Catulus Caesar had gone white. "You're joking!" he said. "I? Joke?" Marius blinked beneath his brows. "Never, Quintus Lutatius!" "I I I refuse to consent!" "You don't have any choice," said Marius sweetly. "They thought they had me beaten, didn't they? Dear old Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle and his friends and your friends! Well, you'll never beat me, any of you." "The Senate has decreed two triumphs, and two triumphs it will be!" said Catulus Caesar, shaking. "Oh, you could insist, Quintus Lutatius. But it won't look good, will it? Take your choice. Either you and I triumph together in the same parade, or you are going to look like one enormous fool. That's it." And that was it. The letter from Marius went to the Senate, and the single triumph was announced for the first day of the month of December. Catulus Caesar was not slow to take his revenge. He wrote to the Senate complaining that the consul Gaius Marius had usurped the prerogatives of the Senate and People of Rome by awarding the full citizenship to a thousand auxiliary soldiers from Camerinum in Picenum right there on the field of Vercellae. He had also exceeded his consular authority, said Catulus Caesar, by announcing that he was founding a colony of Roman veteran legionaries at the small town of Eporedia in Italian Gaul. The letter went on:
Gaius Marius has established this unconstitutional colony in order to lay his hands upon the alluvial gold which is mined from the bed of the Duria Major at Eporedia. The proconsul Quintus Lutatius Catulus also wishes to point out that he won the battle of Vercellae, not Gaius Marius. As proof positive, he tenders thirty-five captured German standards in his keeping, as against a mere two in the keeping of Gaius Marius. As the victor of Vercellae, I claim all the captives taken to be sold into slavery. Gaius Marius is insisting upon taking one third of them.
In answer, Marius circulated Catulus Caesar's letter among the troops of his own army and Catulus Caesar's; it had a laconic appendix from Marius himself attached, to the effect that the proceeds from the sale of Cimbric captives taken after Vercellae to the limit of the one third he had claimed for himself were to be donated to the army of Quintus Lutatius Catulus. His own army, he pointed out, had already been given the proceeds from the sale of the Teutonic slaves after Aquae Sextiae, and he didn't wish Catulus Caesar's army to feel entirely neglected, for he understood that Quintus Lutatius would as was his right be keeping the proceeds from the sale of his two thirds of the Cimbric slaves for himself. Glaucia read out both letters in the Forum in Rome, and the People laughed themselves sick. There could be no doubt in anyone's mind who was the real victor, and who cared more for his troops than for himself. "You'll have to stop this campaign to vilify Gaius Marius," said Scaurus Princeps Senatus to Metellus Numidicus, "or you're going to be slapped about again the next time you go into the Forum. And you'd better write to Quintus Lutatius and tell him the same. Whether we like it or not, Gaius Marius is the First Man in Rome. He won the war against the Germans, and the whole of Rome knows it. He's the popular hero, the popular demigod. Try to bring him down, and the city will unite to bring you down, Quintus Caecilius." "Piss on the People!" said Metellus Numidicus, who was feeling the strain of having to house his sister, Metella Calva, and whichever lowborn lover she fancied. "Look, there are other things we can do," urged Scaurus. "For one thing, you can run for consul again. It's ten years since you were consul, believe it or not! Gaius Marius will be running again, nothing surer. Wouldn't it be wonderful to saddle his sixth consulship with an inimical colleague like yourself?" "Oh, when are we going to rid ourselves of this incurable disease called Gaius Marius?" cried Numidicus in despair. "Hopefully it won't be long," said Scaurus, obviously not despairing. "A year. I doubt it will be more." "Never, more like." "No, no, Quintus Caecilius, you give up too easily! Like Quintus Lutatius, you let your hatred for Gaius Marius rule your head. Think! How much time during all his five eternal consulships has Gaius Marius actually spent in Rome herself?" "A matter of days. What's that to the point?" "It is the whole point, Quintus Caecilius! Gaius Marius is not a great politician, though I do admit he's got a wonderfully sharp brain between his ears. Where Gaius Marius shines is as a soldier and an organizer. I assure you, he's not going to thrive in the Comitia and the Curia when his world shrinks down to nothing else. We won't let him thrive! We'll bait him like a bull, we'll fasten our teeth in his carcass and we won't let go. And we'll bring him down. You wait and see." Scaurus sounded supremely sure. Staring at these welcome vistas Scaurus was opening up, Metellus Numidicus smiled. "Yes, I understand, Marcus Aemilius. Very well, I'll stand for consul." "Good! You'll get in you can't not get in after we bring every ounce of influence we have to bear on the First and Second Classes, no matter how much they love Gaius Marius." "Oh, I can't wait to be his colleague!" Metellus Numidicus drew out his muscles in a secretive stretch. "I'll block him every way I can! His life will be a misery." "I suspect we'll have help from an unexpected quarter too," said Scaurus, looking like a cat. "What quarter?" "Lucius Appuleius Saturninus is going to run for another term as a tribune of the plebs." "That's ghastly news! How can it help us?" Numidicus asked. "No, it's excellent news, Quintus Caecilius, believe me. For when you sink your consular teeth into Gaius Marius's rump, and so do I, and Quintus Lutatius, and half a hundred more, Gaius Marius won't resist enlisting Saturninus to help him. I know Gaius Marius. He can be tried too far, and when that happens, he'll lash out wildly in every direction. Just like a baited bull. He won't be able to resist using Saturninus. And I think Saturninus is probably the worst tool a Gaius Marius could put his hands on. You wait and see!" Scaurus said. "It's his allies will bring our bull Gaius Marius down."
The tool was on his way to Italian Gaul to see Gaius Marius, more anxious to form an alliance with Marius than Marius was with him at that stage; for Saturninus was living in the Roman political arena, whereas Marius was still living in a military commander's Elysium. They met in the little resort town of Comum on the shores of Lake Larius, where Gaius Marius had hired a villa belonging to the late Lucius Calpurnius Piso, the same who had died with Lucius Cassius at Burdigala. For Marius was more tired than he would ever have admitted to Catulus Caesar, nearly ten years his junior; he packed Catulus Caesar off to the far end of the province to hear the assizes, and packed himself off very quietly to enjoy a vacation, leaving Sulla in command. Naturally when Saturninus turned up, Marius invited him to stay; the two men settled down in welcome leisure to have their talks against the background of a lake far lovelier than any in Italy proper. Not that Marius had grown more convoluted; when the time came to broach the subject, he attacked it straight on. "I don't want Metellus Numidicus for my consular colleague next year," he said abruptly. "I've got Lucius Valerius Flaccus in mind. He's a malleable man." "He'd suit you well," said Saturninus, "but you won't pull it off, I'm afraid. The Policy Makers are already canvassing support for Metellus Numidicus." He looked at Marius curiously. "Anyway, why are you running for a sixth term? Surely with the Germans defeated, you can rest on your laurels." "I only wish I could, Lucius Appuleius. But the job is not finished just because the Germans are defeated. I have two Head Count armies to discharge or rather, I have one of six overstrength legions, and Quintus Lutatius has one of six very understrength legions. But I regard both armies as my responsibility, because Quintus Lutatius thinks he can just issue them with their discharge papers and forget about them." "You're still determined to give them land, aren't you?" asked Saturninus. "I am. If I don't, Lucius Appuleius, Rome will be the poorer in many ways. First off, because over fifty thousand veteran legionaries are going to descend upon Rome and Italy with a bit of money jingling in their purses. They'll spend the lot in a few days, and then turn into a perpetual source of trouble wherever they live. If there's a war, they'll re-enlist. But if there's no war on, they're going to be a real nuisance," said Marius. Saturninus inclined his head. "I can see that." "I got the idea when I was in Africa, and that's why I had the African islands reserved for veterans to settle in. Tiberius Gracchus wanted to resettle Rome's poor on the land in Campania to make the city more comfortable and safer, and to put some new blood onto the land. But Italy was a mistake, Lucius Appuleius," Marius said dreamily. "We need Romans of humble sort in our provinces. Especially veteran soldiers." The view was so beautiful, but Saturninus didn't see it. "Well, we all heard the speech about bringing Rome's way of life to the provinces," he said. "And we all heard Dalmaticus's reply. But that's not your real object, is it, Gaius Marius?'' The eyes flashed beneath the eyebrows. "How very acute of you! Of course it's not!" He leaned forward in his chair. "It costs Rome a great deal of money to send armies to the provinces to put down rebellions and police the laws. Look at Macedonia. Two legions on permanent duty there -not Roman legions, admittedly, but they still cost the State money it could put to better use elsewhere. Now what if twenty or thirty thousand Roman veterans were settled in three or four colonies across Macedonia? Greece and Macedonia are very empty places these days, have been for a century or more the people all left. Ghost towns everywhere! And Roman absentee landlords owning enormous properties, producing little, putting nothing back into the country, parsimonious about employing local men and women. And whenever the Scordisci come down across the border, there's war, and the absentee landlords bleat to the Senate, and the governor runs in different directions dealing with marauding Celts on the one hand, and irate letters from Rome on the other. Well, I'd put the land held by Roman absentee landlords to better use. I'd fill it up with veteran soldier colonies. More populous by far and a ready-made garrison force in case of serious war." "And you got this idea in Africa," said Saturninus. "While I was doling out vast tracts to Roman men who will rarely if ever visit Africa. They'll put in overseers and gangs of grain slaves, ignore local conditions and the local people, keep Africa from going ahead, and lay it wide open to another Jugurtha. I don't want Roman ownership of provincial land to stop I just want some parcels of provincial land to contain large numbers of well-trained professional Romans we can call on in times of need." He forced himself to lie back again, not to betray the urgency of his desire. "There's already been one small example of how veteran colonies in foreign lands can help in times of emergency. My first little lot I settled personally on the island of Meninx heard about the Sicilian slave uprising, organized themselves into units, hired some ships, and reached Lilybaeum just in time to prevent the city's falling to Athenion the slave." "I do see what you're trying to achieve, Gaius Marius," Saturninus said. "It's an excellent scheme." "But they'll fight me, if for no other reason than it's me," said Marius with a sigh. A tiny shiver ran up Saturninus's spine; quickly he turned head and eyes away, pretended to admire the reflection of trees and mountains and sky and clouds in the perfect mirror of the lake. Marius was tired! Marius was slowing down! Marius was not looking forward to his sixth consulship one little bit! "I daresay you witnessed all the squealing and shouting in Rome about my giving the citizenship to those wonderful soldiers from Camerinum?" Marius asked. "I did. All Italy heard the racket," said Saturninus, "and all Italy liked what you did. Where Rome of the Policy Makers definitely did not." "Well, and why shouldn't they be Roman citizens?" Marius demanded angrily. "They fought better than any other men on the field, Lucius Appuleius, and that's a fact. If I had my way, I'd confer the citizenship on every man in the whole of Italy." He drew a breath. "When I say I want land for the Head Count veterans, I mean just that. Land for the lot of them Romans, Latins and Italians." Saturninus whistled. "That's asking for trouble! The Policy Makers will never lie down for it." "I know. What I don't know is if you've got the courage to stand up for it." "I've never really taken a good long look at courage," said Saturninus thoughtfully, "so I'm not sure how much of it I own. But yes, Gaius Marius, I think I have the courage to stand up for it." "I don't need to bribe to secure my own election I can't lose," Marius said. "However, there's no reason why I can't hire a few fellows to distribute bribes for the post of junior consul. And for you, if you need help, Lucius Appuleius. And for Gaius Servilius Glaucia too. I understand he's going to be running for election as a praetor?" "He is indeed. And yes, Gaius Marius, we'd both be happy to accept help in getting elected. In return, we'll do whatever is necessary to assist you in getting your land." Marius drew a roll of paper out of his sleeve. "I've done a little work already just sketched out the sort of bill I think is necessary. Unfortunately I'm not one of Rome's greatest legal draftsmen. Where you are. But and I hope you'll not take exception to my saying it Glaucia is a lawmaking genius. Can the pair of you formulate great laws from my ill-educated scribbles?" "You help us into office, Gaius Marius, and I assure you we'll give you your laws," said Saturninus. There could be no mistaking the relief which coursed through Marius's big fit body; he sagged. "Only let me pull this off, Lucius Appuleius, and I swear I don't care if I'm never consul a seventh time," he said. "A seventh time?" "It was prophesied that I would be consul seven times." Saturninus laughed. "Why not? No one would ever have thought it possible that one man would be consul six times. But you will be."
The elections for the new College of the Tribunes of the Plebs were held as Gaius Marius and Catulus Caesar led their armies south toward Rome and their single joint triumph, and they were hotly contested. There were over thirty candidates for the ten posts, and more than half of that number were creatures in the employ of the Policy Makers, so the campaign was bitter and violent. Glaucia, president of the current ten tribunes of the plebs, was deputed to hold the elections for the incoming college; had the Centuriate elections for consuls and praetors already been held, he would not have been able to officiate, for his status as praetor-elect would have disqualified him. As it was, nothing prevented his conducting the tribunate elections. The proceedings took place in the well of the Comitia, with Glaucia presiding from the rostra, and his nine fellow tribunes of the plebs drawing the lots to see which of the thirty-five tribes would vote first through to last, then marshaling each tribe when its turn came to vote. A lot of money had changed hands, some of it on behalf of Saturninus, but a great deal more on behalf of the anonymous candidates fielded by the Policy Makers. Every rich man on the conservative front benches had dug deep into his cashbox, and votes were bought for men like Quintus Nonius from Picenum, a political nobody of stoutly conservative heart. Though Sulla had had nothing to do with his entering the Senate, nor his standing for the tribunate of the plebs, he was the brother of Sulla's brother-in-law; when Sulla's sister, Cornelia Sulla, had married into the wealthy squirarchical family of Nonius from Picenum, the luster of her name inspired the men of the family of Nonius to try their luck on the cursus honorum. Her son was being groomed for the most earnest attempt, but the boy's uncle decided to see what he could do first. It was an election full of shocks. Quintus Nonius from Picenum got in easily, for example. Whereas Lucius Appuleius Saturninus didn't get in at all. There were ten places for tribunes of the plebs, and Saturninus came in eleventh. "I don't believe it!" Saturninus gasped to Glaucia. "I just don't believe it! What happened?" Glaucia was frowning; suddenly his own chances to become a praetor seemed dim. Then he shrugged, clapped Saturninus on the back with rough comfort, and stepped down from the rostra. "Don't worry," he said, "something might change things yet." "What can possibly change an election result?" Saturninus demanded. "No, Gaius Servilius, I'm out!" "I'll see you shortly here. Just stay here, don't go home yet," said Glaucia, and hurried off into the crowd. The moment he heard his name called as one of the ten new tribunes of the plebs, Quintus Nonius from Picenum wanted to go home to his expensive new house on the Carinae. There his wife waited with his sister-in-law Cornelia Sulla and her boy, anxious to know the results, provincial enough to doubt Quintus Nonius's chances. However, it was more difficult to leave the Forum area than Quintus Nonius had counted on, for every few feet he was stopped and warmly congratulated; a natural courtesy could not allow him to fob off his well-wishers, so he lingered in a forced detention, beaming and bowing, shaking a hundred hands. One by one Quintus Nonius's companions dropped away, until he entered the first of the alleyways on his route home attended only by three close friends who also lived on the Carinae. When they were set upon by a dozen men armed with clubs, one of the friends managed to break away and run back toward the Forum, crying for help, only to find it virtually deserted. Luckily Saturninus and Glaucia were standing talking to some others near the rostra, Glaucia looking red-faced and a little disheveled; when the cry for help came, they all followed at a run. But it was too late. Quintus Nonius and his two friends were dead. "Edepol!" said Glaucia, getting to his feet after verifying that Quintus Nonius was indeed dead. "Quintus Nonius has just been elected a tribune of the plebs, and I'm the officer in charge of proceedings." He frowned. "Lucius Appuleius, will you see Quintus Nonius is carried home? I'd better go back to the Forum and deal with the electoral dilemma." The shock of finding Quintus Nonius and his friends lying extinguished in lakes of their own blood deprived those who had come to the rescue of their normal faculties, including Saturninus; no one noticed how artificial Glaucia sounded, including Saturninus. And standing on an empty rostra shouting to a deserted Forum Romanum, Gaius Servilius Glaucia announced the death of the newly elected tribune of the plebs Quintus Nonius. He then announced that the candidate who came in eleventh would replace Quintus Nonius in the new college Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. "It's all set" said Glaucia complacently later, at Saturninus's house. "You are now a legally elected tribune of the plebs, co-opted to fill Quintus Nonius's shoes." He was not over-endowed with scruples since those awful events which had seen him dismissed from his post as quaestor at Ostia, but Saturninus was nonetheless so shocked he stared at Glaucia, aghast. "You didn't!" he cried. Glaucia put the tip of his index finger against the side of his nose and smiled at Saturninus from beneath his brows, a smile owning much fierceness. "Ask me no questions, Lucius Appuleius, and I'll tell you no lies," he said. "The shame of it is that he was a nice fellow." "Yes, he was. But that's his luck, to wind up dead. He was the only one who lived on the Carinae, so he was elected in more ways than one. It's too hard to set something up on the Palatine there aren't enough people on the streets." Saturninus sighed, shrugged off his depression. "You're right. And I'm in. I thank you for your help, Gaius Servilius." "Think nothing of it," said Glaucia. The scandal was difficult to live down, but it was quite impossible for anyone to prove that Saturninus was implicated in a murder when even the dead man's surviving friend could testify that both Saturninus and Glaucia. had been standing in the lower Forum at the time the deed was done. People talked, but talk was cheap, as Glaucia said with a sneer. And when Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus demanded that the tribunician elections be held all over again, he got nowhere; Glaucia had created a precedent to deal with a particular crisis which had never occurred before. "Talk is cheap!" Glaucia said again, this time in the Senate. "The allegations that Lucius Appuleius and I were involved in the death of Quintus Nonius have no foundation in fact. As for my replacing a dead tribune of the plebs with a live one, I did what any true presiding officer of an election ought to do I acted! No one can dispute that Lucius Appuleius polled in eleventh place, nor that the election was properly conducted. To appoint Lucius Appuleius the successor of Quintus Nonius as quickly and smoothly as possible was as logical as it was expedient. The contio of the Plebeian Assembly which I called yesterday gave my actions full-throated approval, as everyone here can verify. This debate, Conscript Fathers, is as useless as it is causeless. The matter is closed." Thus Gaius Servilius Glaucia.
Gaius Marius and Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar triumphed together on the first day of December. The joint parade was a stroke of genius, for there could be no doubt that Catulus Caesar, his chariot trailing behind the incumbent consul's, was very much the second lead in the production. The name on everybody's lips was Gaius Marius. There was even a very clever float put together by Lucius Cornelius Sulla who as usual got the job of organizing the parade showing Marius allowing Catulus Caesar's men to pick up the thirty-five Cimbric standards, because he had already captured so many in Gaul. At the meeting which followed in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Marius spoke with passion of his actions in awarding the citizenship to the soldiers of Camerinum and plugging up the Vale of the Salassi by planting a soldier colony at little Eporedia. His announcement that he would seek a sixth consulship was greeted with groans, gibes, cries of bitter protest and cheers. The cheers were far louder. When the tumult died down he announced that all his personal share of the spoils would go to build a new temple to the military cult of Honor and Virtue; in it his trophies and the trophies of his army would be housed, and it would be sited on the Capitol. He would also build a temple to the Roman military Honor and Virtue at Olympia in Greece. Catulus Caesar listened with a sinking heart, understanding that if he was to preserve his own reputation he would have to donate his own share of the spoils to a similar kind of public religious monument, rather than investing it to augment his private fortune which was large enough, but not nearly as large as Marius's. It surprised no one when the Centuriate Assembly elected Gaius Marius consul for the sixth time, and in senior place. Not only was he now the undisputed First Man in Rome, many were beginning to call him the Third Founder of Rome as well. The First Founder was none other than Romulus himself. The Second Founder was Marcus Furius Camillus, who had been-responsible for the ejection of the Gauls from Italy three hundred years before. Therefore it seemed appropriate to call Gaius Marius the Third Founder of Rome, since he too had repulsed a tide of barbarians. The consular elections were not without their surprises; Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle failed to carry the junior consul's poll. This was Marius's high point, and he won, even in the matter of his junior colleague; he had declared his firm support for Lucius Valerius Flaccus, and Lucius Valerius Flaccus was duly elected. Flaccus held an important lifelong priesthood, the position of flamen Martialis the special priest of Mars and his office had made him a quiet man, biddable and subordinate. An ideal companion for the masterful Gaius Marius. But it was no surprise to anyone when Gaius Servilius Glaucia was elected a praetor, for he was Marius's man, and Marius had bribed the voters lavishly. What was a surprise was the fact that he came in at the head of the poll, and so was appointed praetor urbanus, the most senior of the six praetors elected. Shortly after the elections Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar announced publicly that he would donate his personal share of the German spoils to two religious causes; the first was to purchase the old site of Marcus Fulvius Flaccus's house on the Palatine it lay next door to his own house and build thereon a magnificent porticus to house the thirty-five Cimbric standards he had captured on the field of Vercellae; the second was to build a temple on the Campus Martius to the goddess Fortuna in her guise of the Fortune of the Present Day.
