling down curses upon the heads of women, and unable to do what he had fully intended to do, namely to deface his frescoes and dig up his mosaic floor; Aurelia had installed a pair of hired gladiators inside the apartment. "Good!" she said, dusting off her hands. "Now, Cardixa, I can find a decent tenant." The process whereby an apartment was let occurred in any of several ways; the landlord hung a notice upon his front door and more notices on the walls of his shops, did the same thing outside the baths and public latrines and any wall owned by friends, then spread the news of a vacancy by word of mouth as well. Because Aurelia's insula was known as a particularly safe one, there was no shortage of prospective tenants, whom she interviewed herself. Some she liked; some she felt were trustworthy; some she wouldn't have rented to had they been the only applicants. But none proved to be what she was after, so she kept on looking and interviewing. It was seven weeks before she found her ideal tenant. A knight and the son of a knight, his name was Gaius Matius; he was the same age as Caesar, and his wife was the same age as Aurelia; both were cultivated and educated; they had married about the same time as Caesar and Aurelia; they had a baby girl the same age as Lia; and they were comfortably off. His wife was called Priscilla, which must have derived from her father's cognomen rather than his gens, but in all the many years the family Matius was to live there, Aurelia never did find out Priscilla's proper name. The Matius family business was in brokerage arid the handling of contracts, and Gaius Matius's father lived with a second wife and younger children in a commodious house on the Quirinal. Aurelia was careful to check all this, and when her inquiries confirmed it, she rented Gaius Matius her ground-floor apartment for the welcome sum of ten thousand denarii a year; Epaphroditus's expensive murals and mosaic floor helped secure the contract, as did Aurelia's promise that all her future leasing contracts would be handled by the firm of Gaius Matius and Gaius Matius. For there were to be no more agents collecting the rents; from now on, Aurelia intended to run her insula herself. All the flats would be let by written lease, with an option to renew every two years. Penalty clauses for damage to the property were inserted, as well as clauses to protect the tenants from extortion by the landlord. She converted her sitting room into an office stacked high with account books, kept only her loom from all her old hobbies, and set to work to discover the complexities of being a landlady. After she collected the insula's paperwork from the erstwhile agents, Aurelia discovered there were files for all manner of things masons, painters, plasterers, vendors of many kinds, water rates, taxes, land titles, bills as well as receipts. A good deal of the incoming, she learned, would have to be almost immediately outgoing. As well as charging for the water and sewer laid on, the State took a small contribution for every window the insula possessed, and every door opening onto the street, and every staircase leading to every floor. And though it was undeniably a stoutly built insula, there were repairs going on all the time. Among the tradesmen listed were several carpenters; conning the dates, Aurelia found one man who seemed to have done the most work and lasted the longest. So she sent for him, and ordered him to remove the wooden screens boxing in the light-well. This project she had cherished from the time she and Caesar first moved into the insula; Aurelia had discovered in herself a longing to make a garden, and dreamed of transforming the ill-kept central courtyard into an oasis which would be a pleasure to everyone living in the building. But everything had conspired against her, starting with the problem of Epaphroditus, also entitled to use the courtyard. Caesar had never seen for himself the goings-on of Epaphroditus; the actor was cunning enough to make sure his debaucheries occurred only when Caesar was out. And Caesar, she learned, thought all women tended to exaggerate. Irksomely dense wooden screens were fixed between the columns of the balconies which looked down into the courtyard from every upper floor. Therefore, no one who lived upstairs could gain a glimpse of it. Admittedly these screens did keep the courtyard private and helped stem the constant torrent of noise which emanated from every flat but they also converted the light-well into a dreary brown chimney nine storeys high, and the courtyard into its equally dreary hearth, and rendered it impossible for any of the upper floors to obtain much light or much fresh air. Thus as soon as possible after Caesar left, Aurelia sent for her carpenter and told him to tear down every screen. He stared at her as if she had gone mad. "What's the matter?" she asked, bewildered. "Domina, you'll be knee-deep in shit and piss inside three days," he said, "not to mention anything else they want to toss out, from the dead dog to the dead granny to the girl-babies." She felt a tide of red suffuse her face until even her ears were on fire. It