When the new tribunes of the plebs entered office on the tenth day of December, the fun began. Tribune of the plebs for the second time, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus dominated the college completely, and exploited the fear the death of Quintus Nonius had provoked to further his own legislative ends. Though he kept denying strenuously any implication in the murder, he kept dropping little remarks in private to his fellow tribunes of the plebs which gave them cause to wonder if they might not end up as Quintus Nonius did, should they attempt to thwart him. The result was that they permitted Saturninus to do precisely what he pleased; neither Metellus Numidicus nor Catulus Caesar could persuade a single tribune of the plebs to interpose a single veto. Within eight days of entering office, Saturninus brought forward the first of two bills to award public lands to the veterans of both German armies; the lands were all abroad, in Sicily, Greece, Macedonia, and mainland Africa. The bill also carried a novel proviso, that Gaius Marius himself was to have the authority to personally grant the Roman citizenship to three Italian soldier settlers in each colony. The Senate erupted into furious opposition. "This man," said Metellus Numidicus, "is not even going to favor his Roman soldiers! He wants land for all comers on an equal footing Roman, Latin, Italian. No difference! No distinguished attention for Rome's own men! I ask you, fellow senators, what do you think of such a man? Does Rome matter to him? Of course it doesn't! Why should it? He's not a Roman! He's an Italian! And he favors his own breed. A thousand of them enfranchised on the battlefield, while Roman soldiers stood by and watched, unthanked. But what else can we expect of such a man as Gaius Marius?" When Marius rose to reply, he couldn't even make himself heard; so he walked out of the Curia Hostilia and stood on the rostra, and addressed the Forum frequenters instead. Some were indignant; but he was their darling, and they listened. "There's land enough for all!" he shouted. "No one can accuse me of preferential treatment for Italians! One hundred iugera per soldier! Ah, why so much, I hear you ask? Because, People of Rome, these colonists are going to harder places by far than our own beloved Italy. They will plant and harvest in unkind soils and unkind climates, where to make a decent living a man must have more land than he does in our beloved land of Italy." "There he goes!" cried Catulus Caesar from the steps of the Senate, his voice carrying shrilly. "There he goes! Listen to what he's saying! Not Rome! Italy! Italy, Italy, always it's Italy! He's not a Roman, and he doesn't care about Rome!" "Italy is Rome!" thundered Marius. "They are one and the same! Without one, the other does not and cannot exist! Don't Romans and Italians alike lay down their lives in Rome's armies for Rome? And if that is so and who can deny it is so? why should one kind of soldier be any different from the other?" "Italy!" cried Catulus Caesar. "Always it's Italy!" "Rubbish!" shouted Marius. "The first allocations of land go to Roman soldiers, not to Italian! Is that evidence of an Italian bias? And isn't it better that out of the thousands of veteran legionaries who will go to these colonies, three of the Italians among them will become full Roman citizens? I said three, People of Rome! Not three thousand Italians, People of Rome! Not three hundred Italians, People of Rome! Not three dozen Italians, People of Rome! Three! A drop in an ocean of men! A drop of a drop in an ocean of men!" "A drop of poison in an ocean of men!" screamed Catulus Caesar from the steps of the Senate. "The bill may say that the Roman soldiers will get their land first, but where does it say that the first land given away will be the best land?" shouted Metellus Numidicus. But the first land bill, which dealt with various tracts Rome had possessed in her public domain for a number of years and leased to absentee landlords, was passed by the Plebeian Assembly in spite of the opposition. Quintus Poppaedius Silo, now the leading man of his Marsic people in spite of his relative youth, had come to Rome to hear the debates on the land bills; Marcus Livius Drusus had invited him, and he was staying in Drusus's house. "They make a great deal of noise out of Rome versus Italy, don't they?" Silo asked Drusus, never having heard Rome debate this subject before. "They do indeed," said Drusus grimly. "It's an attitude only time will change. I live in hope, Quintus Poppaedius." "And yet you don't like Gaius Marius." "I detest the man. But I voted for him," said Drusus. "It's only four years since we fought at Arausio," said Silo reflectively. "Yes, I daresay you're right, and it will change. Before Arausio, I very much doubt Gaius Marius would have had any chance to include Italian troops among his colonists." "It was thanks to Arausio the Italian debt slaves were freed," said Drusus. "I'm glad to think we didn't die for nothing. And yet look at Sicily. The Italian slaves there weren't freed. They died instead." "I writhe in shame over Sicily," said Drusus, flushing. "Two corrupt, self-seeking senior Roman magistrates did that. Two miserable mentulae! Like them you may not, Quintus Poppaedius, but grant that a Metellus Numidicus or an Aemilius Scaurus would not soil the hem of his toga on a grain swindle." "Yes, I'll grant you that," said Silo. "However, Marcus Livius, they still believe that to be a Roman is to belong to the most exclusive club on earth and that no Italian deserves to belong by adoption." "Adoption?" "Well, isn't that really what the bestowal of the Roman citizenship is? An adoption into the family of Rome?" Drusus sighed. "You're quite right. All that changes is the name. Granting him the citizenship can't make a Roman out of an Italian or a Greek. And as time goes on, the Senate at least sets its heart more and more adamantly against creating artificial Romans." "Then perhaps," said Silo, "it will be up to us Italians to make ourselves artificial Romans with or without the approval of the Senate." A second land bill followed the first, this one to deal with all the new public lands Rome had acquired during the course of the German wars. It was by far the more important of the two, for these were virtually virgin lands, unexploited by large-scale farmers and graziers, and potentially rich in other things than beasts and crops minerals, gems, stone. They were all tracts in western Gaul-across-the-Alps, around Narbo, Tolosa, Carcasso, and in central Gaul-across-the-Alps, plus an area in Nearer Spain which had rebelled while the Cimbri were making things difficult at the foot of the Pyrenees. There were many Roman knights and Roman companies anxious to expand into Gaul-across-the-Alps, and they had looked to the defeat of the Germans for an opportunity and looked to their various patrons in the Senate to secure them access to the new ager publicus Galliae. Now to find that most of it was to go to Head Count soldiers roused them to heights of fury hitherto seen only during the worst days of the Gracchi. And as the Senate hardened, so too did the First Class knights, once Marius's greatest advocates now, feeling cheated of the chance to be absentee landlords in Further Gaul, his obdurate enemies. The agents of Metellus Numidicus and Catulus Caesar circulated everywhere, whispering, whispering... "He gives away what belongs to the State as if he owned both the land and the State" was one whisper, soon a cry. "He plots to own the State why else would he be consul now that the war with the Germans is over?" "Rome has never subsidized her soldiers with land!" "The Italians are receiving more than they deserve!" "Land taken from enemies of Rome belongs exclusively to Romans, not to Latins and Italians as well!" "He's starting on the ager publicus abroad, but before we know it he'll be giving away the ager publicus of Italy and he'll give it to Italians!" "He's calling himself the Third Founder of Rome, but what he wants to call himself is King of Rome!" And on, and on, and on. The more Marius roared from the rostra and in the Senate that Rome needed to seed her provinces with colonies of ordinary Romans, that veteran soldiers would form useful garrisons, that Roman lands abroad were better held by many little men than a handful of big men, the bitterer the opposition became. It stockpiled rather than dwindled from too much use, grew daily stronger, more strenuous. Until slowly, subtly, almost without volition, the public attitude toward the second agrarian law of Saturninus began to change. Many of the policy makers among the People and there were policy makers among the habitual Forum frequenters, as well as among the most influential knights began to doubt that Marius was right. For never had they seen such opposition. "There can't be so much smoke without at least some fire," they began to say, between themselves and to those who listened to them because they were policy makers. "This isn't just another silly Senate squabble it's too implacable." "When a man like Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus who has been censor as well as consul, and don't we all remember how brave he was while he was censor? keeps increasing the number of his supporters, he must have some right on his side." "I heard yesterday that a knight whose support Gaius Marius desperately needs has spurned him publicly! The land at Tolosa he was personally promised by Gaius Marius is now going to be given to the Head Count veterans." "Someone was telling me that he personally overheard Gaius Marius saying he intends to give the citizenship to every single Italian man." "This is Gaius Marius's sixth consulship and his fifth in a row. He was heard to say at dinner the other day that he would never not be consul! He's going to run every single year until he dies." "He really wants to be King of Rome!" Thus did the whispering campaign of Metellus Numidicus and Catulus Caesar begin to pay dividends. And suddenly even Glaucia and Saturninus started to fear that the second land bill was doomed to fail.
"I've got to have that land!" cried Marius in despair to his wife, who had been waiting patiently for days in the hope that he would eventually discuss matters with her. Not because she had either fresh ideas to offer or positive things to say, but because she knew herself to be the only real friend he had near him. Sulla had been sent back to Italian Gaul after the triumph, and Sertorius had journeyed to Nearer Spain to see his German wife and child. "Gaius Marius, is it really so essential?" Julia asked. "Will it honestly matter if your soldiers don't receive their land? Roman soldiers never have received land there's no precedent for it. They can't say you haven't tried." "You don't understand," he said impatiently. "It isn't to do with the soldiers anymore, it has to do with my dignitas, my position in public life. If the bill doesn't pass, I'm no longer the First Man in Rome." "Can't Lucius Appuleius help?" "He's trying, the gods know he's trying! But instead of gaining ground, we're losing it. I feel like Achilles in the river, unable to get out of the flood because the bank keeps giving way. I claw myself upward a little, then go down twice as far. The rumors are incredible, Julia! And there's no combating them, because they're never overt. If I were guilty of one tenth of the things they're saying about me, I'd have been pushing a boulder uphill in Tartarus long ago." "Yes, well, slander campaigns are impossible to deal with," Julia said comfortably. "Sooner or later the rumors become so bizarre that everyone wakes up with a start. That's what's going to happen in this case too. They've killed you, but they're going to keep on stabbing until the whole of Rome is sick to death of it all. People are horribly naive and gullible, but even the most naive and gullible have a saturation point somewhere. The bill will go through, Gaius Marius I am sure of it. Just don't hurry it too much, wait for opinion to swing back your way." "Oh, yes, it may well go through, just as you say, Julia. But what's to stop the House's overturning it the moment Lucius Appuleius is out of office, and I don't have an equally capable tribune of the plebs to fight the House?" Marius groaned. "I see." "Do you?" "Certainly. I'm a Julian of the Caesars, husband, which means I grew up surrounded by political discussions, even if my sex precluded a public career." She chewed her lip. "It is a problem, isn't it? Agrarian laws can't be implemented overnight they take forever. Years and years. Finding the land, surveying it, parceling it up, finding the men whose names have been drawn to settle it, commissions and commissioners, adequate staff it's interminable." Marius grinned. "You've been talking to Gaius Julius!" "I have indeed. In fact, I'm quite an expert." She patted the vacant end of her couch. "Come, my love, sit down!" "I can't, Julia." "Is there no way to protect this legislation?" Marius stopped his pacing, turned and looked at her from beneath his brows. "Actually there is. ..." "Tell me," she prompted gently. "Gaius Servilius Glaucia thought of it, but Lucius Appuleius is mad for it, so I have the two of them clambering up my back trying to bend me over, and I'm not sure. ..." "Is it so novel?" she asked, aware of Glaucia's reputation. "Novel enough." "Please, Gaius Marius, tell me!" It would be a relief to tell someone who didn't have any axe to grind save Marius's, he thought tiredly. "I'm a Military Man, Julia, and I like a Military Man's solutions," he said. "In the army everyone knows that when I issue an order, it's the best order possible under the circumstances. So everyone jumps to obey without questioning it, because they know me, and they trust me. Well, this lot in Rome know me too, and they ought to trust me! But do they? No! They're so set on seeing their own ideas implemented that they don't even listen to anyone else's ideas, even if they're better ideas. I go to the Senate knowing before ever I reach the awful place that I'm going to have to do my work in an atmosphere of hatred and heckling which exhausts me before I start! I'm too old and too set in my ways to be bothered with them, Julia! They're all idiots, and they're going to kill the Republic if they go on trying to pretend things haven't changed since Scipio Africanus was a boy! My soldier settlements make such good sense!" "They do," Julia said, hiding her consternation. He was looking worn these days, older than his years instead of younger, and he was putting on weight for the first time in his life all that sitting around in meetings rather than striding around in the open air and his hair was suddenly greying and thinning. Warmaking was clearly more beneficial to a man's body than lawmaking. "Gaius Marius, make an end to it and tell me!" she insisted. "This second bill contains an additional clause Glaucia invented specially for it," said Marius, beginning to pace again, his words tumbling out. "An oath to uphold the law in perpetuity is demanded from every senator within five days of the bill's passing into law." She couldn't help herself; Julia gasped, lifted her hands to her cheeks; looked at Marius in dismay, and said the strongest word her vocabulary contained, "Ecastor!" "Shocking, isn't it?" "Gaius Marius, Gaius Marius, they'll never forgive you if you include it in the bill!" "Do you think I don't know that?" he cried, hands reaching like claws for the ceiling. "But what else can I do? I've got to have this land!" She licked her lips. "You'll be in the House for many years to come," she said. "Can't you just go on fighting to see the law upheld?" "Go on fighting? When do I ever stop?" he asked. "I'm tired of fighting, Julia!" She blew a bubble of derision aimed at jollying him. "Oh, pooh! Gaius Marius tired of fighting? You've been fighting all your life!" "But not the same kind of fighting as now," he tried to explain. "This is dirty. There are no rules. And you don't even know who let alone where! your enemies are. Give me a battlefield for an arena anytime! At least what happens on it is quick and clean and the best man usually wins. But the Senate of Rome is a brothel stuffed with the lowest forms of life and the lowest forms of conduct. I spend my days crawling in its slime! Well, Julia, let me tell you, I'd rather bathe in battlefield blood! And if anyone is naive enough to think that political intrigue doesn't ruin more lives than any war, then he deserves everything politics will dish out to him!" Julia got up and went to him, forced him to stop the pacing, and took both his hands. "I hate to say it, my dear love, but the political forum isn't the right arena for a man as direct as you." "If I didn't know it until now, I certainly do know that now," he said gloomily. "I suppose it will have to be Glaucia's wretched special-oath clause. But as Publius Rutilius keeps asking me, where are all these new-style laws going to lead us? Are we really replacing bad with good? Or are we merely replacing bad with worse?" "Only time will tell," she said calmly. "Whatever else happens, Gaius Marius, never forget that there are always huge crises in government, that people are always going around proclaiming in tones of horror that this or that new law will mean the end of the Republic, that Rome isn't Rome any more I know from my reading that Scipio Africanus was saying it of Cato the Censor! And probably some early Julius Caesar was saying it of Brutus when he killed his sons in the beginning of things. The Republic is indestructible, and they all know it, even as they're yelling it's doomed. So don't you lose sight of that fact." Her good sense was placating him at last; Julia noted in satisfaction that the red tinge was dying out of his eyes, and his skin was losing its mottled choler. Time to change the subject a little, she decided. "By the way, my brother Gaius Julius would like to see you tomorrow, so I've taken the opportunity to invite him and Aurelia to dinner, if that's acceptable." Marius groaned. "Of course! That's right! I'd forgotten! He's off to Cercina to settle my first colony of veterans there, isn't he?" Down went his head into his hands, snatched from Julia's clasp. "Isn't he? Ye gods, my memory! What's happening to me, Julia?" "Nothing," she soothed. "You need a respite, preferably a few weeks away from Rome. But since that's clearly not possible, why don't we go together to find Young Marius?" That extremely handsome little man, not quite nine years old, was a very satisfactory son: tall, sturdily built, blond, and Roman-nosed enough to please his father. If the lad's leanings were more toward the physical than the intellectual, that too pleased Marius. The fact that he was still an only child grieved his mother more than it did his father, for Julia had not succeeded in either of the two pregnancies which had followed the death of his younger brother, and she was now beginning to fear that she was incapable of carrying another child to its full term. However, Marius was content with his one son, and refused to believe that there should be another basket in which to pile some of his eggs.
The dinner party was a great success, its guest list limited to Gaius Julius Caesar; his wife, Aurelia; and Aurelia's uncle, Publius Rutilius Rufus. Caesar was leaving for African Cercina at the end of the eight-day market interval; the commission had delighted him, only one disadvantage marring his pleasure. "I won't be in Rome for the birth of my first son," he said with a smile. "Aurelia, no! Again?" asked Rutilius Rufus, groaning. "It'll be another girl, you wait and see and where will the pair of you find another dowry?" "Pooh, Uncle Publius!" said the unrepentant Aurelia, popping a morsel of chicken into her mouth. "First of all, we shan't need dowries for our girls. Gaius Julius's father made us promise that we wouldn't be stiff-necked Caesars and keep our girls free of the taint of plutocracy. So we fully intend to marry them to terribly rich rural nobodies." More chicken morsels suffered the same fate as the first. "And we've had our two girls. Now we're going to have boys." "All at once?" asked Rutilius Rufus, eyes twinkling. "Oh, I say, twins would be nice! Do they run in the Julii?" asked the intrepid mother of her sister-in-law. "I think they do," said Julia, frowning. "Certainly our Uncle Sextus had twins, though one died Caesar Strabo is a twin, isn't he?" "Correct, he is," said Rutilius Rufus with a grin. "Our poor young cross-eyed friend positively drips extra names, and 'Vopiscus' is one of them, which means he's the survivor of twins. But he's got a new nickname, I hear." The wicked note of gloat in his voice alerted everyone; Marius voiced the query. "What?" "He's developed a fistula in the nether regions, so some wit said he had an arsehole and a half, and started calling him Sesquiculus," said Rutilius Rufus. The entire dinner party collapsed into laughter, including the women, permitted to share this mild obscenity. "Twins might run in Lucius Cornelius's family too," said Marius, wiping his eyes. "What makes you say that?" asked Rutilius Rufus, sensing another snippet of gossip. "Well, as you all know though Rome doesn't he lived among the Cimbri for a year. Had a wife a Cherusci woman named Hermana. And she threw twin boys." Julia's mirth faded. "Captured? Dead?" she asked. "Edepol, no! He took her back to her own people in Germania before he rejoined me." "Funny sort of chap, Lucius Cornelius," said Rutilius Rufus reflectively. "Not quite right in the head." "There you're wrong for once, Publius Rutilius," said Marius. "No man's head was ever better attached to his shoulders than Lucius Cornelius's. In fact, I'd say he was the man of the future as far as Rome's concerned." Julia giggled. "He positively bolted back to Italian Gaul after the triumph," she said. "He and Mother fight more and more as time goes on." "Well," said Marius bravely, "that's understandable! Your mother is the one person on this patch of earth who can frighten the life out of me." "Lovely woman, Marcia," said Rutilius Rufus reminiscently, then added hastily when all eyes turned on him, "At least to look at. In the old days." "She's certainly made herself very busy finding Lucius Cornelius a new wife," said Caesar. Rutilius Rufus nearly choked on a prune pip. "Well, I happened to be at Marcus Aemilius Scaurus's for dinner a few days ago," he said in a wickedly pleasurable voice, "and if she wasn't already another man's wife, I'd have been willing to bet Lucius Cornelius would have found a wife all by himself." "No!" said Aurelia, leaning forward on her chair. "Oh, Uncle Publius, do tell!" "Little Caecilia Metella Dalmatica, if you please," said Rutilius Rufus. "The wife of the Princeps Senatus himself?" squeaked Aurelia. "The same. Lucius Cornelius took one look at her when she was introduced, blushed redder than his hair, and sat like a booby all through the meal just staring at her." "The imagination boggles," said Marius. "As well it might!" said Rutilius Rufus. "Even Marcus Aemilius noticed well, he does tend to be like an old hen with one chick about his darling little Dalmatica. So she got sent off to bed at the end of the main course. Looking very disappointed. And shooting a look of shy admiration at Lucius Cornelius as she went. He spilled his wine." "As long as he doesn't spill his wine in her lap," said Marius grimly. "Oh no, not another scandal!" cried Julia. "Lucius Cornelius just can't afford another scandal. Gaius Marius, can you drop him a hint?" Marius produced that look of discomfort husbands do when their wives demand some utterly unmasculine and uncharacteristic task of them. "Certainly not!" "Why?" asked Julia, to whom her request was sensible. "Because a man's private life is his own lookout and a lot he'd thank me for sticking my nose in!" Julia and Aurelia both looked disappointed. The peacemaker as always, Caesar cleared his throat. "Well, since Marcus Aemilius Scaurus looks as if he'll have to be killed with an axe in about a thousand years' time, I don't think we need to worry very much about Lucius Cornelius and Dalmatica. I believe Mother has made her choice and I hear Lucius Cornelius approves, so we'll all be getting wedding invitations as soon as he comes back from Italian Gaul." "Who?" asked Rutilius Rufus. "I haven't heard a whisper!" "Aelia, the only daughter of Quintus Aelius Tubero." "A bit long in the tooth, isn't she?" asked Marius. "Late thirties, the same age as Lucius Cornelius," said Caesar comfortably. "He doesn't want more children, it seems, so Mother felt a widow without children was ideal. She's a handsome enough lady." "From a fine old family," said Rutilius Rufus. "Rich!" "Then good for Lucius Cornelius!" said Aurelia warmly. "I can't help it, I like him!" "So do we all," said Marius, winking at her. "Gaius Julius, this professed admiration doesn't make you jealous?" "Oh, I have more serious rivals for Aurelia's affections than mere patrician legates," said Caesar, grinning. Julia looked up. "Really? Who?" "His name is Lucius Decumius, and he's a grubby little man of about forty with skinny legs, greasy hair, and an all-over reek of garlic," said Caesar, picking at the dish of dried fruits in search of the plumpest raisin. "My house is perpetually filled with magnificent vases of flowers in season, out of season, makes no difference to Lucius Decumius, who sends a new lot round every four or five days. And visits my wife, if you please, smarming up to her in the most nauseating way. In fact, he's so pleased about our coming child that I sometimes have deep misgivings." "Stop it, Gaius Julius!" said Aurelia, laughing. "Who is he?" asked Rutilius Rufus. "The caretaker or whatever he's called of the crossroads college Aurelia is obliged to house rent-free," said Caesar. "Lucius Decumius and I have an understanding," Aurelia said, filching the raisin Caesar was holding halfway to his mouth. "What understanding?" asked Rutilius Rufus. "Whereabouts he plies his trade, namely anywhere but in my vicinity." "What trade?" "He's an assassin," said Aurelia.