wasn't the unvarnished truth of the carpenter's statement mortified her, but her own naivete. Fool, fool, fool! Why hadn't she thought of that? Because, she answered herself, a lifetime of passing the doorways and staircases of apartment buildings could not give one who had always lived in a large private dwelling the remotest idea of what went on inside. Her Uncle Cotta would not have divined the purpose of that wooden screen any quicker than she had. She pressed her hands to her glowing cheeks and gave the carpenter such an adorable look of confused amusement that he dreamed of her for almost a year, called round regularly to see how things were, and improved the standard of his work by at least 100 percent. "Thank you!" she said to him fervently. The departure of the revolting Epaphroditus did give her the opportunity to start making a garden in the courtyard, however, and then the new tenant, Gaius Matius, revealed that he too had a passion for gardening. "Let me help!" he pleaded. It was difficult to say no when she had spent so long searching for these ideal tenants. “Of course you can help.'' Which led to yet another lesson. Through Gaius Matius, Aurelia learned that it was one thing to dream of making a wonderful garden, but quite another to actually do it. For she herself didn't have the eye or the art, whereas Gaius Matius did. In fact, he had a genius for gardening. Once the Caesar bathwater had gurgled down into the sewers, but now it was ducted to a small cistern in the courtyard, and fed the plants Gaius Matius produced with bewildering rapidity purloined, he informed Aurelia, from his father's Quirinal mansion in the main, but also from anyone else who owned a likely bush or vine or tree or ground cover. He knew how to graft a weakly plant onto strong rootstock of the same kind; he knew which plants liked a little lime, which Rome's naturally acidic soil; he knew the correct times of the year for sowing seed, bedding out, pruning. Within twelve months the courtyard all thirty feet by thirty feet of it was a bower, and creepers were wending their way steadily up lattices on the columns toward the patch of sky high above. Then one day Shimon the Jewish scribe came to see her, looking very strange to her Roman eyes in his long beard and with his long ringlets of hair curling around his little skullcap. “Domina Aurelia, the fourth floor has a very special favor to ask of you," he said. "If I can grant it, Shimon, be sure I will," she said gravely. "We will understand if you decline, for what we ask is an invasion of your privacy," said Shimon, picking his phrases with a delicacy he usually reserved for his work. "But if we pledge you our word that we will never abuse the privilege by tossing refuse or ordure might we remove the wooden screens from around our light-well balcony? We could breathe better air, and look down on your beautiful garden." Aurelia beamed. "I'm very happy to grant you this favor," she said. "However, I can't condone the use of the windows onto the street for disposing of refuse and ordure, either. You must promise me that all your wastes will be carried across the road to the public latrine, and tipped into the sewer." Delighted, Shimon promised. Down came the screens around the light-well balcony on the fourth floor, though Gaius Matius begged that they be retained where they covered the columns, so that his creepers could continue to grow upward. The Jewish floor started a fashion; the inventor and the spice merchant on the first floor just above asked next if they could take away their screens, and then the third floor asked, and the sixth, and the second, and the fifth, until finally only the freedman warrens of the two top floors were screened in. In the spring before the battle of Aquae Sextiae, Caesar made a hurried trip across the Alps bearing dispatches for Rome, and his brief visit resulted in a second pregnancy for Aurelia, who bore a second girl the following February, again in her own home, again attended by no one save the local midwife and Cardixa. This time she was alerted to her lack of milk, and the second little Julia who was to suffer all her life under the babyish sobriquet of "Ju-Ju" was put immediately onto the breasts of a dozen lactating mothers scattered through the various floors of the insula. "That's good," said Caesar in response to her letter telling him of Ju-Ju's birth, "we've got the two traditional Julian girls over and done with. The next set of dispatches I bring for the Senate, we'll start on the Julian boys." Which was much what her mother, Rutilia, had said, thinking to offer Aurelia comfort for bearing girls. "You might have known you were wasting your words," said Cotta, amused. "Yes, well !" said Rutilia irritably. "Honestly, Marcus Aurelius, that girl of mine baffles me! When I tried to cheer her up, all she did was raise her brows and remark that it was a matter of complete indifference to her which sex her babies were, as long as she had good babies." "But that's a wonderful attitude!" protested Cotta. "As those of us who can afford to feed the little things gave up exposing girl-babies at birth a good four or five hundred years ago, it's better that a mother welcomes her girls, surely." "Of course it is! It's the only attitude!" snapped Rutilia. "No, it's not her composure I'm complaining about, it's that maddening way she has of making you feel a fool for stating the obvious!" "I love her," chuckled Publius Rutilius Rufus, party to this exchange. "You would!" said Rutilia. "Is it a nice little girl-baby?" Rutilius asked. "Exquisite, what else could you expect? That pair couldn't have an ugly baby if they stood on their heads to make it," said the goaded Rutilia. "Now, now, who's supposed to be a proper Roman noblewoman?" Cotta chided, winking at Rutilius Rufus. "I hope your teeth fall out!" said Rutilia, and pitched her cushions at them.