When Saturninus introduced his second agrarian law, the clause stipulating an oath burst upon the Forum like a clap of thunder; not a bolt of Jovian lightning, rather the cataclysmic rumble of the old gods, the real gods, the faceless gods, the numina. Not only was an oath required of every senator, but instead of the customary swearing in the temple of Saturn, Saturninus's law required that the oath be taken under the open sky in the roofless temple of Semo Sancus Dius Fidius on the lower Quirinal, where the faceless god without a mythology had only a statue of Gaia Caecilia wife of King Tarquinius Priscus of old Rome to humanize his dwelling. And the deities in whose name the oath was taken were not the grand deities of the Capitol, but the little faceless numina who were truly Roman the Di Penates Publici, guardians of the public purse and larder the Lares Praestites, guardians of the State and Vesta, guardian of the hearth. No one knew what they looked like, or where they came from, or even what sex if any they actually possessed; they just were. And they mattered. They were Roman. They were the public images of the most private gods, the deities who ruled the family, that most sacred of all Roman traditions. No Roman could swear by these deities and contemplate breaking his oath, for to do so would be to bring down ruin and disaster and disintegration upon his family, his home, his purse. But the legalistic mind of Glaucia hadn't merely trusted to nameless fear of nameless numina; to drive the point of the oath home, Saturninus's law even dealt with any senator who might refuse to take the oath; he would be forbidden fire and water within Italy, and fined the sum of twenty silver talents, and stripped of his citizenship. "The trouble is, we haven't gone far enough fast enough yet," said Metellus Numidicus to Catulus Caesar, Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, Metellus Piglet, Scaurus, Lucius Cotta, and his uncle Marcus Cotta. ' 'The People aren't ready to reject Gaius Marius they'll pass this into law. And we will be required to swear." He shivered. "And if I swear, I must uphold my oath." "Then it cannot be passed into law," said Ahenobarbus. "There's not one tribune of the plebs with the courage to veto it," said Marcus Cotta. "Then we must fight it with religion," said Scaurus, looking at Ahenobarbus meaningfully. "The other side has brought religion into things, so there's no reason why we can't too." "I think I know what you want," said Ahenobarbus. "Well, I don't," said Lucius Cotta. "When the day for voting the bill into law comes and the augurs inspect the omens to ensure the meeting is not in contravention of divine law, we'll make sure the omens are inauspicious," said Ahenobarbus. "And we'll go on finding the omens inauspicious, until one of our tribunes of the plebs finds the courage to interpose his veto on religious grounds. That will kill the law, because the People get tired of things very quickly." The plan was put into practice; the omens were declared inauspicious by the augurs. Unfortunately Lucius Appuleius Saturninus himself was also an augur a small reward given him at the instigation of Scaurus at the time when Scaurus restored his reputation and differed in his interpretation of the omens. "It's a trick!" he shouted to the Plebs standing in the well of the Comitia. "Look at them, all minions of the Senate Policy Makers! There's nothing wrong with the omens this is a way to break the power of the People! We all know Scaurus Princeps Senatus and Metellus Numidicus and Catulus will go to any lengths to deprive our soldiers of their just reward and this proves they have gone to any lengths! They've deliberately tampered with the will of the gods!" The People believed Saturninus, who had taken the precaution of inserting his gladiators into the crowd. When one of the other tribunes of the plebs attempted to interpose his veto on the grounds that the omens were inauspicious, that he had heard thunder besides, and that any law passed that day would be nefas, sacrilegious, Saturninus's gladiators acted. While Saturninus declared in ringing tones that he would not allow the veto, his bully-boys plucked the hapless tribune from the rostra and ran him up the Clivus Argentarius to the cells of the Lautumiae and kept him there until the meeting broke up. The second land bill was put to the vote, and the People in their tribes passed it into law, for its oath clause made it novel enough to intrigue the habitual attenders in the Plebeian Assembly; what would happen if it became law, who would resist, how would the Senate react? Too good to miss! The mood of the People was one of let's find out. The day after the bill became law, Metellus Numidicus rose to his feet in the Senate, and announced with great dignity that he would not take the oath. "My conscience, my principles, my very life itself depend upon this decision!" he roared. "I will pay the fine and I will go into exile on Rhodes. For I will not swear. Do you hear me, Conscript Fathers? I will not swear! I cannot swear to uphold anything to which the very core of my being is adamantly opposed. When is forsworn forsworn? Which is the more grievous crime to swear to uphold a law I set myself against, or not to swear? You may all of you answer that for yourselves. My answer is that the greater crime is to swear. So I say to you, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, and I say to you, Gaius Marius I will not swear! I choose to pay the fine and I choose to go into exile." His stand made a profound impression, for everyone present knew he meant what he said. Marius's eyebrows grew still, meeting across his nose, and Saturninus pulled his lips back from his teeth. The murmurings began; the doubts and discontents niggled, gnawed, amplified. "They're going to be difficult," whispered Glaucia from his curule chair, close to Marius's. "Unless I close this meeting, they'll all refuse to swear," muttered Marius, rose to his feet, and dismissed the House. "I urge you to go home and think for three days about the serious consequences should you decide not to take the oath. It is easy for Quintus Caecilius he has the money to pay his fine, and plenty to ensure a comfortable exile. But how many of you can say that? Go home, Conscript Fathers, and think for three days. This House will reconvene four days from now, and then you must make up your minds, for we must not forget there is a time limit built into the lex Appuleia agraria secunda." But you can't talk to them like that, said Marius to himself as he walked the floor of his huge and beautiful house below the temple of Juno Moneta, while his wife watched helplessly and his normally saucy son hid himself in his playroom. You just can't talk to them like that, Gaius Marius! They are not soldiers. They are not even subordinate officers, despite the fact that I am consul and they are mostly backbenchers who will never know the feel of an ivory curule chair beneath their fat arses. To the last one, they really do think themselves my peers I, Gaius Marius, six times consul of this city, this country, this empire! I have to beat them, I cannot leave myself open to the ignominy of defeat. My dignitas is enormously greater than theirs, say what they will to the contrary. And I cannot see it suffer. I am the First Man in Rome. I am the Third Founder of Rome. And after I die, they are going to have to admit that I, Gaius Marius, the Italian hayseed with no Greek, was the greatest man in the history of our Republic, the Senate and People of Rome. Further than that his thoughts never got during the three days' grace he had given the senators; round and round and round went his dread of the loss of his dignitas were he to go down in defeat. And at dawn on the fourth day he left for the Curia Hostilia determined he was going to win and not having thought at all about what kind of tactics the Policy Makers might use to beat him. He had taken particular care with his appearance, unwilling to let the world see that he had walked the floor for three days, and he strode down the Hill of the Bankers with his twelve lictors preceding him as if indeed he truly did own Rome. The House assembled with unusual quietness; too few stools scraped, too few men coughed, too few attendants scuffled and muttered. The sacrifice was made flawlessly and the omens were declared auspicious for the meeting. A big man in perfect control, Marius rose to his feet in awesome majesty. Though he had given no thought to what possible tack the Policy Makers might take, he had worked out his own tack down to the finest detail, and the confidence he felt was written plainly upon him. "I too have spent the last three days in thought, Conscript Fathers," he began, his eyes fixed upon some space between the listening senators rather than upon any one face, friendly or inimical. Not that anyone could tell where Marius's eyes were, for his eyebrows hid them from all but the closest scrutiny. He tucked his left hand around the front edge of his toga where it fell in many beautifully ordered folds from left shoulder to ankles, and stepped down from the curule dais to the floor. "One fact is patent." He paced a few feet, and stopped. "If this law is valid, it binds all of us to swear to uphold it." He paced a few feet more. "If this law is valid, we must all take the oath." He paced to the doors, turned to face both sides of the House. "But is it valid?" he asked loudly. The question dropped into a fathomless silence. "That's it!" whispered Scaurus Princeps Senatus to Metellus Numidicus. "He's done for! He's just killed himself!" But Marius, up against the doors, didn't hear. So he didn't pause to think again; he just went on. "There are those among you who insist that no law passed in the circumstances attending the passage of the lex Appuleia agraria secunda can be valid. I have heard the law's validity challenged on two separate grounds one, that it was passed in defiance of the omens, and the other, that it was passed even though violence was done to the sacrosanct person of a legally elected tribune of the plebs." He began to walk down the floor, then stopped. "Clearly the future of the law is in doubt. The Assembly of the Plebeian People will have to re-examine it in the light of both objections to its validity." He took one small pace, stopped. "But that, Conscript Fathers, is not the issue we face here today. The validity of the law per se is not our first concern. Our concern is more immediate." One more little pace. "We have been instructed by the law in question to swear to uphold the law in question. And that is what we are here today to debate. Today is the last day upon which we can take our oaths to uphold it, so the matter of swearing is urgent. And today the law in question is a valid law. So we must swear to uphold it." He walked forward hastily, almost reached the dais, then turned and paced slowly to the doors again, where he turned to face both sides of the House again. "Today, Conscript Fathers, we will all take that oath. We are bound to do so by the specific instruction of the People of Rome. They are the lawmakers! We of the Senate are simply their servants. So we will swear. For it can make no difference to us, Conscript Fathers! If at some time in the future the Assembly of the Plebeian People re-examines the law and finds it invalid, then our oaths are also invalid." Triumph filled his voice. "That is what we must understand! Any oath we take to uphold a law remains an oath only as long as the law remains a law. If the Plebeian People decide to nullify the law, then they also nullify our oaths." Scaurus Princeps Senatus was nodding sapiently, rhythmically; to Marius it looked as if he was agreeing with every word spoken. But Scaurus was nodding sapiently, rhythmically, for quite a different reason. The movements of his head accompanied the words he was speaking low-voiced to Metellus Numidicus. "We've got him, Quintus Caecilius! We've got him at last! He backed down. He didn't last the distance. We've forced him to admit to the whole House that there is a doubt about the validity of Saturninus's law. We've outmaneuvered the Arpinate fox!" Filled with elation because he was sure he had the House on his side, Marius walked back to the dais in real earnest, mounted it, and stood in front of his carved ivory curule chair to make his peroration. "I myself will take the oath first among us," he said, voice distilled reason. "And if I, Gaius Marius, your senior consul for the past four years and more, am prepared to swear, what can it possibly cost anyone else here? I have conferred with the priests of the College of the Two Teeth, and the temple of Semo Sancus Dius Fidius has been made ready for us. It's not such a very long walk! Come, who will join me?" There was a sigh, a faint murmur, the hiss of shoes moving as men broke their immobility. The backbenchers began slowly to get up from their stools. "A question, Gaius Marius," said Scaurus. The House stilled again. Marius nodded. "I would like your personal opinion, Gaius Marius. Not your official opinion. Just your personal opinion." "If you value my personal opinion, Marcus Aemilius, then naturally you shall have it," said Marius. "On what?" "What do you think personally?" Scaurus asked, his voice projected to every corner of the Curia. "Is the lex Appuleia agraria secunda valid in the light of what happened when it was passed?" Silence. Complete silence. No one breathed. Even Gaius Marius, who was too busy racing across the awful wastes of the regions where his over-confidence had put him to think of drawing a breath. "Would you like me to repeat the question, Gaius Marius?" asked Scaurus sweetly. Marius's tongue flickered out, wet his hideously dry lips. Where to go, what to do? You've slipped at last, Gaius Marius. Fallen into a pit you cannot climb out of. Why didn't I see that this question was bound to be asked, and asked by the only truly great brain among them? Am I suddenly blinded by my own cleverness? It was bound to be asked! And I never once thought of it. Never once in all those three long days. Well, I have no choice. Scaurus has my scrotum in his hands, and I must dance to his tug on my balls. He's brought me down. Because I have no choice. I now have to stand here and tell this House that I personally think the law is invalid. Otherwise no one will swear to uphold it. I led them to believe there was a doubt, I led them to believe that the doubt made the taking of the oath permissible. If I retract, I've lost them. But if I say I personally think the law is invalid, I've lost my own self. He looked toward the tribunes' bench, saw Lucius Appuleius Saturninus sitting forward, hands clenched, face set, lips curled back from his teeth. I will lose this man who is so important to me if I say I think the law is invalid. And I'll lose the greatest legal draftsman Rome has ever seen, Glaucia.... Together, we might have straightened the whole of Italy out in spite of the worst the Policy Makers could do. But if I say I think their law is invalid, I'll lose them forever. And yet and yet I must say it. Because if I do not, these cunni won't swear the oath and my soldiers won't get their land. That's all I can salvage out of the mess. Land for my men. I am lost. For I have lost. When the leg of Glaucia's ivory chair scraped across a marble tile, half the members of the Senate jumped; Glaucia looked down at his nails, lips pursed, face expressionless. But the silence continued, moment after moment. "I think I had better repeat my question, Gaius Marius," Scaurus said. "What is your personal opinion? Is this law a valid one, or is it not?" "I think " Marius stopped, frowning fiercely. "Personally I think the law improbably invalid," he said. Down came Scaurus's hands on his thighs with a crack. "Thank you, Gaius Marius!" He rose and turned round to beam at those on the tiers behind him, then turned back to beam at those on the tiers opposite him. "Well, Conscript Fathers, if no less a man than our very own conquering hero Gaius Marius deems the lex Appuleia invalid, I for one am happy to swear the oath!" And he bowed to Saturninus, to Glaucia. "Come, fellow senators, as your Princeps Senatus I suggest that we all hurry to the temple of Semo Sancus immediately!" "Stop!" Everyone stopped. Metellus Numidicus clapped his hands. Down from the very back of the top tier came his servant, a bag burdening each hand so that he bent double and had to drag them across each of the six-foot-wide steps and down to the next with a crash and a chink. When the two bags rested near Metellus Numidicus's feet, the servant went back to the top and carried another two down. Several of the backbencher senators looked at what was piled against the wall, and signed their servants to help. The work went on more swiftly then, until forty bags were piled all around Metellus Numidicus's stool. He himself stood up. "I will not take the oath," he said. "Not for a thousand thousand assurances from the senior consul that the lex Appuleia is invalid will I swear! I hereby tender twenty talents of silver in payment of my fine, and declare that tomorrow at dawn I will proceed into exile on Rhodes." Pandemonium broke out. "Order! Order! Order!" shouted Scaurus, shouted Marius. When order did prevail, Metellus Numidicus looked behind him, and spoke over his shoulder to someone on the back tier. "Treasury quaestor, please come forward," he said. Down he came, a presentable-looking young man with brown hair and brown eyes, his white toga gleaming, every fold perfect; he was Quintus Caecilius Metellus the Piglet, son of Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle. "Treasury quaestor, I give these twenty talents of silver into your keeping as payment of the fine levied upon me for refusing to swear to uphold the lex Appuleia agraria secunda," said Metellus Numidicus. "However, while the House is still in assembly, I demand that it be counted so that the Conscript Fathers can be sure the amount is not so much as one denarius short of the proper sum." "We are all willing to take your word for it, Quintus Caecilius," said Marius, smiling without a vestige of amusement. "Oh, but I insist!" said Metellus Numidicus. "No one is going to move from this place until every last coin is counted." He coughed. "The total, I believe, should be one hundred and thirty-five thousand denarii." Everyone sat down with a sigh. Two clerks of the House fetched a table and set it up at Metellus Numidicus's place; Metellus Numidicus himself stood with his left hand clasping his toga and his right hand extended to rest, fingertips lightly down, upon the table. The clerks opened one of the bags and lifted it up between them, then let its contents cascade in glittering clinking heaps near Metellus Numidicus's hand. Young Metellus signed to the clerks to hold the empty bag openmouthed to his right side, and began counting the coins, pushing them quickly into his right hand, cupped beneath the edge of the table; when the hand was full, he dropped its contents into the bag. "Wait!" said Metellus Numidicus. Metellus Piglet stopped. "Count them out loud, Treasury quaestor!" There was a gasp, a sigh, a ghastly collective groan. Metellus Piglet put all the coins back on the table, and began again. "Wuh-wuh-wuh-one . . . tuh-tuh-tuh-two... thruh-thruh-thruh-three .. . fuh-fuh-fuuh-four..." At sundown Gaius Marius rose from his curule chair. "The day is over, Conscript Fathers. Our business is not over, but in this House no one sits in formal session after the sun has set. Therefore I suggest we go now to the temple of Semo Sancus and swear our oaths. It must be done before midnight, or we are in violation of a direct order from the People." He looked across to where Metellus Numidicus still stood and his son still toiled at the counting far from over, though his stammer had improved markedly when his nervousness evaporated. "Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus, it is your duty to remain here and supervise the rest of this long task. I expect you to do so. And I hereby grant you leave to take your own oath tomorrow. Or the day after, if the counting is still in progress tomorrow. "A glimmer of a smile was playing about the corners of Marius's mouth. But Scaurus did not smile. He threw his head back and went into peal after peal of joyous, full-throated laughter. Late in the spring Sulla came back from Italian Gaul, and called to see Gaius Marius immediately after a bath and a change of clothing. Marius, he discovered, looked anything but well, a finding which did not surprise him. Even in the very north of the country the events surrounding the passing of the lex Appuleia had not suffered in the telling. Nor was it necessary for Marius to retell the story; they simply looked at each other wordlessly, and everything which needed to pass between them on a basic level did so wordlessly. However, once the emotional rush abated a little and the first cup of good wine was finished, Sulla did broach the more unpalatable externals of the subject. "Your credibility's suffered shockingly," he said. "I know, Lucius Cornelius." "It's Saturninus, I hear." Marius sighed. "Well, and can you blame him for hating me? He's given half a hundred speeches from the rostra, and by no means all to properly convoked assemblies. Every one accusing me of betraying him. In fact, since he's a brilliant speaker, the tale of my treachery hasn't lost in his style of translation to the crowds. And he draws the crowds too. Not merely regular Forum frequenters, but men of the Third and Fourth and Fifth Classes who seem fascinated by him to the extent that whenever they have a day off, they turn up in the Forum to listen to him." "Does he speak that often?" asked Sulla. "He speaks every single day!" Sulla whistled. "That's something new in the annals of the Forum! Every day? Rain or shine? Formal meetings or no formal meetings?" "Every single day. When the urban praetor his own boon companion Glaucia obeyed his orders from the Pontifex Maximus to instruct Saturninus that he couldn't speak on market days or holidays or non-comitial days, he simply ignored it. And because he's a tribune of the plebs, no one has seriously tried to haul him down." Marius frowned, worried. "In consequence, his fame keeps spreading, and we now see a whole new breed of Forum frequenter those who come solely to hear Saturninus harangue. He has I don't quite know what you'd call it I suppose the Greeks have the word for it, as usual they'd say kharisma. They feel his passion, I think, because of course not being regular Forum frequenters they're not connoisseurs of rhetoric, and don't give tuppence how he wiggles his littlest finger or varies the style of his walk. No, they just stand there gaping up at him, becoming more and more excited at what he says, and end in cheering him wildly." "We'll have to keep an eye on him, won't we?" Sulla asked. He looked at Marius very seriously. "Why did you do it?" There was no pretence at ignorance; Marius answered at once. "I didn't have any choice, Lucius Cornelius. The truth is that I'm not I don't know devious enough to see around all the corners I should if I'm to keep a pace to two ahead of men like Scaurus. He caught me as neatly as anyone could have wanted. I acknowledge the fact freely." "But in one way you've salvaged the scheme," said Sulla, trying to comfort him. "The second land bill is still on the tablets, and I don't think the Plebeian Assembly -or the Assembly of the People, for that matter is going to invalidate it. Or at least, I'm told that's how things stand." "True," said Marius, not looking comforted. He hunched his head into his shoulders, sighed. "Saturninus is the victor, Lucius Cornelius, not I. It's his sense of outrage keeping the Plebs firm. I've lost them." He writhed, threw out his hands. "How am I ever going to get through the rest of this year? It's an ordeal to have to walk through the volley of boos and hisses from the region around the rostra whenever Saturninus is speaking, but as for walking into the Curia I loathe it! I loathe the sleek smile on Scaurus's seamy face, I loathe the insufferable smirk on that camel Catulus's face I'm not made for the political arena, and that's a truth I've just begun to find out." "But you climbed the cursus honorum, Gaius Marius!" Sulla said. ' 'You were one of the great tribunes of the plebs! You knew the political arena, and you loved it, otherwise you could never have been a great tribune of the plebs." Marius shrugged. "Oh, I was young then, Lucius Cornelius. And I had a good brain. But a political animal I am not.'' "So you're going to yield the center of the stage to a posturing wolfshead like Saturninus? That doesn't sound like the Gaius Marius I know," said Sulla. "I'm not the Gaius Marius you know," said Marius with a faint smile. "The new Gaius Marius is very, very tired. A stranger to me as much as to you, believe me!" "Then go away for the summer, please!" "I intend to," said Marius, "as soon as you tie the knot with Aelia." Sulla started, then laughed. "Ye gods, I'd forgotten all about it!" He got to his feet gracefully, a beautifully made man in the prime of life. "I'd better go home and seek an audience with our mutual mother-in-law, hadn't I? No doubt she's breaking her neck" he shivered "to leave me." The shiver meant nothing to Marius, who seized upon the comment instead. "Yes, she's anxious. I've bought her a nice little villa not far from ours at Cumae." "Then home I go, as fleet as Mercury chasing a contract to repave the Via Appia!" He held out his hand. "Look after yourself, Gaius Marius. If Aelia's still willing, I'll tie the knot at once." A thought occurred to him, he laughed. “You're absolutely right! Catulus Caesar looks like a camel! Monumental hauteur!" Julia was waiting outside the study to waylay Sulla as he left. "What do you think?" she asked anxiously. "He'll be all right, little sister. They beat him, and he suffers. Take him down to Campania, make him bathe in the sea and wallow in the roses." "I will, as soon as you're married." "I'm marrying, I'm marrying!" he cried, holding up his hands in surrender. Julia sighed. "There's one thing we cannot get away from, Lucius Cornelius, and that is that less than half a year in the Forum has worn Gaius Marius down more than ten years in the field with his armies."
It seemed everyone needed a rest, for when Marius left for Cumae, public life in Rome simmered down to a tepid inertia. One by one the notables quit the city, unbearable during the height of summer, when every kind of enteric fever raged amid Subura and Esquiline, and even Palatine and Aventine were only debatably healthy. Not that life in the Subura worried Aurelia unduly; she dwelled in the midst of a cool cavern, the greenery of the courtyard and the immensely thick walls of her insula keeping the heat at bay. Gaius Matius and his wife, Priscilla, were in like condition to herself and Caesar, for Priscilla too was heavily pregnant, her baby due at the same time as Aurelia's. The two women were very well looked after. Gaius Matius hovered helpfully, and Lucius Decumius popped in every day to make sure all was right. The flowers still came regularly, supplemented since her pregnancy with little gifts of sweetmeats, rare spices, anything Lucius Decumius thought might keep his darling Aurelia's appetite keen. "As if I'd lost it!" she laughed to Publius Rutilius Rufus, another regular caller. Her son, Gaius Julius Caesar, was born on the thirteenth day of Quinctilis, which meant that his birth was entered in the register at the temple of Juno Lucina as occurring two days before the Ides of Quinctilis, his status as patrician, his rank as senatorial. He was very long and consequently weighed somewhat more than he looked to weigh; he was very strong; he was solemn and quiet, not prone to wailing; his hair was so fair it was practically invisible, though on close examination he actually had quite a lot of it; and his eyes from birth were a pale greenish-blue, ringed around with a band of blue so dark it was almost black. "He's someone, this son of yours," said Lucius Decumius, staring into the baby's face intently. "Will you look at them eyes! Give your grandmother a fright, they would!" "Don't say such things, you horrible little wart!" growled Cardixa, who was enslaved by this first boy-child. "Gimme a look at downstairs," Lucius Decumius demanded, snatching with grubby fingers at the baby's diapers. "Oho ho ho ho ho!" he crowed. "Just as I thought! Big nose, big feet, and big dick!" "Lucius Decumius!'' said Aurelia, scandalized. "That does it! Out you go!" roared Cardixa as she picked him up by the scruff of his neck, and dropped him outside the front door as smaller women might have dumped a kitten. Sulla called to see Aurelia almost a month after the baby's birth, explaining that she was the only familiar face left in Rome, and apologizing if he was imposing. "Of course not!" she said, delighted to see him. "I'm hoping you can stay for dinner or if you can't today, perhaps you can come tomorrow? I'm so starved for company!" "I can stay," he said without ceremony. "I only really came back to Rome to see an old friend of mine he's come down with a fever." "Who's that? Anyone I know?" she asked, more out of courtesy than curiosity. But for a short moment he looked as if she had asked an unwelcome question, or perhaps a painful one; the expression on his face interested her far more than the identity of his sick friend, for it was dark, unhappy, angry. Then it was gone, and he was smiling with consummate ease. "I doubt you know him," he said. "Metrobius." "The actor?" "The same. I used to know a lot of people in the theater. In the old days. Before I married Julilla and entered the Senate. A different world.'' His strange light eyes wandered around the reception room. "More like this world, only seamier. Funny! It seems now like a dream." "You sound rather sorry," said Aurelia gently. "No, not really." "And will he get well, your friend Metrobius?" "Oh, yes! It's just a fever." A silence fell, not uncomfortable, which he broke without words by getting up and walking across to the big open space which served as a window onto the courtyard. "It's lovely out there." "I think so." "And your new son? How is he?" She smiled. "You shall see for yourself shortly." "Good." He remained staring at the courtyard. "Lucius Cornelius, is everything all right?" she asked. He turned then, smiling; she thought what an attractive man he was, in a most unusual way. And how disconcerting those eyes were so light so ringed with darkness. Like her son's eyes. And for some reason that thought made her shiver. "Yes, Aurelia, everything's all right," Sulla said. "I wish I thought you were telling me the truth." He opened his mouth to reply, but at that moment Cardixa came in bearing the infant heir to the Caesar name. "We're off upstairs to the fourth floor," she said. "Show Lucius Cornelius first, Cardixa." But the only children Sulla was really interested in were his own two, so he peered dutifully into the baby's face, then glanced at Aurelia to see if this satisfied her. "Off you go, Cardixa," she said, putting Sulla out of his misery. "Who is it this morning?" "Sarah." She turned to Sulla with a pleasant, unselfconscious smile. "I have no milk, alas! So my son goes everywhere for his food. One of the great advantages of living in a big community like an insula. There are always at least half a dozen women nursing, and everyone is nice enough to offer to feed my babies." "He'll grow up to love the whole world," said Sulla. "I imagine you have the whole world as tenants." "I do. It makes life interesting." Back he went to gaze at the courtyard. "Lucius Cornelius, you're only half here," she accused softly. "Something is the matter! Can't you share it with me? Or is it one of those men-only difficulties?" He came to sit down on the couch opposite hers. "I just never have any luck with women," he said abruptly. Aurelia blinked. "In what way?" "The women I love. The women I marry." Interesting; he found it easier to speak of marriage than of love. "Which is it now?" she asked. "A bit of both. In love with one, married to another." "Oh, Lucius Cornelius!" She looked at him with genuine liking but not an ounce of desire. "I shan't ask you any names, because I don't really want to know. You ask me the questions, I'll try to come up with the answers." He shrugged. "There's nothing much to say! I married Aelia, found for me by our mother-in-law. After Julilla, I wanted a perfect Roman matron someone like Julia, or you if you were a little older. When Marcia introduced me to Aelia, I thought she was ideal calm, quiet, good-humored, attractive, a nice person. And I thought, terrific! I'll have me my Roman matron at last. I can't love anyone, I thought, so I may as well be married to someone I can like." "You liked your German wife, I believe," Aurelia said. "Yes, very much. I still miss her in peculiar ways. But she's not a Roman, so she's no use to the senator in Rome, is she? Anyway, I decided Aelia would turn out much the same as Hermana." He laughed, a hard sound. "But I was wrong! Aelia turns out to be dull, pedestrian, and boring. A very nice person indeed, but oh, five moments in her company, and I'm yawning!" "Is she good to your children?" "Very good. No complaints there!" He laughed again. "I ought to have hired her as a nurserymaid she'd have been ideal. She adores the children, and they adore her." He was talking now almost as if she didn't exist, or as if she didn't matter as an auditor, only as a presence who gave him an excuse to say aloud what he had long been thinking. "Just after I came back from Italian Gaul, I was invited to attend a dinner party at Scaurus's," he went on. "A bit flattered. A bit apprehensive. Wondered if they were all going to be there Metellus Piggle-wiggle and the rest and try to wean me away from Gaius Marius. She was there, poor little thing. Scaurus's wife. By all the gods in the world, why did it have to be her married to Scaurus? He could be her great-grandfather! Dalmatica. That's what they call her. One way of keeping them all straight, the thousands of Caecilia Metellas. I took one look at her and I loved her. At least I think it's love. There's pity in it too, but I never seem to stop thinking of her, so that means it's got to be love, doesn't it? She's pregnant. Isn't that disgusting? No one asked her what she wanted, of course. Metellus Piggle-wiggle just gave her to Scaurus like a honeycomb to a child. Here, your son's dead, take this consolation prize! Have another son! Disgusting. And yet if they knew the half of me, they'd be the ones disgusted. I can't see it, Aurelia. They're more immoral than I am! But you'd never get them to see it that way." Aurelia had learned a great deal since she moved to the Subura; everyone from Lucius Decumius to the freedmen thronging the top two floors talked to her. And things happened things the landlady was involved in whether she liked it or not things which would have shocked her husband to his core did he only know. Abortion. Witchcraft. Murder. Robbery with violence. Rape. Delirium tremens and worse addictions. Madness. Despair. Depression. Suicide. It all went on in every insula, and concluded itself the same way; no taking these cases to the tribunal of the praetor urbanus! They were solved by the inhabitants, and a rough justice was dealt out in the most summary fashion. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. So as she listened Aurelia pieced together a composite picture of Lucius Cornelius Sulla that was not so very far from the truth. Alone among the aristocrats of Rome who knew him, she understood from whence he had come, and understood too the terrible difficulties his nature and his upbringing had thrust upon him. He had claimed his birthright, but he was permanently branded with the stews of Rome too. And as Sulla talked about one thing, his mind wandered among other things he didn't dare say to his listener: how desperately he had wanted her, Scaurus's little pregnant child-wife, and not entirely for the flesh or the mind. She was ideal for his purposes. But she was married confarreatio to Scaurus, and he was committed to splendid boring Aelia. Not confarreatio this time! It was too hideous a business to divorce; Dalmatica simply pointed up a lesson he had already learned in that respect. Women. He was never going to have the luck with women, he knew it in his bones. Was it because of the other side to himself? That wonderful beautiful glorious relationship with Metrobius! And yet he didn't want to live with Metrobius any more than he had wanted to live with Julilla. Perhaps that was it he did not want to share himself. Too dangerous by far. Oh, but he had hungered for Caecilia Metella Dalmatica, wife of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus! Disgusting. Not that he normally objected to old men and child-brides. This was personal. He was in love with her, therefore she was special. "Did she Dalmatica like you, Lucius Cornelius?" Aurelia asked, breaking into his thoughts. Sulla didn't hesitate. "Oh, yes! No doubt of it." "What are you going to do, then?" He writhed. "I've come too far, I've paid too much! I can't stop now, Aurelia! Even for Dalmatica if I had an affair with her, the boni would make it their business to ruin me. I don't have much money yet, either. Just enough to get by in the Senate. I made a bit out of the Germans, but no more than my proper share. And I'm not going to climb the rest of the way easily. They feel about me the way they feel about Gaius Marius, even though for different reasons. Neither of us conforms to their wretched ideals. Yet they can't work out why we have the ability and they don't. They feel used, abused. I'm definitely luckier than Gaius Marius. At least I have the blood. But it's tainted with the Subura. Actors. Low life. I'm not really one of the Good Men." He drew a breath. "Yet I'm going to go right past them, Aurelia! Because I'm the best horse in the race." "And what happens when the prize isn't worth it?" He opened his eyes wide, astonished at her denseness. "It's never worth the effort! Never! That's not why we do it, any of us. When they harness us up to do our seven laps of the course, we race against ourselves. What other challenge could there be for a Gaius Marius? He's the best horse in the field. So he races against himself. So do I. I can do it. I'm going to do it! But it only really matters to me." And she blushed at her denseness. "Of course." Rising to her feet, she held out her hand. "Come, Lucius Cornelius! It's a lovely day in spite of the heat. The Subura will be entirely left to itself all those who can afford to leave Rome for the summer are gone. Only the poor and the crazed are left! And I. Let's go for a walk, and when we come back, we'll have dinner. I'll send a message to Uncle Publius to join us I think he's still in town." She pulled a face. "I have to be careful, you understand, Lucius Cornelius. My husband trusts me as much as he loves me, which is a great deal. But he wouldn't like me to cause gossip, and I try to be an old-fashioned kind of wife. He would be horrified to think I didn't invite you to eat dinner with me and yet if Uncle Publius can come, Gaius Julius will commend me." Sulla eyed her affectionately. "What nonsense men cherish about their wives! You're not even remotely like the creature Gaius Julius moons about over military dinners in camp." "I know," she said. "But he doesn't." The heat of the Vicus Patricii settled down on their heads like a stifling blanket; Aurelia gasped and ducked back inside. "Well, that settles that! I didn't think it was hot! Eutychus can run to the Carinae for Uncle Publius, he can do with the exercise. And we'll sit in the garden." She led the way, still talking. "Cheer up, Lucius Cornelius, do! It will all turn out in the end, I'm sure. Go back to Circei and that nice, boring wife. In time you'll like her more, I promise. And it will be better for you if you don't see Dalmatica at all. How old are you now?" The trapped feeling was beginning to lift; Sulla's face lightened, his smile more natural. "A milestone this year, Aurelia. I turned forty last New Year's Day." "Not an old man yet!" "In some ways I am. I haven't even been praetor yet, and I'm already a year past the usual age." "Now, now, you're looking gloomy again, and there really is no need. Look at our old war-horse Gaius Marius! His first consulship at fifty, eight years over the age. Now if you saw him poled up for the Mars race, would you pick him as the best horse in it? Would you bet that he'd be the October Horse? Yet all his greatest deeds he did after he turned fifty." "That's very true," said Sulla, and did feel more cheerful, in spite of himself. "What lucky god prompted me to come and see you today? You're a good friend, Aurelia. A help." "Well, perhaps one day I'll turn to you for help." "All you have to do is ask." His head went up, he took in the naked balconies of the upper floors. "You are courageous! No screens? And they don't abuse the privilege?" "Never." He laughed, a throaty chuckle of genuine amusement. "I do believe you have the Subura hard cases all wrapped up in the palm of your little hand!" Nodding, smiling, she rocked gently back and forth on her garden seat. "I like my life, Lucius Cornelius. To be honest, I don't care if Gaius Julius never gets the money together to buy that house on the Palatine. Here in the Subura I'm busy, fruitful, surrounded by all sorts of interesting people. I'm running a race of my own, you see." "With only one egg in the cup and only one dolphin down," Sulla said, "you've got a very long way to go yet." "So have you," said Aurelia.
Julia knew of course that Marius would never spend the whole summer at Cumae, though he had talked as if he would not return to Rome until the beginning of September; the moment his equilibrium began to right itself, he would be itching to get back to the fray. So she counted her blessings a day at a time, glad that the moment Marius returned to a rural setting, he shed both political toga praetexta and military cuirass, and became for a little while a country squire like all his ancestors. They swam in the sea off the little beach below their magnificent villa, and gorged themselves on fresh oysters, crabs, shrimp, tunnyfish; they walked the sparsely populated hills amid welters of roses cloying the air with perfume; they did little entertaining, and pretended to be out whenever people called. Marius built a boat of sorts for Young Marius, and got almost as much fun out of its instant imitation of a bottom fish as Young Marius did. Never, thought Julia, had she been quite so happy as during that halcyon summer at Cumae. Counting her blessings one day at a time. But Marius did not return to Rome. Painless and subtle, the little stroke happened during the first night of the Dog Star month of Sextilis; all Marius noticed when he woke in the morning was that his pillow was wet where apparently he had drooled in his sleep. When he came to break his fast and found Julia on the open terrace looking out to sea, he gazed at her in bewilderment as she gazed at him with an expression he had never before seen on her face. "What's the matter?" he mumbled, his tongue feeling thick and clumsy, a most peculiar non-sensation. "Your face " she said, her own whitening. His hands went up to touch it, his left fingers as awkward as his tongue felt. "What is it?" he asked. "Your face it's dropped on the left side," she said, and choked on her breath as understanding dawned. "Oh, Gaius Marius! You've had a stroke!" But because he felt no pain and no direct consciousness of any alteration, he refused to believe her until she brought him a big polished silver mirror and he could look at himself for himself. The right side of his face was firm, uplifted, not very lined for a man of his age, where the left side looked as if it were a wax mask melting in the heat of some nearby torch, running, drooping, slipping away. "I don’t feel any different!" he said, stunned. "Not inside my mind, where one is supposed to feel an illness. My tongue won't move around my words properly, but my head knows how to say them, and you're understanding what I say and I'm understanding what you say, so I haven't lost my faculty of speech! My left hand fumbles, yet I can move it. And there is no pain, no pain of any kind!" When he refused with trembling anger to have a physician sent for, Julia gave in for fear that opposition would make his condition worse; all that day she watched him herself, and was able to tell him as she persuaded him to go to bed shortly after nightfall that the paralysis appeared to be about the same as it had been at dawn. "That's a good sign, I'm sure," she said. "You'll get better in time. You'll just have to rest, stay here longer." "I can't! They'll think I'm not game to face them!" "If they care to visit you which I'm sure they will! they'll be able to see for themselves what's wrong, Gaius Marius. Whether you like it or not, here you stay until you get better," said Julia with a note of authority quite new to her voice. "No, don't argue with me! I'm right, and you know I am! What do you think you can accomplish if you go back to Rome in this condition, beyond having another stroke?" "Nothing," he muttered, and fell back on the bed in despair. "Julia, Julia, how can I recover from something that makes me feel more ugly than ill? I must recover! I can't let them beat me, not now I have so much at stake!" "They won't beat you, Gaius Marius," she said strongly. "The only thing that will ever beat you is death, and you're not going to die from this little stroke. The paralysis will improve. And if you rest, you exercise sensibly, you eat in moderation, you don't drink any wine, and you don't worry about what's happening in Rome, it will happen much faster."
4
The spring rains didn't fall in Sicily or Sardinia, and in Africa they were scanty. Then when what wheat had come up started to form ears, the rains came in torrents; floods and blights utterly destroyed the crop. Only from Africa would a tiny harvest find its way to Puteoli and Ostia. Which meant that Rome faced her fourth year of high grain prices, and a shortage in quantity spelling famine. The junior consul and flamen Martialis, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, found himself with empty granaries beneath the cliffs of the Aventine adjacent to the Port of Rome, and the private granaries along the Vicus Tuscus held very little. This very little, the grain merchants informed Flaccus and his aediles, would sell for upward of fifty sesterces per modius, a mere thirteen pounds in weight. Few if any Head Count families could afford to pay a quarter so much. There were other and cheaper foods available, but a shortage of wheat sent all foodstuffs up in price because of increased consumption and limited production. And bellies used to good bread found no satisfaction in thin gruel and turnips, which became the staples of the lowly in times of famine; the strong and healthy survived, but the old, the weak, the very young, and the sickly all too often died. By October the Head Count was growing restive; thrills of fear began to run through the ordinary residents of the city. For the Head Count of Rome deprived of food was a prospect no one living cheek by jowl with them could face without a thrill of fear. Many of the Third and Fourth Class citizens, who would find it difficult anyway to buy such costly grain, began to lay in weapons to defend their larders from the depredations of those owning even less. Lucius Valerius Flaccus conferred with the curule aediles responsible for grain purchases on behalf of the State as well as for the storage and sale of State grain and applied to the Senate for additional funds to buy in grain from anywhere it could be obtained, and of any kind barley, millet, emmer wheat as well as bread wheat. However, few in the Senate were really worried; too many years and too much insulation from the lower classes of citizens separated them from the last Head Count famine riots. To make matters worse, the two young men serving as Rome's Treasury quaestors were of the most exclusive and unpitying kind of senator, and thought little of the Head Count at the best of times. Both when elected quaestor had asked for duty inside Rome, declaring that they intended to “arrest the unwarranted drains upon Rome's Treasury" an impressive way of saying that they had no intention of releasing money for Head Count armies or Head Count grain. The urban quaestor more senior of the two was none other than Caepio Junior, son of the consul who had stolen the Gold of Tolosa and lost the battle of Arausio; the other was Metellus Piglet, the son of the exiled Metellus Numidicus. Both had scores to settle with Gaius Marius. It was not senatorial practice to run counter to the recommendations of the Treasury quaestors. Questioned in the House as to the state of fiscal affairs, both Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet said flatly there was no money for grain. Thanks to the massive outlays it had been called upon to make for a number of years outfitting and paying and feeding Head Count armies, the State was broke. Neither the war against Jugurtha nor the war against the Germans had brought in anything like enough money in spoils and tributes to rectify the State's negative financial balance, said the two Treasury quaestors. And produced their tribunes of the Treasury and their account books to prove their point. Rome was broke. Those without the money to pay the going price for grain would have to starve. Sorry, but that was the reality of the situation. By the beginning of November the word had reached all of Rome that there would be no reasonably priced State grain, for the Senate had refused to vote funds for its purchase. Couched in the form of rumor, the word didn't mention crop failures or cantankerous Treasury quaestors; it simply stated that there would be no cheap grain. The Forum Romanum immediately began to fill up with crowds of a nature not usually seen there, while the normal Forum frequenters melted away or tacked themselves onto the back of the newcomers. These crowds were Head Count and the Fifth Class, and their mood was ugly. Senators and other togate men found themselves hissed by thousands of tongues as they walked what they regarded as their traditional territory, but at first were not easily cowed; then the hissing became showers of pelted filth faeces, manure, stinking Tiber mud, rotten garbage. Whereupon the Senate extricated itself from these difficulties by suspending all meetings, leaving unfortunates like bankers, knight merchants, advocates, and tribunes of the Treasury to suffer the besmirching of their persons without senatorial support. Not strong enough to take the initiative, the junior consul, Flaccus, let matters drift, while Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet congratulated themselves upon a job well done. If the winter saw a few thousand Head Count Romans die, that meant there would be fewer mouths to feed. At which point the tribune of the plebs Lucius Appuleius Saturninus convoked the Plebeian Assembly, and proposed a grain law to it. The State was to buy immediately every ounce of wheat, barley, and millet in Italy and Italian Gaul and sell it for the ridiculously cheap price of one sestertius per modius. Of course Saturninus made no reference to the impossible logistics of shipping anything from Italian Gaul to regions south of the Apennines, nor the fact that there was almost no grain to buy anywhere south of the Apennines. What he wanted was the crowd, and that meant placing himself in the eyes of the crowd as its sole savior. Opposition was almost nonexistent in the absence of a convened Senate, for the grain shortage affected everyone in Rome below the level of the rich. The entire food chain and its participants were on Saturninus's side. So were the Third and Fourth Classes, and even many of the centuries of the Second Class. As November edged over the hump of its middle and down the slope toward December, all Rome was on Saturninus's side. "If people can't afford to buy wheat, we can't afford to make bread!" cried the Guild of Millers and Bakers. "If people are hungry, they don't work well!" cried the Guild of Builders. “If people can't afford to feed their children, what's going to happen to their slaves?" cried the Guild of Freedmen. "If people have to spend their money on food, they won't be able to pay rent!" cried the Guild of Landlords. "If people are so hungry they start pillaging shops and overturning market stalls, what will happen to us?" cried the Guild of Merchants. "If people descend on our allotments in search of food, we won't have any produce to sell!" cried the Guild of Market Gardeners. For it was not the simple matter of a famine killing off a few thousand of the Head Count; the moment Rome's middle and poorer citizens could not afford to eat, a hundred and one kinds of businesses and trades suffered in their turn. A famine, in short, was an economic disaster. But the Senate wasn't coming together, even in temples off the beaten track, so it was left to Saturninus to propose a solution, and his solution was based upon a false premise; that there was grain for the State to buy. He himself genuinely thought there was, deeming every aspect of the crisis a manufactured one, and the culprits an alliance between the Policy Makers of the Senate and the upper echelons of the grain barons. Every one of the thousands of faces in the Forum turned to him as heliotropes to the sun; working himself into a passion through the force of his oratory, he began to believe every single word he shouted, he began to believe every single face his eyes encountered in the crowd, he began to believe in a new way to govern Rome. What did the consulship really matter? What did the Senate really matter, when crowds like these made it shove its tail between its legs and slink home? When the bets were on the table and the moment to throw the dice arrived, they were all that mattered, these faces in this enormous crowd. They held the real power; those who thought they held it did so only as long as the faces in the crowd permitted it. So what did the consulship really matter? What did the Senate really matter? Talk, hot air, a nothing! There were no armies in Rome, no armies nearer to Rome than the recruit training centers around Capua. Consuls and Senate held their power without force of arms or numbers to back them up. But here in the Forum was true power, here were the numbers to back that true power. Why did a man have to be consul to be the First Man in Rome? It wasn't necessary! Had Gaius Gracchus too realized that? Or was he forced to kill himself before he could realize it? I, thought Saturninus, gobbling up the vision of the faces in his mighty crowd, shall be the First Man in Rome! But not as consul. As tribune of the plebs. Genuine power lay with the tribunes of the plebs, not with the consuls. And if Gaius Marius could get himself elected consul in what promised to be perpetuity, what was to stop Lucius Appuleius Saturninus's getting himself elected tribune of the plebs in perpetuity? However, Saturninus chose a quiet day to pass his grain bill into law, chiefly because he retained the wisdom to see that senatorial