Shortly after the birth of Ju-Ju, Aurelia was obliged to deal with the crossroads tavern at last. It was a task she had avoided, for though it was housed in her insula, she could collect no rent, as it was regarded as the meeting place of a religious brotherhood; while it didn't have temple or aedes status, it was nonetheless "official," and registered on the urban praetor's books. But it was a nuisance. Activity around it and in it never seemed to abate, even during the night, and some of its frequenters were very quick to push people off the sidewalk outside it, yet very slow to clean up the constant accumulation of refuse on that same section of sidewalk. Cardixa it was who first learned of a blacker aspect to the religious brotherhood of the crossroads tavern. She had been sent to the small shop alongside Aurelia's front door to purchase ointment for Ju-Ju's bottom, and found the proprietor an old Galatian woman who specialized in medicines and tonics, remedies and panaceas backed against the wall while two villainous-looking men debated with each other as to which set of jars and bottles they were going to smash first. Thanks to Cardixa, they smashed nothing; Cardixa smashed them instead. After the men had fled, howling imprecations, she got the tale out of the terrified old woman, who had been unable to pay her protection fee. "Every shop has to pay the crossroads brotherhood a fee to remain open," Cardixa told Aurelia. "They say they're providing a service to protect the shopkeepers from robbery and violence, but the only robbery and violence the shopkeepers suffer is at their hands when the protection fee isn't paid. Poor old Galatia buried her husband not long ago, as you know, dominilla, and she buried him very well. So she doesn't have any money at the moment." "That settles it!" said Aurelia, girding herself for war. "Come on, Cardixa, we'll soon fix this." Out her front door she marched, down past her shops on the Vicus Patricii, stopping at each one to force its proprietor into telling her about the brotherhood's protection fees. From some she discovered that the brotherhood's business extended far beyond her own insula's shops, and so she ended in walking the entire neighborhood, unraveling an amazing tale of blatant extortion. Even the two women who ran the public latrine on the opposite side of the Subura Minor under contract to the firm which held the contract from the State were forced to pay the brotherhood a percentage of the money they received from patrons well off enough to afford a sponge on a stick to clean themselves after defaecating; when the brotherhood discovered that the two women also ran a service collecting chamber pots from various apartments for emptying and cleaning, and had not revealed this, every chamber pot was broken, and the women were obliged to buy new ones. The baths next door to the public latrine were privately owned as were all baths in Rome but did a lucrative trade nonetheless. Here too the brotherhood levied fees which assured that the customers were not held under the water until they nearly drowned. By the time Aurelia finished her investigation, she was so angry she thought it wise to go home and calm down before confronting the brotherhood in their lair. "Out of my house!" she said to Cardixa. "My house!" "Don't you worry, Aurelia, we'll give them their comeuppance," Cardixa comforted. "Where's Ju-Ju?" asked Aurelia, taking deep breaths. "Upstairs on the fourth floor. It's Rebeccah's turn to give her a drink this morning." Aurelia wrung her hands. "Why can't I seem to make milk? I'm as dry as a crone!" Cardixa shrugged. "Some women make milk; others don't. No one knows why. Now don't get down in the dumps it's this brotherhood business that's really upsetting you. No one minds giving Ju-Ju a drink, you know that. I'll send one of the servants upstairs to ask Rebeccah to keep Ju-Ju for a little while, and we'll go down and sort these wretches out." Aurelia rose to her feet. "Come on, then, let's get it over and done with." The interior of the tavern was very dim; Aurelia stood in the doorway outlined in light, at the peak of a beauty which lasted all of her life. The din inside subsided at once, but began again angrily when Cardixa loomed behind her mistress. "That's the great elephant beat us up this morning!" said a voice out of the gloom. Benches scraped. Aurelia marched