opposition to providing cheap grain must continue to appear high-handed and elitist; therefore no enormous crowd must be present in the Forum to give the Senate an opportunity to accuse the Plebeian Assembly of disorder, riot, violence, and denounce the law as invalid. He was still simmering about the second agrarian bill, Gaius Marius's treachery, Metellus Numidicus's exile; that in fact the law was still engraved on the tablets was his doing, not Gaius Marius's. Which made him the real author of land grants for the Head Count veterans. November was short on holidays, especially holidays on which the Comitia could meet. But his opportunity to find a quiet day came when a fabulously wealthy knight died, and his sons staged elaborate funeral gladiatorial games in their father's honor; the site chosen for the games normally the Forum Romanum was the Circus Flaminius, in order to avoid the crowds gathering every day in the Forum Romanum. It was Caepio Junior who spoiled Saturninus's plans. The Plebeian Assembly was convoked; the omens were auspicious; the Forum was inhabited by its normal frequenters because the crowd had gone off to the Circus Flaminius; the other tribunes of the plebs were busy with the casting of the lots to see which order the tribes were going to vote in; and Saturninus himself stood to the front of the rostra exhorting the groups of tribes forming in the well of the Comitia to vote the way he wanted. In the conspicuous absence of senatorial meetings, it had not occurred to Saturninus that any members of the Senate were keeping an eye on events in the Forum, barring his nine fellow tribunes of the plebs, who simply did as they were told these days. But there were some members of the Senate who felt quite as much contempt for that body's craven conduct as did Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. They were all young, either in their quaestorian year or at most two years beyond that point, and they had allies among the sons of senators and First Class knights as yet too young to enter the Senate or senior posts in their fathers' firms. Meeting in groups at each other's homes, they were led by Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet, and they had a more mature confidant-adviser to give direction and purpose to what might otherwise have ended up merely a series of angry discussions foundering in an excess of wine. Their confidant-adviser was rapidly becoming something of an idol to them, for he possessed all those qualities young men so admire he was daring, intrepid, cool-headed, sophisticated, something of a high liver and womanizer, witty, fashionable, and had an impressive war record. His name was Lucius Cornelius Sulla. With Marius laid low in Cumae for what seemed months, Sulla had taken it upon himself to watch events in Rome in a way that, for instance, Publius Rutilius Rufus would never have dreamed of doing. Sulla's motives were not completely based on loyalty to Marius; after that conversation with Aurelia, he had looked very detachedly at his future prospects in the Senate, and come to the conclusion that Aurelia was right: he would, like Gaius Marius, be what a gardener would call a late bloomer. In which case it was pointless for him to seek friendship and alliance among those senators older than himself. Scaurus, for instance, was a lost cause. And how convenient that particular decision was! It would keep him out of the way of Scaurus's delectable little child-bride, now the mother of baby Aemilia Scaura; when he had heard the news that Scaurus had fathered a girl, Sulla experienced a shaft of pure pleasure. Served the randy old goat right. Thinking to safeguard his own political future while preserving Marius's, Sulla embarked upon the wooing of the senatorial younger generation, choosing as his targets those who were malleable, able to be influenced, not very intelligent, extremely rich, from important families, or so arrogantly sure of themselves they left themselves open to a subtle form of flattery. His primary targets were Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet, Caepio Junior because he was an intellectually dense patrician with access to young men like Marcus Livius Drusus (whom Sulla did not even try to woo), and Metellus Piglet because he knew what was going on among the older Good Men. No one knew better than Sulla how to woo young men, even when his purposes held no kind of sexuality, so it was not long before he was holding court among them, his manner always tinged with amusement at their youthful posturings in a way which suggested to them that there was a hope he would change his mind, take them seriously. Nor were they adolescents; the oldest among them were only some seven or eight years his junior, the youngest fifteen or sixteen years his junior. Old enough to consider themselves fully formed, young enough to be thrown off balance by a Sulla. And the nucleus of a senatorial following which in time would be of enormous importance to a man determined to be consul. At this moment, however, Sulla's chief concern was Saturninus, whom he had been watching very closely since the first crowds began to gather in the Forum, and the harassment of togate dignitaries began. Whether the lex Appuleia frumentaria was actually passed into law or not was far from Sulla's main worry; what Saturninus needed, Sulla thought, was a demonstration that he would not have things all his own way. When some fifty of the young bloods met at the house of Metellus Piglet on the night before Saturninus planned to pass his grain law, Sulla lay back and listened to the talk in an apparent idle amusement until Caepio Junior rounded on him and demanded to know what he thought they ought to do. He looked marvelous, the thick red-gold hair barbered to bring out the best of its waves, his white skin flawless, his brows and lashes dark enough to show up (had they only known it, he touched them with a trace of stibium, otherwise they virtually disappeared), his eyes as glacially compelling as a blue-eyed cat's. "I think you're all hot air," he said. Metellus Piglet had been brought to understand that Sulla was anything but Marius's tame dog; like any other Roman, he didn't hold it against a man that he attached himself to a faction, any more than he assumed that man could not be detached. "No, we're not all hot air," he growled without a single stammer. "It's just that we don't know what's the right tactic." "Do you object to a little violence?" Sulla asked. "Not when it's to protect the Senate's right to decide how Rome's public money is to be spent," said Caepio Junior. "And there you have it," said Sulla. "The People have never been accorded the right to spend the city's moneys. Let the People make the laws we don't object to that. But it's the Senate's right to provide any money the People's laws demand and the Senate's right to deny funding. If we're stripped of our right to control the purse-strings, we have no power left at all. Money is the only way we can render the People's laws impotent when we don't agree with them. That's how we dealt with the grain law of Gaius Gracchus." "We won't prevent the Senate's voting the money when this grain law goes through," said Metellus Piglet, still without a stammer; when with his intimates he didn't stammer. "Of course not!" said Sulla. "We won't prevent its being passed, either. But we can show Lucius Appuleius a little of our strength all the same." Thus as Saturninus stood exhorting his voters to do the right thing by the lex Appuleia frumentaria, the crowds no closer than the Circus Flaminius and the meeting as orderly as any consular could demand, Caepio Junior led some two hundred followers into the lower Forum Romanum. Armed with clubs and billets of wood, most of them were beefy muscular fellows with the slack midriffs which suggested they were ex-gladiators now reduced to hiring out their services for any sort of job requiring strength or the capacity to turn nasty. However, all the fifty present at Metellus Piglet's house the night before led the vanguard, Caepio Junior very much the leader of the pack. Lucius Cornelius Sulla was not among them. Saturninus shrugged and watched impassively as the gang marched across the Forum, then turned back to the well of the Comitia and dismissed the meeting. "There'll be no heads broken on my account!" he shouted to the voters, dissolving their tribal clumps in alarm. "Go home, come back tomorrow! We'll pass our law then!" On the following day the Head Count was back in attendance on the Comitia; no gang of senatorial toughs appeared to break up the meeting, and the grain bill passed into law. "All I was trying to do, you thick-headed idiot," said Saturninus to Caepio Junior when they met in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, where Valerius Flaccus had felt the Conscript Fathers would be safe from the crowds while they argued about funding for the lex Appuleia frumentaria, "was pass a lawful law in a lawfully convoked assembly. The crowds weren't there, the atmosphere was peaceful, and the omens were impeccable. And what happens? You and your idiot friends come along to break a few heads!" He turned to the clusters of senators standing about. "Don't blame me that the law had to be passed in the middle of twenty thousand Head Count! Blame this fool!" “This fool is blaming himself for not using force where force would have counted most!" shouted Caepio Junior. "I ought to have killed you, Lucius Appuleius!" "Thank you for saying that in front of all these impartial witnesses," said Saturninus, smiling. "Quintus Servilius Caepio Junior, I hereby formally charge you with minor treason, in that you did attempt to obstruct a tribune of the plebs in the execution of his duty, and that you did threaten to harm the sacrosanct person of a tribune of the plebs." "You're riding a half-mad horse for a fall, Lucius Appuleius," said Sulla. "Get off before it happens, man!" "I have laid a formal charge against Quintus Servilius, Conscript Fathers," said Saturninus, ignoring Sulla as nobody of importance, "but that matter can now be left to the treason court. Today I'm here to demand money." There were fewer than eighty senators present, in spite of the safe location, and none of significance; Saturninus glared at them contemptuously. "I want money to buy grain for the People of Rome," he said. "If you haven't got it in the Treasury, I suggest you go out and borrow it. For money I will have!" Saturninus got his money. Red-faced and protesting, Caepio Junior the urban quaestor was ordered to mint a special coinage from an emergency stockpile of silver bars in the temple of Ops, and pay for the grain without further defiance. "I'll see you in court," said Saturninus sweetly to Caepio Junior as the meeting finished, "because I'm going to take great pleasure in prosecuting you myself." But in this he overstepped himself; the knight jurors took a dislike to Saturninus, and were already favorably disposed toward Caepio Junior when Fortune showed that she too was most favorably disposed toward Caepio Junior. Right in the middle of the defending counsel's address came an urgent letter from Smyrna to inform his son that Quintus Servilius Caepio had died in Smyrna, surrounded by nothing more comforting than his gold. Caepio Junior wept bitterly; the jury was moved, and dismissed the charges. Elections were due, but no one wanted to hold them, for still each day the crowds gathered in the Forum Romanum, and still each day the granaries remained empty. The junior consul, Flaccus, insisted the elections must wait until time proved Gaius Marius incapable of conducting them; priest of Mars though he was, Lucius Valerius Flaccus had too little of Mars in him to risk his person by supervising elections in a climate like this present one.
Marcus Antonius Orator had had a very successful three-year campaign against the pirates of Cilicia and Pamphylia, which he finished in some style from his headquarters in the delightfully cosmopolitan and cultured city of Athens. Here he had been joined by his good friend Gaius Memmius, who on his return to Rome from governing Macedonia had found himself arraigned in Glaucia's extortion court along with Gaius Flavius Fimbria, his partner-in-crime in the grain swindle. Fimbria had been convicted heavily, but Memmius was unlucky enough to be convicted by one vote. He chose Athens as his place of exile because his friend Antonius spent so much time there, and he needed his friend Antonius's support in the matter of an appeal to the Senate to quash his conviction. That he was able to defray the costs of this expensive exercise was due to pure chance; while governing Macedonia, he had almost literally tripped over a cache of gold in a captured Scordisci village one hundred talents of it. Like Caepio at Tolosa, Memmius had seen no reason why he ought to share the gold with anybody, so he didn't. Until he dropped some of it into Antonius's open hand in Athens. And a few months later got his recall to Rome and his seat in the Senate reinstated. Since the pirate war was properly concluded, Gaius Memmius waited in Athens until Marcus Antonius Orator was ready to go home as well. Their friendship had prospered, and they formed a pact to seek the consulship as joint candidates. It was the end of November when Antonius sat down with his little army on the vacant fields of the Campus Martius, and demanded a triumph. Which the Senate, able to meet in the safety of the temple of Bellona to deal with this, was pleased to grant him. However, Antonius was informed that his triumph would have to wait until after the tenth day of December, as no tribunician elections had yet been held, and the Forum Romanum was still packed with the Head Count. Hopefully the tribunician elections would be held and the new college would enter office on the tenth day of the month, but a triumphal parade with the city in its current mood, Antonius was informed, was out of the question. It began to look to Antonius as if he would not be able to stand for the office of consul, for until his triumph was held, he had to remain outside the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city; he still held imperium, which put him in exactly the same position as a foreign king, forbidden to enter Rome. And if he couldn't enter Rome, he couldn't announce himself as a candidate in the consular elections. However, his successful war had made him tremendously popular with the grain merchants and other businessmen, for traffic on the Middle Sea was safer and more predictable than in half a century. Could he stand for the consulship, there was every chance that he would win the senior position, even against Gaius Marius. And in spite of his part in Fimbria's grain swindle, Gaius Memmius's chances were not bad either, for he had been an intrepid foe of Jugurtha's, and fought Caepio bitterly when he returned the extortion court to the Senate. They were, as Catulus Caesar said to Scaurus Princeps Senatus, as popular a pair with the knights who formed the majority of the First and Second Classes as the boni could possibly ask and both of them were infinitely preferable to Gaius Marius. For of course everyone expected Gaius Marius back in Rome at the very last minute, all set to stand for his seventh consulship. The story of the stroke had been verified, but it didn't seem to have incapacitated Marius very much, and those who had made the journey to Cumae to see him had come away convinced it had not in any way affected the quality of his mind. No doubt of it in anyone's thoughts; Gaius Marius was sure to declare himself a candidate. The idea of presenting the electorate with a pair of candidates eager to stand as partners appealed to the Policy Makers very strongly; Antonius and Memmius together stood a chance of breaking Marius's iron hold on the senior chair. Except that Antonius stubbornly refused to give up his triumph for the sake of the consulship by yielding his imperium and stepping across the pomerium to declare himself a candidate. "I can run for the consulship next year," he said when Catulus Caesar and Scaurus Princeps Senatus came to see him on the Campus Martius. "The triumph is more important I'll probably never fight another good war again as long as I live." And from that stand he could not be budged. "All right," said Scaurus to Catulus Caesar as they came away from Antonius's camp despondent, "we'll just have to bend the rules a little. Gaius Marius thinks nothing of breaking them, so why should we be scrupulous when so much is at stake?" But it was Catulus Caesar who proposed their solution to the House, meeting with just enough members present to make a quorum in yet another safe location, the temple of Jupiter Stator near the Circus Flaminius. "These are trying times," Catulus Caesar said. "Normally all the candidates for the curule magistracies must present themselves to the Senate and the People in the Forum Romanum to declare their candidacies. Unfortunately the shortage of grain and the constant demonstrations in the Forum Romanum have rendered this location untenable. Might I humbly beg the Conscript Fathers to shift the candidates' tribunal for this one extraordinary year only! to a special convocation of the Centuriate Assembly in the saepta on the Campus Martius? We must do something about holding elections! And if we do shift the curule candidates' ceremony to the saepta, it's a start the requisite time between the declarations and the elections can elapse. It would also be fair to Marcus Antonius, who wants to stand for the consulship, but cannot cross the pomerium without abandoning his triumph, yet cannot hold his triumph because of the unrest in our hungry city. On the Campus Martius he can present himself as a candidate. We all expect that the crowds will go home after the tribunes of the plebs are elected and take office. So Marcus Antonius can hold his triumph as soon as the new college goes in, after which we can hold the curule elections." "Why are you so sure the crowds will go home after the new College of Tribunes of the Plebs takes office, Quintus Lutatius?" asked Saturninus. "I should have thought you of all people could answer that, Lucius Appuleius!" snapped Catulus Caesar. "It's you draws them to the Forum it's you up there day after day haranguing them, making them promises neither you nor this august body can keep! How can we buy grain that doesn't exist?" "I'll still be up there speaking to the crowd after my term is over," said Saturninus. "You will not," said Catulus Caesar. "Once you're a privatus again, Lucius Appuleius, if it takes me a month and a hundred men, I'll find some law on the tablets or some precedent that makes it illegal for you to speak from the rostra or any other spot in the Forum!" Saturninus laughed, roars of laughter, howls of laughter; and yet no one there made the mistake of thinking he was amused. "Search to your heart's content, Quintus Lutatius! It won't make any difference. I'm not going to be a privatus after the current tribunician year is finished, because I'm going to be a tribune of the plebs all over again! Yes, I'm taking a leaf out of Gaius Marius's book, and with no legal constraints to have you yammering after my blood! There's nothing to stop a man's seeking the tribunate of the plebs over and over again!" "There are custom and tradition," said Scaurus. "Enough to stop all men save you and Gaius Gracchus from seeking a third term. And you ought to take warning from Gaius Gracchus. He died in the Grove of Furrina with only a slave for company." "I have better company than that," countered Saturninus. "We men of Picenum stick together eh, Titus Labienus? eh, Gaius Saufeius? You'll not get rid of us so easily!" "Don't tempt the gods," said Scaurus. "They do love a challenge from men, Lucius Appuleius!" "I'm not afraid of the gods, Marcus Aemilius! The gods are on my side," said Saturninus, and left the meeting. "I tried to tell him," said Sulla, passing Scaurus and Catulus Caesar. "He's riding a half-mad horse for a fall." "So's that one," said Catulus Caesar to Scaurus after Sulla was out of earshot. "So is half the Senate, if only we knew it," said Scaurus, lingering to look around him. "This truly is a beautiful temple, Quintus Lutatius! A credit to Metellus Macedonicus. But it was a lonely place today without Metellus Numidicus." Then he shrugged his shoulders, cheered up. "Come, we'd better catch our esteemed junior consul before he bolts to the very back of his warren. He can perform the sacrifice to Mars as well as to Jupiter Optimus Maximus if we make it an all-white suovetaurilla, that should surely buy us divine approval to hold the curule candidacy ceremony on the Campus Martius!" "Who's going to foot the bill for a white cow, a white sow, and a white ewe?" asked Catulus Caesar, jerking his head to where Metellus Piglet and Caepio Junior were standing together. "Our Treasury quaestors will squeal louder than all three of the sacrificial victims." "Oh, I think Lucius Valerius the white rabbit can pay," said Scaurus, grinning. "He's got access to Mars!"
On the last day of November a message came from Gaius Marius, convening a meeting of the Senate for the next day in the Curia Hostilia. For once the current turmoil in the Forum Romanum couldn't keep the Conscript Fathers away, so agog were they to see what Gaius Marius was like. The House was packed and everyone came earlier than the dawn did on the Kalends of December to be sure they beat him, speculations flying as they waited. He walked in last of the entire body, as tall, as broad-shouldered, as proud as he had ever been, nothing in his gait to suggest the cripple, his left hand curled normally around the folds of his purple-bordered toga. Ah, but it was there for all the world to see upon his poor face, its old beetling self on the right side, a mournful travesty on the left. Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus put his hands together and began to applaud, the first clap echoing about the ancient hall's naked rafters and bouncing off the ruddy bellies of the terracotta tiles which formed both ceiling and roof. One by one the Conscript Fathers joined in, so that by the time Marius reached his curule chair the whole House was thundering at him. He didn't smile; to smile was to accentuate the clownlike asymmetry of his face so unbearably that every time he did it, whoever watched grew moist in the eyes, from Julia to Sulla. Instead, he simply stood by his ivory seat, nodding and bowing regally until the ovation died away. Scaurus got up, smiling broadly. "Gaius Marius, how good it is to see you! The House has been as dull as a rainy day these last months. As Leader of the House, it is my pleasure to welcome you home." "I thank you, Princeps Senatus Conscript Fathers my fellow magistrates," Marius said, his voice clear, not one slurred word. In spite of his resolve, a slight smile lifted the right side of his mouth upward, though the left corner stayed dismally slumped. "If it is a pleasure for you to welcome me home, it cannot be one tenth the pleasure it is to me to be home! As you can see, I have been ill." He drew a long breath everyone could hear; and hear the sadness in its quaver halfway through. "And though my illness is past, I bear its scars. Before I call this House to order and we get down to business which seems sorely in need of our attention, I wish to make a statement. I will not be seeking re-election as consul for two reasons. The first, that the emergency which faced the State and resulted in my being allowed the unprecedented honor of so many consecutive consulships is now conclusively, finally, positively over. The second, that I do not consider my health would enable me to perform my duties properly. The responsibility I must bear for the present chaos here in Rome is manifest. If I had been here in Rome, the senior consul's presence would have helped. That is why there is a senior consul. I do not accuse Lucius Valerius or Marcus Aemilius or any other official of this body. The senior consul must lead. I have not been able to lead. And that has taught me that I cannot seek re-election. Let the office of senior consul pass to a man in good health." No one replied. No one moved. If his twisted face had indicated this was in the wind, the degree of stunned shock every last one of them now felt was proof of the ascendancy he had gained over them during the past five years. A Senate without Gaius Marius in the consul's chair? Impossible! Even Scaurus Princeps Senatus and Catulus Caesar sat shocked. Then came a voice from the back tier behind Scaurus. "Guh-guh-good!" said Metellus Piglet. "Now my fuh-fuh-father can cuh-cuh-cuh-come home." "I thank you for the compliment, young Metellus," Marius said, looking directly up at him. "You infer that it is only I who keeps your father in his exile on Rhodes. But such is not the case, you know. It is the law of the land keeps Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus in exile. And I strictly charge each and every member of this august body to remember that! There will be no decrees or plebiscites or laws upset because I am not consul!" "Young fool!" muttered Scaurus to Catulus Caesar. "If he hadn't said that, we could quietly have brought Quintus Caecilius back early next year. Now he won't be allowed to come. I really think it's time young Metellus was presented with an extra name." "What?" asked Catulus Caesar. "Puh-Puh-Puh-Pius!" said Scaurus savagely. "Metellus Pius the pious son, ever striving to bring his tata home! And stuh-stuh-stuffing it up!" It was extraordinary to see how quickly the House got down to business now that Gaius Marius was in the consul's chair, extraordinary too to feel a sense of wellbeing permeating the members of the House, as if suddenly the crowds outside couldn't matter the way they had until Gaius Marius reappeared. Informed of the change in venue for the presentation of the curule candidates, Marius simply nodded consent, then curtly ordered Saturninus to call the Plebeian Assembly together and elect some magistrates; until this was out of the way, no other magistrates could be elected. After which, Marius turned to face Gaius Servilius Glaucia, sitting in the urban praetor's chair just behind and to his left. "I hear a rumor, Gaius Servilius," he said to Glaucia, "that you intend to seek the consulship on the grounds of invalidities you have allegedly found in the lex Villia. Please do not. The lex Villia annalis unequivocally says that a man must wait two years between the end of his praetorship and the beginning of any consulship." "Look at who's talking!" gasped Glaucia, staggered to find opposition in the one senatorial corner where he had thought to find support. "How can you stand there so brazenly, Gaius Marius, accusing me of thinking of breaking the lex Villia when you've broken it in fact for the last five years in a row? If the lex Villia is valid, then it unequivocally states that no man who has been consul may seek a second consulship until ten years have elapsed!" "I did not seek the consulship beyond that once, Gaius Servilius," said Marius levelly. "It was bestowed upon me and three times in absentia! because of the Germans. When a state of emergency exists, all sorts of customs even laws! come tumbling down. But when the danger is finally over, whatever extraordinary measures were taken must cease." "Ha ha ha!" said Metellus Piglet from the back row, this being an interjection in perfect accord with his speech impediment. "Peace has come, Conscript Fathers," said Marius as if no one had spoken, "therefore we return to normal business and normal government. Gaius Servilius, the law forbids you to stand for the consulship. And as the presiding officer of the elections, I will not allow your candidacy. Please take this as fair warning. Give up the notion gracefully, for it does not become you. Rome needs lawmakers of your undeniable talent. For you cannot make the laws if you break the laws." "I told you so!" said Saturninus audibly. "He can't stop me, and nor can anyone else," said Glaucia, loudly enough for the whole House to hear him. "He'll stop you," said Saturninus. "As for you, Lucius Appuleius," Marius said, turning now to look at the tribunes' bench, "I hear a rumor that you intend to seek a third term as a tribune of the plebs. Now that is not against the law. Therefore I cannot stop you. But I can ask you to give up the notion. Do not give our meaning of the word 'demagogue' a new interpretation. What you have been doing during the past few months is not customary political practice for a member of the Senate of Rome. With our immense body of laws and our formidable talent for making the cogs and gears of government work in the interests of Rome as we know it, there is no necessity to exploit the political gullibility of the lowly. They are innocents who should not be corrupted. It is our duty to look after them, not to use them to further our own political ends." "Are you finished?" asked Saturninus. "Quite finished, Lucius Appuleius." And the way Marius said it, it had many meanings.
So that was over and done with, he thought as he walked home with the crafty new gait he had developed to disguise a tiny tendency to foot-drop on the left side. How odd and how awful those months in Cumae had been, when he had hidden away and seen as few people as possible because he couldn't bear the horror, the pity, the gloating satisfaction. Most unbearable of all were those who loved him enough to grieve, like Publius Rutilius. Sweet and gentle Julia had turned into a positive tyrant, and flatly forbidden anyone, even Publius Rutilius, to say one word about politics or public business. He hadn't known of the grain crisis, he hadn't known of Saturninus's wooing of the lowly; his life had constricted to an austere regimen of diet, exercise, and reading the Classics. Instead of a nice bit of bacon with fried bread, he ate baked watermelon because Julia had heard it purged the kidneys, both the bladders, and the blood of stones; instead of walking to the Curia Hostilia, he hiked to Baiae and Misenum; instead of reading senatorial minutes and provincial dispatches, he plodded through Isocrates and Herodotus and Thucydides, and ended in believing none of them, for they didn't read like men who acted, only like men who read. But it worked. Slowly, slowly, he got better. Yet never again would he be whole, never again would the left side of his mouth go up, never again would he be able to disguise the fact that he was weary. The traitor within the gates of his body had branded him for all the world to see. It was this realization which finally prompted his rebellion; and Julia, who had been amazed that he remained docile for so long, gave in at once. So he sent for Publius Rutilius, and returned to Rome to pick up what pieces he could. Of course he knew Saturninus would not stand aside, yet felt obliged to give him the warning; as for Glaucia, his election would never be allowed, so that was no worry. At least the elections would go ahead now, with the tribunes of the plebs set for the day before the Nones and the quaestors on the Nones, the day they were supposed to enter office. These were the disturbing elections, for they had to be held in the Comitia of the Forum Romanum, where the crowd milled every day, and shouted obscenities, and pelted the togate with filth, and shook their fists, and listened in blind adoration to Saturninus. Not that they hissed or pelted Gaius Marius, who walked through their midst on his way home from that memorable meeting feeling nothing but the warmth of their love. No one lower than the Second Class would ever look unkindly upon Gaius Marius; like the Brothers Gracchi, he was a hero. There were those who looked upon his face, and wept to see it ravaged; there were those who had never set eyes on him in the flesh before, and thought his face had always been like that, and admired him all the more; but none tried to touch him, all stepped back to make a little lane for him, and he walked proudly yet humbly through them reaching out to them with heart and mind. A wordless communion. And Saturninus, watching from the rostra, wondered. "The crowd is an awesome phenomenon, isn't it?" Sulla asked Marius over dinner that evening, in the company of Publius Rutilius Rufus and Julia. "A sign of the times," said Rutilius. "A sign that we've failed them," said Marius, frowning. "Rome needs a rest. Ever since Gaius Gracchus we've been in some kind of serious trouble Jugurtha the Germans the Scordisci Italian discontent slave uprisings pirates grain shortages the list is endless. We need a respite, a bit of time to look after Rome rather than ourselves. Hopefully, we'll get it. When the grain supply improves, at any rate." "I have a message from Aurelia," said Sulla. Marius, Julia, and Rutilius Rufus all turned to look at him curiously. "Do you see her, Lucius Cornelius?" Rutilius Rufus the watchful uncle demanded. "Don't get clucky, Publius Rutilius, there's no need! Yes, I see her from time to time. It takes a native to sympathize, which is why I go. She's stuck down there in the Subura, and it's my world too," he said, unruffled. "I still have friends there, so Aurelia's on my way, if you know what I mean." "Oh dear, I should have asked her to dinner!" said Julia, distressed at her oversight. "Somehow she tends to be forgotten." "She understands," said Sulla. "Don't mistake me, she loves her world. But she likes to keep a little abreast of what's happening in the Forum, and that's my job. You're her uncle, Publius Rutilius, you tend to want to keep the trouble from her. Where I tell her everything. She's amazingly intelligent." "What's the message?" asked Marius, sipping water. "It comes from her friend Lucius Decumius, the odd little fellow who runs the crossroads college in her insula, and it goes something like this if you think there have been crowds in the Forum, you haven't seen anything yet. On the day of the tribunician elections, the sea of faces will become an ocean."
Lucius Decumius was right. At sunrise Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla walked up onto the Arx of the Capitol and stood leaning on the low wall barring the top of the Lautumiae cliff to take in the sight of the whole Forum Romanum spread below. As far as they could see was that ocean of people, densely packed from the Clivus Capitolinus to the Velia. It was orderly, somber, shot with menace, breathtaking. "Why?" asked Marius. "According to Lucius Decumius, they're here to make their presence felt. The Comitia will be in session to elect the new tribunes of the plebs, and they've heard that Saturninus is going to stand, and they think he's their best hope for full bellies. The famine has only just begun, Gaius Marius. And they don't want a famine," said Sulla, voice even. "But they can't influence the outcome of a tribal election, any more than they can elections in the Centuries! Almost all of them will belong to the four city tribes." "True. And there won't be many voters from the thirty-one rural tribes apart from those who live in Rome," said Sulla. "There's no holiday atmosphere today to tempt the rural voters. So a handful of what's below will actually vote. They know that. They're not here to vote. They're just here to make us aware they're here." "Saturninus's idea?" asked Marius. "No. His crowd is the one you saw on the Kalends, and every day since. The shitters and pissers, I call them. Just rabble. Denizens of crossroads colleges, ex-gladiators, thieves and malcontents, gullible shopkeepers bleeding from the lack of money, freedmen bored with groveling to their ex-masters, and many who think there might be a denarius or two to be made out of keeping Lucius Appuleius a tribune of the plebs." "They're actually more than that," said Marius. "They're a devoted following for the first man ever to stand on the rostra and take them seriously.'' He shifted his weight onto his paretic left foot. “But these people here today don't belong to Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. They don't belong to anyone. Ye gods, there weren't more Cimbri on the field at Vercellae than I see here! And I don't have an army. All I have is a purple-bordered toga. A sobering thought." "Indeed it is," said Sulla. "Though, I don't know. . . . Maybe my purple-bordered toga is all the army I need. All of a sudden, Lucius Cornelius, I'm looking at Rome in a different light than ever before. Today they've brought themselves down there to show themselves to us. But every day they're inside Rome, going about whatever is their business. Within an hour they could be down there showing themselves to us again. And we believe we govern them?" "We do, Gaius Marius. They can't govern themselves. They put themselves in our keeping. But Gaius Gracchus gave them cheap bread to eat, and the aediles give them wonderful games to watch. Now Saturninus comes along and promises them cheap bread in the midst of a famine. He can't keep his promise, and they're beginning to suspect he can't. Which is really why they've come to show themselves to him during his elections," said Sulla. Marius had found his metaphor. "They're a gigantic yet very good-natured bull. When he comes to meet you because you have a bucket in your hand, all he's interested in is the food he knows you've got in the bucket. But when he discovers the bucket is empty, he doesn't turn in terrible rage to gore you. He just assumes you've hidden his food somewhere on your person, and crushes you to death looking for it without even noticing he's turned you into pulp beneath his feet." "Saturninus is carrying an empty bucket," said Sulla. “Precisely,'' said Marius, and turned away from the wall. "Come, Lucius Cornelius, let's take the bull by his horns." "And hope," said Sulla, grinning, "that he doesn't have any hay on them after all!" No one in the gargantuan crowd made it difficult for the senators and politically minded citizens who normally always cast their votes in the Comitia to get through; while Marius mounted the rostra, Sulla went to stand on the Senate steps with the rest of the patrician senators. The actual voters of the Plebeian Assembly that day found themselves an island in the ocean of fairly silent onlookers and a sunken island at that, the rostra like a flat-topped rock standing above the well of the Comitia and the top surface of the ocean. Of course Saturninus's thousands of rabble had been expected, which had led many of the senators and normal voters to secret knives or clubs beneath their togas, especially Caepio Junior's little band of conservative young boni; but here was no Saturninian rabble. Here was all of lowly Rome in protest. Knives and clubs were suddenly felt to be a mistake. One by one the twenty candidates standing for election as tribunes of the plebs declared themselves, while Marius stood by watchfully. First to do so was the presiding tribune, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. And the whole vast crowd began to cheer him deafeningly, a reception which clearly amazed him, Marius discovered, shifting to where he could keep his eyes on Saturninus's face. Saturninus was thinking, and transparently: what a following was this for one man! What might he not be able to do with three hundred thousand Roman lowly at his back? Who would ever have the courage to keep him out of the tribunate of the plebs when this monster cheered its approval? Those who followed Saturninus in declaring their candidacies were greeted with indifferent silence; Publius Furius, Quintus Pompeius Rufus of the Picenum Pompeys, Sextus Titius whose origins were Samnite, and the red-haired, grey-eyed, extremely aristocratic-looking Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus, grandson of the Tusculan peasant Cato the Censor and great-grandson of a Celtic slave. Last of all appeared none other than Lucius Equitius, the self-styled bastard son of Tiberius Gracchus whom Metellus Numidicus when censor had tried to exclude from the rolls of the Ordo Equester. The crowd began to cheer again, great billows of wildly enthusiastic sound; here stood a relic of the beloved Tiberius Gracchus. And Marius discovered how accurate his metaphor of the gigantic gentle bull had been, for the crowd began to move toward Lucius Equitius elevated on the rock of the rostra, utterly oblivious of its power. Its inexorable tidal swell crushed those in the Comitia and its environs closer and closer together. Little waves of panic began among these intending voters as they experienced the suffocating sense of helpless terror all men feel who find themselves at the center of a force they cannot resist. While everyone else stood paralyzed, the paralyzed Gaius Marius stepped forward quickly and held out his hands palms facing-out, miming a gesture which commanded HALT HALT HALT! The crowd halted immediately, the pressure decreased a little, and now the cheers were for Gaius Marius, the First Man in Rome, the Third Founder of Rome, the Conqueror of the Germans. "Quickly, you fool!" he snapped at Saturninus, who stood apparently rapt, entranced by the noise emanating from those cheering throats. "Say you heard thunder anything to dismiss the meeting! If we don't get our voters out of the Comitia, the crowd will kill them by sheer weight of numbers!'' Then he had the heralds sound their trumpets, and in the sudden silence he lifted his hands again. "Thunder!" he shouted. "The voting will take place tomorrow! Go home, people of Rome! Go home, go home!" And the crowd went home. Luckily most of the senators had sought shelter inside their own Curia, where Marius followed as soon as he could make his way. Saturninus, he noted, had descended from the rostra and was walking fearlessly into the maw of the crowd, smiling and holding out his arms like one of those peculiar Pisidian mystics who believed in the laying-on of hands. And Glaucia the urban praetor? He had ascended the rostra, and stood observing Saturninus among the crowd, the broadest of smiles upon his fair face. The faces turned to Marius when he entered the Curia were white rather than fair, drawn rather than smiling. "And what a vat of pickles is this!" said Scaurus Princeps Senatus, unbowed as usual, but definitely a little daunted. Marius looked at the clusters of Conscript Fathers and said, very firmly, "Go home, please! The crowd won't hurt you, but slip up the Argiletum, even if you're heading for the Palatine. If all you have to complain about is a very long walk home, you're doing well. Now go! Go!" Those he wanted to stay he tapped on the shoulder; just Sulla, Scaurus, Metellus Caprarius the censor, Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, Crassus Orator, and Crassus's cousin Scaevola, who were the curule aediles. Sulla, he noticed with interest, went up to Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet, murmured something to them, and gave them what looked suspiciously like affectionate pats on the shoulder as they left the building. I must find out what's going on, said Marius to himself, but later. When I have the time. If I ever do, judging by this mess. "Well, today we've seen something none of us has ever seen before," he began. "Frightening, isn't it?" "I don't think they mean any harm," said Sulla. "Nor do I," said Marius. "But they're still the gigantic bull who doesn't know his own strength." He beckoned to his chief scribe. "Find someone to run up the Forum, will you? I want the president of the College of Lictors here at once." "What do you suggest we do?" asked Scaurus. "Postpone the plebeian elections?" "No, we may as well get them over and done with," Marius said positively. "At the moment our crowd-bull is a docile beast, but who knows how angry he might become as the famine worsens? Let's not wait until he has to have hay wrapped round his horns to signify he gores, because it will be one of our chests he plugs if we do wait. I've sent for the head lictor because I think our bull will be bluffed tomorrow by a fence he could easily walk through. I'll have the public slaves work all night to set up a harmless-looking barricade all the way around the well of the Comitia and the ground between the Comitia and the Senate steps just the usual sort of thing we erect in the Forum to fence off the area of combat from the spectators during funeral games, because they'll know the look of that, and not see it as a manifestation of fear on our part. Then I'll put every lictor Rome possesses on the inside of the barricade all in crimson tunics, not togate, but unarmed except for staves. Whatever we do, we mustn't give our bull the dangerous idea that he's bigger and stronger than we are bulls can think, you know! And tomorrow we hold the tribunician elections I don't care if there are only thirty-five men there to vote. Which means all of you will go visiting on your ways home today, and command the senators in your vicinity to turn up ready to vote tomorrow. That way, we'll be sure to have at least one member of each of the tribes. It may be a skinny vote, but a vote it will be nonetheless. Understood, everyone?" "Understood," said Scaurus. "Where was Quintus Lutatius today?" asked Sulla of Scaurus. "Ill, I believe," said Scaurus. "It would be genuine he doesn't lack courage." Marius looked at Metellus Caprarius the censor. "You, Gaius Caecilius, have the worst job tomorrow," he said, "for when Equitius declares himself a candidate, I'm going to have to ask you if you will allow him to stand. How will you say?" Caprarius didn't hesitate. "I'll say no, Gaius Marius. A man who was a slave, to become a tribune of the plebs? It's unthinkable." "All right, that's all, thank you," Marius said. "Be on your way, and get all our quivering fellow members here tomorrow. Lucius Cornelius, stay. I'm putting you in charge of the lictors, so you'd better be here when their head man comes."
* * *
The crowd was back in the Forum at dawn, to find the well of the Comitia cordoned off by the simple portable post-and-rope fencing they saw every time the Forum became the site of someone's gladiatorial funeral games; a crimson-tunicked lictor holding a long thick stave was positioned every few feet on the inside of the barricade's perimeter. Nothing nasty in that. And when Gaius Marius stepped forward and shouted his explanation, that he wanted no one inadvertently crushed, he was cheered as loudly as on the previous day. What the crowd couldn't see was the group inside the Curia Hostilia, positioned there well before dawn by Sulla: his fifty young members of the First Class, all clad in cuirasses and helmets, swords and daggers belted on, and carrying shields. An excited Caepio Junior was only their deputy leader, however, for Sulla was in command himself. "We move only if I say we move," Sulla said, "and I mean it. If anyone moves without an order from me, I'll kill him." On the rostra everyone was set to go; in the well of the Comitia a surprisingly large number of regular voters clustered along with perhaps half the Senate, while the patrician senators stood as always on the Senate steps. Among them was Catulus Caesar, looking ill enough to have been provided with a chair; also among them was the censor Caprarius, another whose plebeian status should have meant he went into the Comitia, but who wanted to be where everyone could see him. When Saturninus declared his candidacy once more, the crowd cheered him hysterically; clearly his laying-on-of-hands visit on the previous day had worked wonders. As before, the rest of the candidates were greeted with silence. Until in last place came Lucius Equitius. Marius swung to face the Senate steps, and lifted his one mobile eyebrow in a mute question to Metellus Caprarius; and Metellus Caprarius shook his head emphatically. To have spoken the question was impossible, for the crowd went on cheering Lucius Equitius as if it never intended to stop. The heralds sounded their trumpets, Marius stepped forward, silence fell. "This man, Lucius Equitius, is not eligible for election as a tribune of the plebs!" he cried as loudly as he could. "There is an ambiguity about his citizen status which the censor must clarify before Lucius Equitius can stand for any public office attached to the Senate and People of Rome!" Saturninus brushed past Marius and stood on the very edge of the rostra. "I deny any irregularity!" "I declare on behalf of the censor that an irregularity does exist," said Marius, unmoved. So Saturninus turned to appeal to the crowd. "Lucius Equitius is as much a Roman as any of you!" he shrieked. "Look at him, only look at him! Tiberius Gracchus all over again!" But Lucius Equitius was staring down into the well of the Comitia, a place below the vision of the crowd, even those in its forefront. Here senators and sons of senators were pulling knives and cudgels from beneath their robes, and moved as if to drag Lucius Equitius down into their midst. Lucius Equitius, brave veteran of ten years in the legions according to his own story, anyway shrank back, turned to Marius, and clutched his free right arm. "Help me!" he whimpered. "I'd like to help you with the toe of my boot, you silly troublemaker," growled Marius. "However, the business of the day is to get this election over and done with. You can't stand, but if you stay on the rostra someone's going to lynch you. The best I can do to safeguard your hide is put you in the cells of the Lautumiae until everyone's gone home." Two dozen lictors stood on the rostra, a dozen of them carrying the fasces because they belonged to the consul Gaius Marius; the consul Gaius Marius formed them around Lucius Equitius and had him marched away toward the Lautumiae, his progress through the crowd marked by a kind of parting of the people-ocean in response to the authority inherent in those simple crimson-corded bundles of rods. I don't believe it, thought Marius, eyes following the parting of the people-ocean. To hear them cheer, they adore the man the way they adore no gods. To them it must look as if I've put the creature under arrest. But what are they doing? What they always, always do whenever they see a line of lictors marching-along with fasces on their shoulders and some purple-bordered toga strutting at their rear they're standing aside to permit the majesty of Rome the right of way. Not even for a Lucius Equitius will they destroy the power of the rods and the purple-bordered toga. There goes Rome. What's a Lucius Equitius, when all is said and done? A pathetic facsimile of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, whom they loved, loved, loved. They're not cheering Lucius Equitius! They're cheering the memory of Tiberius Gracchus. And a new kind of pride-filled emotion welled up in Gaius Marius as he continued to watch that lictorial dorsal fin cleave the ocean of Roman lowly pride in the old ways, the customs and traditions of six hundred and fifty-four years, so powerful still that it could turn a tide greater than the German invasion with no more effort than the shouldering of a few bundles of sticks. And I, thought Gaius Marius, stand here in my purple-bordered toga, unafraid of anything because I wear it, and know myself greater than any king who ever walked this globe. For I have no army, and inside their city I have no axes thrust into the rods, nor a bodyguard of swords; and yet they stand aside for the mere symbols of my authority, a few sticks and a shapeless piece of cloth rimmed with less purple than they can see any day on some unspeakable saltatrix tonsa parading his stuff. Yes, I would rather be consul of Rome than king of the world. Back came the lictors from the Lautumiae, and shortly thereafter back came Lucius Equitius, whom the crowd gently rescued from the cells and popped back on the rostra with a minimum of fuss almost, it seemed to Marius, apologetically. And there he stood, a shivering wreck, wishing himself anywhere but where he was. To Marius the crowd's message was explicit: fill my bucket, I'm hungry, don't hide my food. In the meantime Saturninus was proceeding with his election as quickly as he could, anxious to make sure he got himself returned before anything untoward could happen. His head was filled with dazzled dreams of the future, the might and majesty of that crowd, the way it showed its adoration of him. Did they cheer Lucius Equitius, just because he looked like Tiberius Gracchus? Did they cheer Gaius Marius, broken old idiot that he was, because he'd saved Rome from the barbarians? Ah, but they didn't cheer Equitius or Marius the way they cheered him! And what material to work with no rabble out of the Suburan stews, this crowd! This crowd was made up of respectable people whose bellies were empty yet whose principles remained intact. One by one the candidates stepped forward, and the tribes voted, while the tally clerks scribbled busily and both Marius and Saturninus kept watch; until the moment when, in last place of all, it came time to deal with Lucius Equitius. Marius looked at Saturninus. Saturninus looked at Marius. Marius looked across to the Senate steps. "What do you wish me to say this time, Gaius Caecilius Metellus Caprarius Censor?" Marius called out. "Do you wish me to continue denying this man the right to stand for election, or do you withdraw your objection?" Caprarius looked helplessly at Scaurus, who looked at the grey-faced Catulus Caesar, who looked at Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, who refused to look at anyone. A long pause ensued; the crowd watched in silence, fascinated, not having the remotest idea what was going on. "Let him stand!" shouted Metellus Caprarius. "Let him stand," said Marius to Saturninus. And when the results were tallied, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus came in in first place for a third term as a tribune of the plebs; Cato Salonianus, Quintus Pompeius Rufus, Publius Furius, and Sextus Titius were elected; and, in second place, only three or four behind Saturninus, the ex-slave Lucius Equitius was returned as a tribune of the plebs. "What a servile college we're going to have this year!" said Catulus Caesar, sneering.' 'Not only a Cato Salonianus, but an actual freedman!" "The Republic is dead," said Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, with a look of loathing for Metellus Caprarius. "Well, what else could I do?" bleated Metellus Billy Goat. Other senators were coming up, and Sulla's armed guard, divested of its accoutrements, emerged from the interior of the Curia. The Senate steps seemed the safest place, though it was becoming obvious that the crowd, having seen its heroes elected, was going home. Caepio Junior spat in the direction of the crowd. "Goodbye to the rabble for today!" he said, face contorted. "Look at them! Thieves, murderers, rapists of their own daughters!" "They're not rabble, Quintus Servilius," said Marius sternly. "They're Roman and they're poor, but not thieves or murderers. And they're fed up with millet and turnips already. You'd better hope that friend Lucius Equitius doesn't stir them up. They've been very well behaved throughout these wretched elections, but that could change as the millet and turnips get dearer and dearer in the markets." "Oh, there's no need to worry about that!" said Gaius Memmius cheerfully, pleased that the tribunes of the plebs were duly elected and his joint candidacy with Marcus Antonius Orator for the consulship looked more promising than ever. "Things will improve in a few days. Marcus Antonius was telling me that our agents in Asia Province managed to buy in a great deal of wheat from way up at the north of the Euxine somewhere. The first of the grain fleets should arrive in Puteoli any day." Everyone was staring at him, openmouthed. "Well," said Marius, forgetting that he could not smile in sweet irony anymore, and so producing a terrifying grimace, "all of us are aware that you seem to have a gift for seeing the future of the grain supply, but how exactly do you happen to be privy to this information when I the senior consul! and Marcus Aemilius here Princeps Senatus as well as curator annonae! are not privy to it?" Some twenty pairs of eyes were fixed on his face; Memmius swallowed. "It's no secret, Gaius Marius. The subject came up in conversation in Athens when Marcus Antonius returned from his last trip to Pergamum. He saw some of our grain agents there, and they told him." "And why hasn't Marcus Antonius seen fit to apprise me, the curator of our grain supply?" asked Scaurus icily. "I suppose because like me, really he just assumed you knew. The agents have written, why wouldn't you know?" "Their letters haven't arrived," said Marius, winking at Scaurus. "May I thank you, Gaius Memmius, for bearing this splendid news?" "Indeed," said Scaurus, temper evaporating. "We had better hope for all our sakes that no tempest blows up and sends the grain to the bottom of the Middle Sea," Marius said, deciding the crowd had now dispersed enough for him to walk home, and not averse to talking with some of its members. "Senators, we meet here again tomorrow for the quaestorian elections. And the day after that, we will all go out to the Campus Martius to see the candidates for consuls and praetors declare themselves. Good day to you." "You're a cretin, Gaius Memmius," said Catulus Caesar crushingly from his chair. Gaius Memmius decided he didn't need an argument with one of the high aristocracy, and walked off in Gaius Marius's wake, having decided he would visit Marcus Antonius in his hired villa on the Campus Martius and apprise him of the day's events. As he strode out briskly he saw how he and Marcus Antonius could pick up additional merit with the electors. He would make sure their agents went among the Centuries as they gathered to witness the declaration of the curule candidates the day after tomorrow; they could spread the news of the coming grain fleets as if he and Marcus Antonius were responsible. The First and Second Classes might deplore the cost of cheap grain to the State, but having seen the size of the crowd in the Forum, Memmius thought they might be very grateful to think of Roman bellies full of bread baked from cheap grain. At dawn on the day of the presentation of candidates in the saepta, he set off to walk from the Palatine to the Campus Martius, accompanied by an elated throng of clients and friends, all sure he and Antonius would get in. Buoyant and laughing, they walked briskly through the Forum Romanum in the cold breeze of a fine late-autumn morning, shivering a little when they passed through the deep shade of the Fontinalis Gate, but positive that down on the sunny plain spread beneath the Arx lay victory. Gaius Memmius would be consul. Other men were walking to the saepta too, in groups, couples, trios, but rarely alone; a man of the classes important enough to vote in the curule elections liked company in public, for it added to his dignitas. Where the road coming down from the Quirinal ran into the Via Lata, Gaius Memmius and his companions encountered some fifty men escorting none other than Gaius Servilius Glaucia. Memmius stopped in his tracks, astounded. "And where do you think you're going dressed like that?" he asked, eyeing Glaucia's toga Candida. Specially bleached by days hanging in the sun, then whitened to blinding purity by copious applications of powdered chalk, the toga Candida could be worn only by one who was standing for election to a public office. "I'm a candidate for the consulship," said Glaucia. "You're not, you know," said Memmius. "Oh yes I am!" "Gaius Marius said you couldn't stand." "Gaius Marius said I couldn't stand," Glaucia mimicked in a namby-pamby voice, then ostentatiously turned his back on Memmius and began to speak to his followers in a loud voice which dripped homosexual overtones. "Gaius Marius said I couldn't stand! Well! I must say it's a bit stiff when real men can't stand, but pretty little pansies can!" The exchange had gathered an audience, not unusual under the circumstances, for part of the general enjoyment of the proceedings were the clashes between rival candidates; that this clash had occurred before the open field of the saepta had been reached made little difference to the audience, swelling as more and more men came along the Via Lata from town. Painfully aware of the audience, Gaius Memmius writhed. All his life he had suffered the curse of being too good-looking, with its inevitable taunts he was too pretty, he couldn't be trusted, he liked boys, he was a lightweight on and on and on. Now Glaucia saw fit to mock him in front of all these men, these voters. Oh, he didn't need to have them reminded of the old homosexual tag on this day above all others! And understandably Gaius Memmius saw red. Before anyone with him could anticipate his intention, he stepped forward, put his hand on Glaucia's left shoulder, and ripped the pristine toga off it. Then as Glaucia spun round to see who was assaulting him, Memmius swung a wild punch at Glaucia's left ear, and connected. Down went Glaucia, Memmius on top of him, both pristine togas now grimed and smeared. But Glaucia's men had concealed clubs and cudgels about their persons; out they came swinging; Glaucia's men waded into the stunned ranks of Memmius's companions, laying about with furious glee. The Memmius entourage disintegrated at once, its members flying in all directions crying for help. Typical of uninvolved bystanders, the audience made no move to help, just watched with avid interest; to do it justice, however, no one looking on dreamed that what he saw was anything more than a brawl between two candidates. The weapons were a surprise, but the supporters of candidates had been known to carry weapons before. Two big men lifted Memmius up and held him between them, struggling furiously, while Glaucia got to his feet kicking away his ruined toga. Glaucia said not a word. He plucked a club from someone standing near him, then looked at Memmius for a long moment. Up went the club, held in both hands like a mallet; and down it came upon Gaius Memmius's strikingly handsome head. No one attempted to interfere as Glaucia bent to follow Memmius fall, and kept on beating, beating that head, handsome no longer. Only when it was reduced to pulp and brains and splatters did Glaucia cease his attack. A look of incredulous and outraged frustration spread then across Glaucia's face; he flung the bloodied club away and stared at his friend Gaius Claudius, watching ashen-faced. "Will you shelter me until I can get away?" he asked. Claudius nodded, speechless. The audience was beginning to mutter and move in upon the group, while other men were running from the direction of the saepta; Glaucia turned and raced toward the Quirinal, his companions following him.