in and stood looking about, Cardixa hovering watchfully at her back. "Who's responsible for you louts?" Aurelia demanded. Up he got from a table in one back corner, a skinny little man in his forties with an unmistakably Roman look to him. "That's me," he said, coming forward. "Lucius Decumius, at your service." "Do you know who I am?" asked Aurelia. He nodded. "You are tenanting rent-free! premises which I own," she said. "You don't own this here premises, madam," said Lucius Decumius, "the State do." "The State does not," she said, and gazed about her now that her eyes were getting used to the poor light. "This place is a downright disgrace. You don't look after it at all. I am evicting you." A collective gasp went up. Lucius Decumius narrowed his eyes and looked alert. "You can't evict us," he said. "Just watch me!" "I'll complain to the urban praetor." "Do, by all means! He's my cousin." "Then there's the Pontifex Maximus." "So there is. He's my cousin too." Lucius Decumius snorted, a sound which might have been contempt or laughter. "They can't all be your cousins!" "They can, and they are." Aurelia's formidable jaw jutted forward. "Make no mistake, Lucius Decumius, you and your dirty ruffians are going." He stood gazing at her reflectively, one hand scratching his chin, what could have been a smile lurking at the back of his clear grey eyes; then he stepped aside and bowed toward the table where he had been sitting. "How about we discuss our little problem?" he asked, smooth as Scaurus. "There's nothing to discuss," said Aurelia. "You're going." "Pooh! There's always room for discussion. Come on, now, madam, let's you and me sit down," wheedled Lucius Decumius. And Aurelia found that an awful thing was happening to her; she was starting to like Lucius Decumius! Which was manifestly ridiculous. Yet a fact, nonetheless. “All right,'' she said. “Cardixa, stand behind my chair.'' Lucius Decumius produced the chair, and sat himself on a bench. "A drop of wine, madam?" "Certainly not." "Oh." "Well?" "Well what?" asked Lucius Decumius. "It's you wanted to discuss things," she pointed out. "S'right, so it was." Lucius Decumius cleared his throat. "Now what precisely was you objecting to, madam?" "Your presence under my roof." "Now, now, that's a bit broad in scope, ain't it? I mean, we can come to some sort of arrangement you tell me what you don't like, and I'll see if I can't fix it," said Decumius. "The dilapidation. The filth. The noise. The assumption that you own the street as well as these premises, when neither is the truth," Aurelia began, ticking her points off on her fingers. "And your little neighborhood business! Terrorizing harmless shopkeepers into paying you money they can't afford! What a despicable thing to do!" "The world, madam," said Decumius, leaning forward with great earnestness, "is divided into sheep and wolves. It's natural. If it weren't natural, there wouldn't be a lot more sheep than there are wolves, where we all know for every wolf there's at least a thousand sheep. Think of us inside here as the local wolves. We're not bad as wolves go. Only little teeth, a bite or two, no necks broken." "That is a revolting metaphor," said Aurelia, "and it doesn't sway me one little bit. Out you go." "Oh, deary me!" said Lucius Decumius, leaning backward. "Deary, deary me." He shot her a look. "Are they really all your cousins?'' "My father was the consul Lucius Aurelius Cotta. My uncle is the consul Publius Rutilius Rufus. My other uncle is the praetor Marcus Aurelius Cotta. My husband is the quaestor Gaius Julius Caesar.'' Aurelia sat back in her chair, lifted her head a little, closed her eyes, and said smugly, "And what is more, Gaius Marius is my brother-in-law." "Well, my brother-in-law is the King of Egypt, ha ha!" said Lucius Decumius, supersaturated with names. "Then I suggest you go home to Egypt," said Aurelia, not a bit annoyed at this feeble sarcasm. "The consul Gaius Marius is my brother-in-law." "Oh, yes, and of course Gaius Marius's sister-in-law is going to be living in an insula way up the Subura's arse-end!" countered Lucius Decumius. "This insula is mine. It's my dowry, Lucius Decumius. My husband is a younger son, so we live here in my insula for the time being. Later on, we'll be living elsewhere." "Gaius Marius really is your brother-in-law?" "Down to the last hair in his eyebrows." Lucius Decumius heaved a sigh. "I like it here," he said, "so we'd better do some negotiating." "I want you out," said Aurelia. "Now look, madam, I do have some right on my side," said Lucius Decumius. "The members of this here lodge are the custodians of the crossroads shrine. Legitimate, like. You may think all them cousins means you own the State but if we go, another lot are only going to move in, right? It's a crossroads college, madam, official on the urban praetor's books. And I'll let you in on a little secret." He leaned forward again. "All of us crossroads brethren are wolves!" He thrust his neck out, rather like a tortoise. "Now you and me can come to an agreement, madam. We keep this place clean, we slap a bit of paint on the walls, we tippy-toe around after dark, we help old ladies across the drains and gutters, we cease and desist our little neighborhood operation in fact, we turn into pillars of society! How does that take your fancy?" Try though she might to suppress it, that smile would tug at the corners of her mouth! "Better the evil I know, eh, Lucius Decumius?" "Much better!" he said warmly. "I can't say I'd look forward to going through all of this again with a different lot of you," she said. "Very well, Lucius Decumius, you're on trial for six months." She got up and went to the door, Lucius Decumius escorting her. "But don't think for one moment that I lack the courage to get rid of you and break in a new lot," she said, stepping into the street. Lucius Decumius walked with her down the Vicus Patricii, clearing a path for her through the crowds with magical ease. "I assure you, madam, we will be pillars of society." "But it's very difficult to do without an income after you've grown used to spending it," said Aurelia. "Oh, that's no worry, madam!" said Lucius Decumius cheerfully. "Rome's a big place. We'll just shift our income-making operation far enough away not to annoy you the Viminal the Agger the factory swamps plenty of places. Don't you worry your lovely little head about Lucius Decumius and his brothers of the sacred crossroads. We'll be all right." "That's no kind of answer!" said Aurelia. "What's the difference between terrorizing our own neighborhood, and doing the same thing somewhere else?" "What the eye don't see and the ear don't hear, the heart don't grieve about," he said, genuinely surprised at her denseness. "That's a fact, madam." They had reached her front door. She stopped and looked at him ruefully. "I daresay you'll do as you see fit, Lucius Decumius. But don't ever let me find out whereabouts you've transferred your operation, as you call it." "Mum, madam, I swear! Mum, dumb, numb!" He reached past her to knock on her door, which was opened with suspicious alacrity by the steward himself. "Ah, Eutychus, haven't seen you in the brotherhood for a few days now," said Lucius Decumius blandly. "Next time madam gives you a holiday, I'll expect to see you in the lodge. We're going to wash the place out and give it a bit of a paint to please madam. Got to keep the sister-in-law of Gaius Marius happy, eh?" Eutychus looked thoroughly miserable. "Indeed," he said. "Oho, holding out on us, were you? Why didn't you tell us who madam was?" asked Lucius Decumius in tones of silk. "As you will have noticed over the years, Lucius Decumius, I do not talk about my family at all," said Eutychus grandly. "Wretched Greeks, they're all the same," said Lucius Decumius, giving his lank brown hair a tug in Aurelia's direction. "Good day to you, madam. Very nice to make your acquaintance. Anything the lodge can do to help, let me know." When the door had closed behind her, Aurelia looked at the steward expressionlessly. "And what have you got to say for yourself?" she asked. "Domina, I have to belong!" he wailed. "I'm the steward of the landlords they wouldn't not let me belong!" "You realize, Eutychus, that I could have you flogged for this," said Aurelia, still expressionless. "Yes," he whispered. "A flogging is the established punishment, is it not?" "Yes," he whispered. "Then it is well for you that I am my husband's wife and my father's daughter," said Aurelia. "My father-in-law, Gaius Julius, put it best, I think. Shortly before he died he said that he could never understand how any family could live in the same house with people they flogged, be it their sons or their slaves. However, there are other ways of dealing with disloyalty and insolence. Never think I am not prepared to take the financial loss of selling you with bad references. And you know what that would mean. Instead of a price of ten thousand denarii on your head, it would be a thousand sesterces. And your new owner would be so vulgarly low he'd flog you unmercifully, for you would come to him tagged as a bad slave." "I understand, domina." “Good! Go on belonging to the crossroads brotherhood I can appreciate your predicament. I also commend you for your discretion about us." She went to move away, then stopped. "Lucius Decumius. Does he have a job?" "He's the lodge caretaker," said Eutychus, looking more uneasy than ever. "You're keeping something back." "No, no!" "Come on, give me all of it!" "Well, domina, it's only a rumor," said Eutychus. "No one really knows, you understand. But he has been heard to say it himself though that could be idle boasting. Or he could be saying it to frighten us." "Saying what!" The steward blanched. "He says he's an assassin." "Ecastor! And who has he assassinated?" she asked. "I believe he takes credit for that Numidian fellow who was stabbed in the Forum Romanum some years ago," said Eutychus. "Will wonders never cease!" said Aurelia, and went off to see what her babies were doing. "They broke the mould when they made her," said Eutychus to Cardixa. The huge Gallic maidservant put out a hand and hurled it down on the pretty steward's shoulder much as a cat might have tethered a mouse by putting a paw on its tail. "They did indeed," she said, giving Eutychus an ostensibly friendly shake. "That's why we've all got to look after her."