* * *
The news was carried to Saturninus as he prowled up and down the saepta, canvassing persuasively for Glaucia's illegal candidacy. Covert yet angry glances told him how most of those hearing the news of Memmius's murder felt, and he was branded as Glaucia's best friend. Among the young senators and sons of senators a furious buzz was starting, while some of the sons of the more powerful knights gathered around their senatorial peers, and that enigmatic man Sulla was in the midst of it. "We'd better get out of here," said Gaius Saufeius, only the day before elected an urban quaestor. "You're right, I think we'd better," said Saturninus, growing more and more uneasy at the anger he could feel all around. Accompanied by his Picentine henchmen Titus Labienus and Gaius Saufeius, Saturninus left the saepta in a hurry. He knew whereabouts Glaucia would have gone to Gaius Claudius's house on the Quirinal but when he got there Saturninus found its doors bolted and barred. Only after considerable yelling did Gaius Claudius open up and let the three friends in. "Where is he?" Saturninus demanded. "My study," said Gaius Claudius, who had been weeping. "Titus Labienus," said Saturninus, "go and find Lucius Equitius, will you? We need him, the crowd thinks he's lovely." "What are you up to?" Labienus asked. "I'll tell you when you bring me Lucius Equitius." Glaucia was sitting grey-faced in Gaius Claudius's study; when Saturninus entered he looked up, but said not a word. "Why, Gaius Servilius? Why?" Glaucia shivered. "I didn't mean to do it," he said. "I just I just lost my temper." "And lost us our chance at Rome," said Saturninus. "I lost my temper," Glaucia said again. He had stayed the night before the presentation of the curule candidates in this same house, for Gaius Claudius threw a party in his honor; more a creature than a man, Gaius Claudius admired Glaucia's boldness in challenging the provisions of the lex Villia, and thought the best way to show his admiration was to use some of his large amounts of money to give Glaucia a memorable send-off down the canvassing path. The fifty men who later accompanied Glaucia on his walk to the saepta were all invited to the party, but no women of any sort had been invited, and the result was a comedy remarkable only for its bibulousness and its biliousness. At dawn no one was feeling very well, yet they had to go to the saepta with Glaucia to support him; clubs and cudgels seemed like a good idea. Just as unwell as the .rest, Glaucia gave himself an emetic and a bath, wrapped himself in his whitened toga, and set off with eyes screwed up against the thousand tiny hammers of a severe headache. To meet the immaculate and laughing Memmius, his handsome head already held like a victor's, was more than Glaucia's frayed nerves could cope with. So he responded to Memmius 's opposition with a cruel taunt, and when Memmius tore away his toga, Glaucia lost all control. Now the deed was done, and could not be undone. Everything lay in ruins around Gaius Memmius's shattered head. Saturninus's silent presence in the study was a different kind of shock; Glaucia began to understand the enormity of his deed, its ramifications and repercussions. Not only had he destroyed his own career, he had probably destroyed the career of his best friend as well. And that he couldn't bear. "Say something, Lucius Appuleius!" he cried. Blinking, Saturninus emerged from his trancelike thoughts. "I think we have only one alternative left," he said calmly. "We must get the crowd on our side, and use the crowd to make the Senate give us what we want safe office, a ruling of extenuating circumstances for you, a guarantee none of us will face prosecution. I've sent Titus Labienus off to fetch Lucius Equitius, because it's easier to sway the crowds with him there." He sighed, flexed His hands. "The moment Labienus comes back, we're off to the Forum. There's no time to waste." "Should I come?" asked Glaucia. "No. You stay here with your men, and have Gaius Claudius arm his slaves. And don't let anyone in until you hear my voice, or Labienus's, or Saufeius's." He got up. "By nightfall I have to control Rome. Otherwise I'm finished too." "Abandon me!" said Glaucia suddenly. "Lucius Appuleius, there's no need for this! Throw up your hands in horror at my deed, then put yourself in the forefront of the pack baying for my condemnation! It is the only way. Rome isn't ready for a new form of government! That crowd is hungry, yes. It's fed up with bungling government, yes. It wants some justice, yes. But not enough to beat in heads and tear out throats. They'll Cheer you until they're hoarse. But they won't kill for you." "You're wrong," said Saturninus, who felt a little as if he walked on wool, light, free, invulnerable. "Gaius Servilius, all those people filling our Forum are greater in numbers and power than an army! Didn't you see how the Policy Makers caved in at the knees? Didn't you see Metellus Caprarius back down over Lucius Equitius? There was no bloodshed! The Forum's run redder by far from the brawls of a hundred men, yet there were hundreds of thousands of them! No one is going to defy that crowd, yet it will never be necessary to arm them, or set them to beating in heads or tearing out throats. Their power is in their mass! A mass I can control, Gaius Servilius! All I need is my own oratory, proof of my devotion to their cause, and a wave or two from Lucius Equitius! Who can resist the man who runs that crowd like some gigantic siege apparatus? The straw men of the Senate?" "Gaius Marius," said Glaucia. "No, not even Gaius Marius! And anyway, he's with us!" "He's not," said Glaucia. "He may think he's not, Gaius Servilius, but the fact that the crowd cheers him the way it cheers me and Lucius Equitius will make the Policy Makers and everyone else in the Senate see him in the same light as they see us! I don't mind sharing the power with Gaius Marius for a little while. He's getting old, he's had a stroke. What more natural than for him to die from another one?'' asked Saturninus eagerly. Glaucia was feeling better; he straightened in his chair and looked at Saturninus in mingled doubt and hope. "Could it work, Lucius Appuleius? Do you really think it could?" And Saturninus stretched his arms toward the ceiling, vibrating confidence, a smile of savage joy upon his face. "It will work, Gaius Servilius. Leave everything to me." So Lucius Appuleius Saturninus went from the house of Gaius Claudius down to the rostra in the Forum Romanum, accompanied by Labienus, Saufeius, Lucius Equitius, and some ten or twelve other close adherents. He cut across the Arx, feeling that he should enter his arena from above, a demigod descending from a region on high filled with temples and divinities; so his first sight of the Forum was from the top of the Gemonian Steps, down which he intended to walk like a king. Shock made him stop. The crowd! Where was the crowd? Gone home after the quaestorian elections of the day before, was the answer; and with nothing scheduled to happen in the Forum, it saw no point in coming back. Nor was a single member of the Senate present anywhere, with events of that day all occurring out on the green field of the saepta. However, the Forum wasn't deserted; perhaps two or three thousand of Saturninus's less reputable rabble paraded up and down, shouting and waving their fists, demanding free grain of the empty air. Sheer disappointment brought tears very close to the surface; then Saturninus looked sternly at the hard-bitten men roiling around the lower end of the Forum, and made a decision. They would do. They would have to do. He would use them as a spearhead; through them he would draw the vast crowd back into the Forum for they mingled with the members of that vast crowd, where he did not. Wishing he had heralds to trumpet his arrival, Saturninus walked down the Gemonian Steps and strode to the rostra, his little band of followers shouting to the rabble to gather round and hear Lucius Appuleius. "Quirites!" he addressed them amid howling cheers, holding out his arms for silence. "Quirites, the Senate of Rome is about to sign our death warrants! I, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, as well as Lucius Equitius and Gaius Servilius Glaucia, are to be accused of the murder of a minion of the nobility, an effeminate puppet whose only purpose in putting himself up for election as consul was to make sure that you, People of Rome, continue to starve!" The dense collection about the rostra was silent and still, listening; Saturninus took confidence and energy from his intent auditors, and expanded upon his theme. "Why do you think you have received no grain, even after I passed my law to give it to you for a pittance? Because the First and Second Classes of our great city would prefer to buy less and sell it for more! Because the First and Second Classes of our city don't want your hungry mouths turned in their direction! They think of you as the cuckoo in their nest, an extravagance Rome doesn't need! You are the Head Count and the lower classes- you're not important any more, with all the wars won and the loot from them safe in the Treasury! Why spend that loot filling your worthless bellies? asks the Senate of Rome, and refuses to give me the funds I need to buy grain for your worthless bellies! For it would suit the Senate of Rome and the First and Second Classes of Rome very, very well if several hundred thousand of Rome's so-called worthless bellies shrank to the point where their owners died of starvation! Imagine it! All that money saved, all those smelly overcrowded insulae emptied what a green and spacious park could Rome become! Where you cramped yourselves to live, they would stroll in pleasure gardens, the money jingling in their purses and their bellies full! They don't care about you! You're a nuisance they'd be glad to be rid of, and what better way than an artificially induced famine?" He had them, of course; they were growling in the backs of their throats like angry dogs, a rumble that filled the air with menace and Saturninus's heart with triumph. "But I, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, have fought to fill your bellies so long and so hard that now I am to be eliminated for a murder I did not commit!" That was a good one; he hadn't committed murder either, he could speak the truth and have the truth ring unmistakably in every word! "With me will perish all my friends, who are your friends too. Lucius Equitius here, the heir to Tiberius Gracchus's name and aims! And Gaius Servilius Glaucia, who so brilliantly frames my laws that not even the nobles who run the Senate can tamper with them!" He paused, he sighed, he lifted his arms helplessly. "And when we are dead, Quirites, who will be left to look after you? Who will carry on the good fight? Who will battle the privileged to fill your bellies? No one!" The growl was now a roar, the mood of the throng was shot with potential violence, they were his to do with as he pleased. "Quirites, it is up to you! Do you want to stand by while we who love you and esteem you are put to death, innocent men? Or will you go home and arm yourselves, and run to every house in your neighborhood, and bring out the crowds?" They began to move, but the shrieking Saturninus pulled them up with his voice. "Come back to me here in all your thousands upon thousands! Bring yourselves to me, and put yourselves in my charge! Before night has fallen, Rome will belong to you because it will belong to me, and then we shall see whose bellies are full! Then we'll break open the Treasury, and buy grain! Now go, bring the whole city to me, meet me here in the heart of Rome, and show the Senate and the First and Second Classes who really rules our city and our empire!" Like a vast number of tiny balls shocked by a single blow from a hammer on the rim containing them, the rabble scattered in all directions at a run, screaming incoherent babbles of words, while Saturninus sank back on his heels, and turned on the rostra to face his henchmen. "Oh, wonderful!" cried Saufeius, straining at the leash. "We'll win, Lucius Appuleius, we'll win!" cried Labienus. Surrounded by men pounding his back in euphoric glee, Saturninus stood royally and contemplated the enormity of his future. At which point Lucius Equitius burst into tears. "But what are you going to do?” he blubbered, mopping his face with the edge of his toga. "Do? What do you think it sounded like, you imbecile? I'm going to take over Rome, of course!" "With that lot?" '”Who is there to oppose them? And anyway, they'll bring the giant crowd. You wait, Lucius Equitius! No one will be able to resist us!" "But there's an army of marines on the Campus Martius two legions of them!" cried Lucius Equitius, still sniffling and shivering. "No Roman army has ever ventured inside Rome except to triumph, and no man who ordered a Roman army to venture inside Rome would survive," said Saturninus, contemptuous of this mean necessity; as soon as he was firmly in control, Equitius would have to go, likeness to Tiberius Gracchus or not. "Gaius Marius would do it," sobbed Equitius. "Gaius Marius, you fool, will be on our side!" Saturninus said with a sneer. "I don't like it, Lucius Appuleius!" "You don't have to like it. If you're with me, shut up the bawling. If you're against me, I'll shut up the bawling!" And Saturninus drew his finger across his throat.
One of the first to answer the call for help from Gaius Memmius's friends was Gaius Marius. He arrived at the scene of the confrontation not more than a few moments after Glaucia and his cronies had gone running to the Quirinal, and found a hundred toga-clad members of the Centuries clustered around what was left of Gaius Memmius. They parted to let the senior consul through; with Sulla at his shoulder, he gazed down at the pulped remnants of head, then looked toward the place where the bloodstained club still lay bedaubed with fragments of hair and muscle and skin and skull. "Who did this?" asked Sulla. The answer came from a dozen men: "Gaius Servilius Glaucia." Sulla blew through his nose. "Himself?" Everyone nodded. "Does anyone know where he went from here?" This time the answers conflicted, but Sulla finally established that Glaucia and his gang had raced toward the Sanqualis Gate onto the Quirinal; since Gaius Claudius had been one of them, it seemed likely they were heading for his house on the Alta Semita. Marius hadn't moved, hadn't lifted his head from his silent contemplation of Gaius Memmius. Gently Sulla touched him on the arm; he stirred then, wiping the tears from his face with a fold of toga because he didn't want to betray his left hand's clumsiness by hunting for his handkerchief. "On the field of war, this is natural. On the Field of Mars beneath the walls of Rome, it is an abomination!" he shouted, turning to face the men crowding around. Other senior senators were arriving, among them Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus, who took one swift look at Marius's tear-streaked face, then down at the ground, and caught his breath. "Memmius! Gaius Memmius?" he asked incredulously. "Yes, Gaius Memmius," said Sulla. "Murdered in person by Glaucia, all the witnesses say." Marius was weeping again, but made no attempt to conceal the fact as he looked at Scaurus. "Princeps Senatus," he said, "I am convoking the Senate in the temple of Bellona immediately. Do you concur?" "I do," said Scaurus. Some lictors were straggling up, their charge the senior consul having outdistanced them by several hundred paces despite his stroke. "Lucius Cornelius, take my lictors, find the heralds, cancel the presentation of the candidates, send the flamen Martialis to the temple of Venus Libitina to bring the sacred axes of the fasces to us in Bellona, and summon the Senate," said Marius. "I will go on ahead with Marcus Aemilius." "This has been," said Scaurus, "an absolutely horrible year. In fact, in spite of all our recent vicissitudes, I don't recall a year so horrible since the last year of Gaius Gracchus's life." Marius's tears had dried. "Then we're overdue for it, I suppose," he said. "Let us hope at least there will be no worse violence done than the murder of Memmius." But Scaurus's hope proved vain, though at first it seemed reasonable. The Senate met in the temple of Bellona and discussed the murder of Memmius; sufficient of its members had been eyewitnesses to make the guilt of Glaucia manifest. "However," said Marius firmly, "Gaius Servilius must be tried for his crime. No Roman citizen can be condemned without trial unless he declares war on Rome, and that is not an issue here today." "I'm afraid it is, Gaius Marius," said Sulla, hurrying in. Everyone stared at him. No one spoke. "Lucius Appuleius and a group of men including the quaestor Gaius Saufeius have taken over the Forum Romanum," announced Sulla. "They've displayed Lucius Equitius to the rabble, and Lucius Appuleius has announced that he intends to supplant the Senate and the First and Second Classes with a rule of the People administered by himself. They haven't yet hailed him as King of Rome, but it's being said already in every street and marketplace between here and the Forum which means it's being said everywhere." "May I speak, Gaius Marius?" asked the Leader of the House. "Speak, Princeps Senatus." "Our city is in crisis," Scaurus said, low-voiced yet clear-voiced, "just as it was during the last days of Gaius Gracchus. At that time, when Marcus Fulvius and Gaius Gracchus seized upon violence as the only means of attaining their desperate ends, a debate took place within the House did Rome need a dictator to deal with a crisis so urgent, yet so short-lived? The rest is history. The House declined to appoint a dictator. Instead, it passed what might be called its ultimate decree the Senatus Consultum de republica defendenda. By this decree the House empowered its consuls and magistrates to defend the sovereignty of the State in any way they considered necessary, and immunized them in advance from prosecution and the tribunician veto." He paused to look about him with immense seriousness. "I suggest, Conscript Fathers, that we deal with our present crisis in the same way by a Senatus Consultum de republica defendenda." "I will see a Division," said Marius. "All those in favor will pass to my left, all those against to my right." And moved to his left first of them all. No one moved to the right; the House passed its second Senatus Consultum de republica defendenda unanimously, which it had not done the first time. "Gaius Marius," said Scaurus, "I am empowered by the members of this House to instruct you as Rome's senior consul to defend the sovereignty of our State in any way you deem fit or necessary. Furthermore, I hereby declare on behalf of this House that you are not subject to the tribunician veto, and that nothing you do or order done shall be held against you for future action in a court of law. Provided that they act under your instructions, this commission together with its indemnity is extended to the junior consul, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, and all the praetors. But you, Gaius Marius, are also empowered to choose deputies from among the members of this House who do not sit as consuls or praetors, and provided these deputies act under your instructions, this commission together with its indemnity is also extended to them." Thinking of Metellus Numidicus's face were he present to see Gaius Marius virtually made dictator by none other than Scaurus Princeps Senatus, Scaurus shot Marius a wicked look, but managed to keep his grin on the inside. He filled his lungs with air, and bellowed, "Long live Rome!" "Oh, my stars!" said Publius Rutilius Rufus. But Marius had no time or patience with the wits of the House, who would, he thought, wittify while Rome burned around them. Voice crisp yet calm, he proceeded to depute Lucius Cornelius Sulla to act as his second-in-command, ordered the store of weapons in the basement of the temple of Bellona to be broken out and distributed to those who lacked personal arms and armor, and told those who did own arms and armor to go home and get it while they could still move freely through the streets. Sulla concentrated upon his young bloods, sending them flying in all directions, Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet the most eager of all. Incredulity was giving way to an outrage almost too great for mere anger; that a senator of Rome would attempt to seize rabble-fueled power in order to set himself up as a king was anathema. Political differences were forgotten, mere factions dissolved; ultra-conservatives lined up shoulder to shoulder with the most progressive Marians, all with their faces set obdurately against the wolfshead in the Forum Romanum. Even as he organized his little army and those awaiting arms and armor from their houses bustled mouthing imprecations here and there, Sulla remembered her; not Dalmatica, but Aurelia. He sent four lictors on the double to her insula with a message to her to bar herself in, and a message to Lucius Decumius to make sure neither he nor his tavernload of operators were in the Forum Romanum for the next few days. Knowing Lucius Decumius, they wouldn't be in the Forum anyway; while the rest of Rome's rabble were rampaging up and down the Forum making noise and beating up innocent passers-by, the territory they normally patrolled was delightfully open to a raid or two, and no doubt that had been Lucius Decumius's choice. Even so, a message couldn't hurt, and Aurelia's safety he cared about. Two hours later everything and everyone was ready. Outside the temple of Bellona was the big open courtyard always known as Enemy Territory. Halfway down the temple steps was a square stone pillar about four feet high. When a just and rightful war was declared upon a foreign enemy and were there any other kinds of wars? a special fetial priest was called upon to hurl a spear from the steps of the temple over the exact top of the ancient stone pillar into the earth of Enemy Territory. No one knew how or why the ritual had started, but it was a part of tradition, and so it was still observed. But today there was no foreign enemy upon whom to declare war, just a senatorial decree to obey; so no fetial priest hurled a spear, and Enemy Territory was filled with Romans of the First and Second Classes. The whole gathering perhaps a thousand strong was now girt for war, chests and backs encased in cuirasses, a few sporting greaves upon their shins, most also clad in leather undersuits flapping fringed pteryges as kilts and sleeves, and all wearing crested helmets. No one carried a spear; all were armed with the good Roman short-sword and dagger, and old-fashioned pre-Marian oval shields five feet high. Gaius Marius stepped to the front of the Bellona podium and spoke to his little army. "Remember that we are Romans and we are entering the city of Rome," he said gravely. "We will step across the pomerium. For that reason I will not call the marines of Marcus Antonius to arms. We ourselves can deal with this, we do not need a professional army. I am adamantly set against any more violence than is absolutely necessary, and I warn all of you most solemnly the young among you particularly that no blade is to be raised against a man with no blade. Take clubs and billets upon your shields, and use the flats of your swords only. Where possible, wrest a wooden weapon from one of the crowd, sheath your sword, and use wood. There will be no heaps of dead and dying in the heart of Rome! That would break the Republic's good luck, and then the Republic would be no more. All we have to do today is avert violence, not make it. "You are my troops," he went on sternly, "but few among you have served under me in any army until this one. So take heed of this, my only warning. Those who disobey my orders or the orders of my legates will be killed. This is not an occasion for factions. Today there are no types of Romans. Just Romans. There are many among you who have no love for the Head Count and Rome's other lowly. But I say to you and mark me well! that a Head Count Roman is a Roman, and his life is as sacred and protected by the law as my life is, or your lives are. There will be no bloodbath! If I see so much as the start of one, I will be down there with my sword raised against those raising swords and under the conditions of the Senate's decree, your heirs cannot exact retribution of any kind from me should I kill you! You will take your orders from only two men from me, and from Lucius Cornelius Sulla here. Not from any other curule magistrate empowered under this decree. I want no attack unless I call for it or Lucius Cornelius calls for it. We do this thing as gently as we can. Understood?" Catulus Caesar tugged his forelock in mock obsequiousness. "We hear and obey, Gaius Marius. I have served under you before I know you mean what you say." "Good!" said Marius cordially, ignoring the sarcasm. He turned to his junior consul. "Lucius Valerius, take fifty men and go to the Quirinal. If Gaius Servilius Glaucia is at the house of Gaius Claudius, arrest him. If he refuses to come out, you and your men will remain on guard without attempting to get inside. And keep me informed."