It was not so very long after this that Gaius Julius Caesar came home from Italian Gaul bearing Marius's message from Vercellae. He simply knocked on the door and was admitted by the steward, who then helped Caesar's orderly in with his baggage while Caesar went to find his wife. She was in the courtyard garden tying little gauze bags around the ripening grapes on Gaius Matius's arbor, and didn't bother to turn when she heard a footfall. "You wouldn't think the Subura was so full of birds, would you?" she asked whoever it was. "But this year I'm determined we'll get to eat the grapes, so I'm going to see if this works." "I'll look forward to the grapes," said Caesar. She spun round, her handful of gauze bags fluttering to the ground, her face transformed with joy. "Gaius Julius!" He held out his arms, she ran into them. Never had a kiss been more loving, nor followed so quickly by a dozen more. The sound of applause brought them back to reality; Caesar looked up the height of the light-well to find the railings of the balconies lined with beaming people, and waved up to them. "A great victory!" he called. "Gaius Marius has annihilated the Germans! Rome need never fear them again!" Leaving the tenants to rejoice and spread the news through the Subura before either Senate or People were informed, Caesar slipped an arm about Aurelia's shoulders and walked with her into the narrow hallway which ran between the reception room and the kitchen area; he turned in the direction of his study, approving of the neatness, the cleanliness, the tasteful yet inexpensive decor. There were vases of flowers everywhere, a new side to Aurelia's housekeeping, he thought, and wondered anxiously if she could afford so many blooms. "I have to see Marcus Aemilius Scaurus right away," he said, "but I wasn't going to go to his house before I visited mine. How good it is to be home!" "It's wonderful," said Aurelia shakily. "It will be more wonderful still tonight, wife, when you and I start making our first boy," he said, kissing her again. "Oh, I do miss you! No other woman has any appeal after you, and that's the truth. Is there any chance of a bath?" "I saw Cardixa duck in there a moment ago, so I expect it's being run for you already." Aurelia snuggled against him with a sigh of pleasure. "And you're sure it isn't too much for you, running our house, looking after our girls, and this whole barn of a place?" he asked. "I know you always tell me the agents took more commission than they should, but ” "It is no trouble, Gaius Julius. This is a very orderly residence, and our tenants are superior," she said firmly. "I've even sorted out the little difficulty I had with the crossroads tavern, so that's very quiet and clean these days." She laughed up at him, passing it off casually, lightly. “You've no idea how co-operative and well behaved everyone is when they find out I'm Gaius Marius's sister-in-law!" "All these flowers!" said Caesar. "Aren't they beautiful? They're a perpetual gift I receive every four or five days." His arms tightened about her. "Do I have a rival, then?" "I don't think you'll be worried after you meet him," said Aurelia. "His name is Lucius Decumius. He's an assassin." "A what!" "No, dearest love, I'm only joking," she soothed. "He says he's an assassin, I suspect to maintain his ascendancy over his fellow brethren. He's the caretaker of the tavern." "Where does he get the flowers?" She laughed softly. "Never look a gift horse in the mouth," she said. "In the Subura, things are different."
3
It was Publius Rutilius Rufus who apprised Gaius Marius of events in Rome immediately after Caesar delivered the victory letter.
There's a very nasty feeling in the air, arising chiefly out of the fact that you've succeeded in what you set out to do, namely eliminate the Germans, and the People are so grateful that if you stand for the consulship, you'll get in yet again. The word on every highborn lip is "dictator" and the First Class at least is starting to sit up and echo it. Yes, I know you have many important knight clients and friends in the First Class, but you must understand that the whole of Rome's political and traditional structure is designed to depress the pretensions of men who stand above their peers. The only permissible "first" is the first among equals, but after five consulships, three of them in absentia, it is getting extremely difficult to disguise the fact that you tower over your so-called equals. Scaurus is disgusted, but him you could deal with if you had to. No, the real turd in the bottom of the punch bowl is your friend and mine, Piggle-wiggle, ably assisted by his stammering son, the Piglet. From the moment you moved east of the Alps to join Catulus Caesar in Italian Gaul, Piggle-wiggle and the Piglet have made it their business to blow Catulus Caesar's contributions to the campaign against the Cimbri out of all proportion to the fact. So when the news of the victory at Vercellae came, and the House met in the temple of Bellona to debate things like triumphs and votes of thanksgiving, there were a lot of ears ready to listen when Piggle-wiggle got up to speak. Briefly, he moved that only two triumphs be held one by you, for Aquae Sextiae, and one by Catulus Caesar, for Vercellae! Completely ignoring the fact that you were the commander on the field of Vercellae, not Catulus Caesar! His argument is purely legalistic two armies were involved, one commanded by the consul, you, and the other by the proconsul, Catulus Caesar. The amount of spoils involved, said Piggle-wiggle, was disappointingly small, and would look ridiculously inadequate were three triumphs to be celebrated. Therefore, since you hadn't yet celebrated the triumph voted you for Aquae Sextiae, why, you could have that, and Catulus Caesar could have the triumph he was entitled to for Vercellae. A second Vercellae triumph celebrated by you would be a superfluity. Lucius Appuleius Saturninus got up at once to object, and was howled down. Since he is a privatus this year, he holds no office that might have compelled the Conscript Fathers to pay him more attention. The House voted two triumphs, yours to be solely for Aquae Sextiae–last year's battle, therefore less significant and Vercellae this year's battle, therefore the big one in everybody's eyes solely the prerogative of Catulus Caesar. In effect, as the Vercellae triumph wends its way through the city, it will be telling the people that you had absolutely nothing to do with the defeat of the Cimbri in Italian Gaul, that Catulus Caesar was the hero. Your own idiocy in handing him most of the spoils and all the German standards captured on the field has clinched the matter. When your mood is expansive and your natural generosity is allowed to come to the fore, you commit your worst blunders, and that is the truth. I don't know what you can do about it the whole thing is cut and dried, officially voted upon, and recorded in the archives. I am very angry about it, but the Policy Makers (as Saturninus calls them) or the boni (as Scaurus calls them) have won the engagement resoundingly, and you will never quite have as much prestige for the defeat of the Germans as you ought. It amused us all those years ago at Numantia to perpetuate the mud bath Metellus took among his porky friends by tagging him with a porky nickname that also happens to be nursery slang for a little girl's genitalia, but it is my considered opinion now that the man is no piggle-wiggle he's a full-grown cunnus. As for the Piglet, he's not going to be a little girl all his life, either. Another full-grown cunnus. Enough, enough, I'll give myself that apoplexy yet! I shall conclude this missive by telling you that Sicily is looking good. Manius Aquillius is doing a superb job, which only makes Servilius the Augur look smaller. However, he did what he promised: he indicted Lucullus in the new treason court. Lucullus insisted upon conducting his own defense, and did his cause no good with all those farting blow-my-nose-between-my-fingers knights, for he stood there with all that freezing hauteur of his showing, and the entire jury thought he was directing it at them. He was, he was! Another stubborn idiot, Lucullus. Naturally they condemned him DAMNO written upon every tile, I believe. And the savagery of the sentence was unbelievable! His place of exile can be no closer to Rome than a thousand miles, which leaves him only two places of any size at all Antioch or Alexandria. He has chosen to honor King Ptolemy Alexander over King Antiochus Grypus. And the court took everything he owned off him houses, lands, investments, city property. He didn't wait for them to hound him to leave. In fact, he didn't even wait to see how much his possessions fetched, but commended his trollop of a wife to the care of her brother, Piggle-wiggle–that'll punish him a little! and left his elder son, now sixteen and a man in the eyes of the State, to his own devices. Interesting, that he didn't commend this very gifted boy to Piggle-wiggle's care, isn't it? The younger now fourteen is adopted. Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus. Scaurus was telling me that both boys have vowed to prosecute Servilius the Augur as soon as Varro Lucullus is old enough to don the toga of manhood; the parting with their father was heartrending, as you might imagine. Scaurus says Lucullus will get himself to Alexandria, and then choose to die. And that both boys think that's what their tata will do too. What hurts the Licinii Luculli most is the fact that all this pain and poverty has been inflicted upon them by a jumped-up nobody New Man like Servilius the Augur. You New Men have not made yourselves any friends when it comes to Lucullus's sons. Anyway, when the Lucullus boys are old enough to prosecute Servilius the Augur in tandem, it will be in the new extortion court as set up by yet another Servilius of relatively obscure origins, Gaius Servilius Glaucia. By Pollux, Gaius Marius, he can draft laws, that fellow! The setup is ironclad and novel, but it works. Back in the hands of the knights and so no consolation to governors, but workmanlike. Recovery of peculated property is now extended to the ultimate recipients as well as the original thieves anyone convicted in the court cannot address any public meeting anywhere men of the Latin Rights who successfully prosecute a malefactor will be rewarded with the full Roman citizenship and there is now a recess inserted into the middle of the trial proceedings. The old procedure is a thing of the past, and the testimony of witnesses, as the few cases heard in it have proven, is now far less important than the addresses of the advocates themselves. A great boon to the great advocates. And last but not least that peculiar fellow Saturninus has been in trouble again. Truly, Gaius Marius, I fear for his sanity. Logic is missing. As indeed I believe it is from his friend Glaucia. Both so brilliant, and yet so unstable, so downright crazy. Or perhaps it is that they don't honestly know what they want out of public life. Even the worst demagogue has a pattern, a logic directed toward the praetorship and the consulship. But I don't see it in either of that pair. They hate the old style of government, they hate the Senate but they have nothing to put in its place. Perhaps they're what the Greeks call exponents of anarchy? I'm not sure. Anyway, the scales have recently tipped against King Nicomedes of Bithynia in the matter of the embassage from King Mithridates of Pontus. Our young friend from the remotenesses at the eastern end of the Euxine sent ambassadors acute enough to discover the secret weakness of all us Romans money! Having got nowhere with their petition for a treaty of friendship and alliance, they began to buy senators. And they paid well, and Nicomedes had cause to worry, I can tell you. Then Saturninus got up on the rostra and condemned all those in the Senate who were prepared to abandon Nicomedes and Bithynia in favor of Mithridates and Pontus. We had had a treaty with Bithynia for years, he said, and Pontus was Bithynia's traditional enemy. Money had changed hands, he said, and Rome for the sake of a few fatter senatorial purses was going to abandon her friend and ally of fifty years. It is alleged I wasn't there myself to hear him that he said something like "We all know how expensive it can be for doddering old senators to marry frisky little fillies not out of the schoolroom, don't we? I mean, pearl necklaces and gold bracelets are a lot more expensive than a bottle of that tonic Ticinus sells in his Cuppedenis stall and who's to say that a frisky young filly isn't a more effective tonic than Ticinus's?" Oh, oh, oh! He sneered at Piggle-wiggle as well, and asked the crowd, "What about our boys in Italian Gaul?" The result was that several of the Pontic ambassadors were beaten up, and went to the Senaculum to complain. Whereupon Scaurus and Piggle-wiggle had Saturninus arraigned in his own treason court on a charge of sowing discord between Rome and an accredited embassage from a foreign monarch. On the day of the trial, our tribune of the plebs Glaucia called a meeting of the Plebeian Assembly, and accused Piggle-wiggle of having another try at getting rid of Saturninus, whom he hadn't been able to get rid of when he functioned as censor. And those hired gladiators Saturninus seems to be able to put his hands on when necessary turned up at the trial, ringed the jurors round, and looked so grim that the jury dismissed the case. The Pontic ambassadors promptly went home without their treaty. I agree with Saturninus it would be a wretchedly paltry thing to do, to abandon our friend and ally of fifty years in favor of his traditional enemy just because his enemy is now far richer and more powerful. No more, no more, Gaius Marius! I really only wanted to let you know about the triumphs ahead of the official dispatches, which the Senate won't rush to you in a hurry. I wish there was something you could do, but I doubt it.
"Oh yes, there is!" said Marius grimly when he had deciphered the letter. He drew a sheet of paper toward him and spent considerable time drafting a short letter of his own. Then he sent for Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar. Catulus Caesar arrived bubbling with enthusiasm, for the hired courier who had carried Rutilius Rufus's Marius missive had also brought a letter from Metellus Numidicus to Catulus Caesar, and another from Scaurus to Catulus Caesar. It was a disappointment to find Marius already aware of the two-triumph vote; Catulus Caesar had been dwelling rather voluptuously upon seeing Marius's face when he heard. However, that was a minor consideration. The triumph was the triumph. "So I'd like to return to Rome in October, if you don't mind," Catulus Caesar drawled. "I'll celebrate my triumph first, since you as consul can't leave quite so early." "Permission to go is refused," said Marius with cheerful civility. "We'll return to Rome together at the end of November, just as we planned. In fact, I've just sent a letter to the Senate on behalf of both of us. Like to hear it? I won't bore you with my writing I'll read it out to you." He took a small paper from his cluttered table, unfurled it, and read it to Catulus Caesar.