It was early afternoon when Gaius Marius led his' little army out of Enemy Territory and into the city through the Carmentalis Gate. Coming from the Velabrum, they appeared out of the alleyway which led between the temple of Castor and the Basilica Sempronia, and took the crowd in the lower Forum completely by surprise. Armed with whatever they could lay their hands upon cudgels, clubs, billets, knives, axes, picks, pitchforks Saturninus's men had swelled to perhaps four thousand in number; but compared to the competent thousand who marched tightly packed into the Forum and formed up in front of the Basilica Sempronia, they were a paltry gang. One look at the breastplates, helmets, and swords of the newcomers was enough to send almost half of them running headlong up the Argiletum and the eastern side of the Forum toward the anonymity of the Esquiline and the safety of home ground. "Lucius Appuleius, give this up!" roared Marius, in the forefront of his force with Sulla beside him. Atop the rostra with Saufeius, Labienus, Equitius, and some ten others, Saturninus stared at Marius slack-jawed; then he threw back his head and laughed; meant to sound confident and defiant, it came out hollow. "Your orders, Gaius Marius?" Sulla asked. "We take them in a charge," said Marius. "Very sudden, very hard. No swords drawn, just shields to the front. I never thought they'd be such a motley lot, Lucius Cornelius! They'll break easily." Sulla and Marius went round their little army and readied it, shields swung to the front, a line of men two hundred long, and five men deep. And then: "Charge!" shrieked Gaius Marius. The maneuver was immediately effective. A solid wall of shields carried at a run hit the rabble like an enormous wave of water. Men and makeshift weapons flew everywhere and not a retaliatory blow was struck; then before Saturninus's men could organize themselves better, the wall of shields crashed into them again, and again. Saturninus and his companions came down from the rostra to join the fray, brandishing naked swords. To no effect. Though they had started out thirsting for real blood, Marius's cohort was now enjoying the novelty of this battering-ram approach, and had got into a rhythm which kept cannoning into the disordered rabble, pushing its men up like stones into a heap, drawing off to form the wall again, cannoning again. A few of the rabble were trampled underfoot, but nothing like a battle developed; it was a debacle instead. Only a short time elapsed before Saturninus's entire force was fleeing the field; the great occupation of the Forum Romanum was over, and almost bloodlessly. Saturninus, Labienus, Saufeius, Equitius, a dozen Romans, and some thirty armed slaves ran up the Clivus Capitolinus to barricade themselves inside the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, calling upon the Great God to give them succor and send that gigantic crowd back into the Forum. "Blood will flow now!" screamed Saturninus from the podium of the temple atop the Capitol, his words clearly audible to Marius and his men. "I will make you kill Romans before I am done, Gaius Marius! I will see this temple polluted with the blood of Romans!'' "He might be right," said Scaurus Princeps Senatus, looking extremely satisfied and happy in spite of this fresh worry. Marius laughed heartily. "No! He's posturing like one of those defenseless little animals plumed with fierce-looking eyes, Marcus Aemilius. There's a simple answer to this siege, believe me. We'll have them out of there without spilling one drop of Roman blood." He turned to Sulla. "Lucius Cornelius, find the city water company engineers, and have them cut off all water to the Capitoline Hill at once." The Leader of the House shook his head in wonder. "So simple! But so obvious I for one would never have seen it. How long will we have to wait for Saturninus to surrender?" "Not long. They've been engaged in thirsty work, you see. Tomorrow is my guess. I'm going to send enough men up there to ring the temple round, and I'm going to order them to taunt our fugitives remorselessly with their lack of water." "Saturninus is a very desperate character," said Scaurus. That was a judgment Marius disagreed with, and said so. "He's a politician, Marcus Aemilius, not a soldier. It's power he's come to understand, not force of arms, and he can't make a workable strategy for himself." The twisted side of Marius's face came round to frighten Scaurus, its drooping eye ironic, and the smile which pulled the good side of his face up was a terrible thing to see. "If I was in Saturninus's shoes, Marcus Aemilius, you'd have cause to worry! Because by now I'd be calling myself the King of Rome, and you would all be dead." Scaurus Princeps Senatus stepped back a pace instinctively. "I know, Gaius Marius," he said. "I know!" "Anyway," said Marius cheerfully, removing the awful side of his face from Scaurus's view, "luckily I'm not King Tarquinius, though my mother's family is from Tarquinia! A night in the same room as the Great God will bring Saturninus round." Those in the rabble who had been caught and detained when it broke and fled were rounded up and put under heavy guard in the cells of the Lautumiae, where a scurrying group of censor's clerks sorted out the Roman citizens from the non-Romans; those who were not Romans were to be executed immediately, while the Romans would be summarily tried on the morrow, and flung down from the Tarpeian Rock of the Capitol straight after. Sulla returned as Marius and Scaurus began to walk away from the lower Forum. "I have a message from Lucius Valerius on the Quirinal,'' he said, looking considerably fresher for the day's events. "He says Glaucia is there inside Gaius Claudius's house all right, but they've barred the gates and refuse to come out." Marius looked at Scaurus. "Well, Princeps Senatus, what will we do about that situation?" "Like the lot in the company of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, why not leave matters lie overnight? Let Lucius Valerius guard the house in the meantime. After Saturninus surrenders, we can have the news shouted over Gaius Claudius's wall, and then see what happens." "A good plan, Marcus Aemilius." And Scaurus began to laugh. "All this amicable concourse with you, Gaius Marius, is not going to enhance my reputation among my friends the Good Men!" he spluttered, and caught at Marius's arm. "Nonetheless, Good Man, I am very glad we had you here today. What say you, Publius Rutilius?" "I say you could not have spoken truer words." Lucius Appuleius Saturninus was the first of all those in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus to surrender; Gaius Saufeius was the last. The Romans among them, some fifteen altogether, were detained on the rostra in full view of all who cared to come and see not many, for the crowd stayed home. Under their eyes those among the rabble who were Roman citizens almost all, for this was not a slave uprising were tried in a specially convened treason court, and sentenced to die from the Tarpeian Rock. Jutting out from the southwest side of the Capitol, the Tarpeian Rock was a basaltic overhang above a precipice only eighty feet in height; that it killed was due to the presence of an outcrop of needle-sharp rocks immediately below. The traitors were led up the slope of the Clivus Capitolinus, past the steps of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, to a spot on the Servian Walls in front of the temple of Ops. The overhang of the Tarpeian Rock projected out of the wall, and was clearly visible in profile from the lower part of the Forum Romanum, where crowds suddenly appeared to watch the partisans of Lucius Appuleius Saturninus go to their deaths crowds with empty bellies, but no desire to demonstrate their displeasure on this day. They just wanted to see men thrown off the Tarpeian Rock, for it hadn't happened in a long time, and the gossip grapevine had told them there were almost a hundred to die. No eyes in that crowd rested upon Saturninus or Equitius with love or pity, though every element in it was the same who cheered them mightily during the tribunician elections. The gossip grapevine was saying there were grain fleets on the way from Asia, thanks to Gaius Marius. So it was Gaius Marius they cheered in a desultory way; what they really wanted to see, for this was a Roman holiday of sorts, was the bodies pitched from the Tarpeian Rock. Death at a decent distance, an acrobatic display, a novelty.
"We can't hold the trials of Saturninus and Equitius until feelings have died down a little," said Scaurus Princeps Senatus to Marius and Sulla as the three of them stood on the Senate Steps while the parade of flailing miniature men dropped into space off the end of the Tarpeian Rock. Neither Marius nor Sulla mistook his meaning; it was not the Forum crowd which worried Scaurus, but the more impulsive and angry among his own kind, growling more fiercely now that the worst was over. Rancor had shifted from Saturninus's rabble to Saturninus himself, with special viciousness reserved for Lucius Equitius. The young senators and those not quite old enough to be senators were standing in a group on the edge of the Comitia with Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet in their forefront, eyeing Saturninus and his companions on the rostra very hungrily. "It will be worse when Glaucia surrenders and joins them," said Marius thoughtfully. "What a paltry lot!" sniffed Scaurus. "You'd have thought at least some of them would have done the proper thing, and fallen on their swords! Even my slack-livered son did that!" "I agree," said Marius. "However, here we are with fifteen of them sixteen when Glaucia comes out to try for treason, and some very resentful fellows down there who remind me of a pack of wolves eyeing a herd of deer.'' "We'll have to hold them somewhere for at least several days," said Scaurus, "only where? For the sake of Rome we cannot permit them to be lynched." "Why not?" asked Sulla, contributing his first mite to the discussion. "Trouble, Lucius Cornelius. We've avoided bloodshed in the Forum, but the crowd's going to appear in force to see that lot on the rostra tried for treason. Today they're entertained by the executions of men who don't matter. But can we be sure they won't turn nasty when we try Lucius Equitius, for instance?" asked Marius soberly. "It's a very difficult situation." "Why couldn't they have fallen on their swords?" asked Scaurus fretfully. "Think of all the trouble they would have saved us! Suicide an admission of guilt, no trials, no strangler in the Career Tullianum we don't dare throw them off the Tarpeian Rock!" Sulla stood listening, his ears absorbing what was said, but his eyes resting thoughtfully upon Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet. However, he said nothing. "Well, the trial is something we'll worry about when the time comes," said Marius. "In the meantime, we have to find somewhere to put them where they'll be safe." "The Lautumiae is out of the question," said Scaurus at once. "If for some reason or at someone's instigation a big crowd decides to rescue them, those cells will never withstand attack, not if every lictor we have is standing guard. It's not Saturninus I'm concerned about, but that ghastly creature Equitius. All it will take is for one silly woman to start weeping and wailing because the son of Tiberius Gracchus is going to die, and we could have trouble." He grunted. "And as if that weren't enough, look at our young bloods down there, slavering. They wouldn't mind lynching Saturninus in the least." "Then I suggest," said Marius joyously, "that we shut them up inside the Curia Hostilia." Scaurus Princeps Senatus looked stunned. "We can't do that, Gaius Marius!" "Why not?" “Imprison traitors in the Senate House! It's it's why, it's like offering our old gods a sacrifice of a turd!" "They've already fouled the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, everything to do with the State religion is going to have to be purified anyway. The Curia has absolutely no windows, and the best doors in Rome. The alternative is for some of us to volunteer to hold them in our own homes would you like Saturninus? Take him, and I'll take Equitius. I think Quintus Lutatius should have Glaucia," said Marius, grinning. "The Curia Hostilia is an excellent idea," said Sulla, still looking thoughtfully at Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet. "Grrrr!" snarled Scaurus Princeps Senatus, not at Marius or Sulla, but at circumstances. Then he nodded decisively. "You are quite right, Gaius Marius. The Curia Hostilia it must be, I'm afraid." "Good!" said Marius, clapped Sulla on the shoulder in a signal to move off, and added with a frightful lopsided grin, "While I see to the details, Marcus Aemilius, I'll leave it to you to explain to your fellow Good Men why we need to use our venerable meeting-house as a prison." "Why, thank you!" said Scaurus. "Think nothing of it." When they were out of earshot of all who mattered, Marius glanced at Sulla curiously. "What are you up to?" he asked. "I'm not sure I'm going to tell you," said Sulla. "You'll be careful, please. I don't want you hauled up for treason." "I'll be careful, Gaius Marius."
Saturninus and his confederates had surrendered on the eighth day of December; on the ninth, Gaius Marius reconvened the Centuriate Assembly and heard the declaration of candidates for the curule magistracies. Lucius Cornelius Sulla didn't bother going out to the saepta; he was busy doing other things, including having long talks with Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet, and squeezing in a visit to Aurelia, though he knew from Publius Rutilius Rufus that she was all right, and that Lucius Decumius had kept his tavern louts away from the Forum Romanum. The tenth day of the month was the day upon which the new tribunes of the plebs entered office; but two of them, Saturninus and Equitius, were locked up in the Senate House. And everyone was worried that the crowd might reappear, for it seemed to be most interested in the doings of the tribunes of the plebs. Though Marius would not permit his little army of three days before to come to the Forum Romanum clad in armor or girt with swords, he had the Basilica Porcia closed off to its normal complement of merchants and bankers, and kept it purely for the storage of arms and armor; on its ground floor at the Senate House end were the offices of the College of Tribunes of the Plebs, and here the eight who were not involved in the Saturninus business were to assemble at dawn, after which the inaugural meeting of the Plebeian Assembly would be conducted as quickly as possible, and with no reference to the missing two. But dawn had not yet broken and the Forum Romanum was utterly deserted when Caepio Junior and Metellus Pius Piglet led their raiding party down the Argiletum toward the Curia Hostilia. They had gone the long way round to make sure no guard detected them, but when they spread out around the Curia, they discovered they had the whole area to themselves. They carried long ladders which they propped against both sides of the building, reaching all the way up to the ancient fan-shaped tiles of the eaves, lichen-covered, brittle. "Remember," said Caepio Junior to his troops, "that no sword must be raised, Lucius Cornelius says. We must abide by the letter of Gaius Marius's orders." One by one they scaled the ladders until the entire party of fifty squatted along the edge of the roof, which was shallow in pitch, and not an uncomfortable place to roost. There in the darkness they waited until the pale light in the east grew from dove-grey to bright gold, and the first rays of the sun came stealing down from the Esquiline Hill to bathe the roof of the Senate House. Some people were beginning to arrive below, but the ladders had been drawn up onto the Curia's roof too, and no one noticed anything untoward because no one thought to look upward. "Do it!" cried Caepio Junior. Racing time for Lucius Cornelius had told them they would not have very long the raiding party began ripping tiles off the oak frames between the far more massive cedar beams. Light flooded into the hall below, bouncing off fifteen white faces staring up, more startled than terrified. And when each man on the roof had a stack of tiles beside him, he began to hurl them down through the gap he had made, straight into those faces. Saturninus fell at once, as did Lucius Equitius. Some of the prisoners tried to shelter in the hall's farthest corners, but the young men on the roof very quickly became skilled at pitching their tiles in any direction accurately. The hall held no furniture of any kind, its users bringing their own stools with them, and the clerks a table or two from the Senate Offices next door on the Argiletum. So there was nothing to shield the prisoners below from the torrent of missiles, more effective as weapons than Sulla had suspected. Each tile broke upon impact with razor-sharp edges, and each weighed ten pounds. By the time Marius and his legates including Sulla got there, it was all over; the raiding party was descending the ladders to the ground, where its members stood quietly, no one trying to escape. "Shall I arrest them?" asked Sulla of Marius. Marius jumped, so deep in thought had he been when the quick question came. "No!" he said. "They're not going anywhere." And he glanced at Sulla, a covert sideways look which asked a silent question. And got his answer with the ghost of a wink. "Open the doors," said Marius to his lictors. Inside the early sun threw rays and beams through a pall of slowly settling dust and lit up the lichen-grey heaps of tiles lying everywhere, their broken edges and more sheltered undersides a rich rust-red, almost the color of blood. Fifteen bodies lay squeezed into the smallest huddles or splayed with arms akimbo and legs twisted, half-buried by shattered tiles. "You and I, Princeps Senatus," said Marius. "No one else." Together they entered the hall and picked their way from one body to the next, looking for signs of life. Saturninus had been struck so quickly and effectively that he hadn't tried to hunch himself up protectively; his face was hidden below a carapace of tiles, and when revealed looked sightlessly into the sky, his black lashes caked with tile dust and plaster dust. Scaurus bent to close the eyes, and winced fastidiously; so much dust lay upon the drying eyeballs that the lids refused to come down. Lucius Equitius had fared worst. Hardly an inch of him was not bruised or cut or swollen from a tile, and it took Marius and Scaurus many moments to toss aside the heap burying him. Saufeius who had run into a corner had died from a shard which apparently struck the floor and bounced up to lodge itself like a huge fat spearhead in the side of his neck; his head was almost severed. And Titus Labienus had taken the long edge of an unfractured tile in the small of his back, gone down without feeling anything below the colossal break in his spine. Marius and Scaurus conferred. "What am I to do with those idiots out there?" Marius asked. "What can you do?" The right half of Marius's upper lip lifted. "Oh, come, Princeps Senatus! Take some of the burden upon your scraggy old carcass! You're not going to skip away from any of this, so much do I promise. Either back me or be prepared for a fight that will leave everything done here today looking like the women's Bona Dea festival!" "All right, all right!" said Scaurus irritably. "I didn't mean I wouldn't back you, you literal-minded rustic! All I meant was what I said what can you do?" "Under the powers invested in me by the Senatus Consultum I can do whatever I like, from arresting every last one of that brave little band outside, to sending them home without so much as a verbal chastisement. Which do you consider expedient?" "The expedient thing is to send them all home. The proper thing is to arrest them and charge them with the murder of fellow Romans. Since the prisoners hadn't stood trial, they were still Roman citizens when they met their deaths." Marius cocked his only mobile eyebrow. "So which course shall I take, Princeps Senatus? The expedient one or the proper one?'' Scaurus shrugged. "The expedient one, Gaius Marius. You know that as well as I do. If you take the proper one, you'll drive a wedge so deeply into Rome's tree that the whole world might fall along with it." They walked out into the open air and stood together at the top of the Senate steps, looking down into the faces of the people in the immediate vicinity; beyond these scant hundreds, the Forum Romanum was empty, clean, dreamy in the morning sun. "I hereby proclaim a general amnesty!" cried Gaius Marius at the top of his voice. "Go home, young men," he said to the raiding party, "you are indemnified along with everyone else." He turned to the main body of his listeners. "Where are the tribunes of the plebs? Here? Good! Call your meeting, there is no crowd. The first business of the day will be the election of two more tribunes of the plebs. Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Lucius Equitius are dead. Chief lictor, send for some of your fellows and the public slaves, and clear up the mess inside the Curia Hostilia. Give the bodies to their families for honorable burial, for they had not been tried for their crimes, and are therefore still Roman citizens of good standing." He walked down the steps and crossed to the rostra, for he was senior consul and supervisor of the ceremonies which would inaugurate the new tribunes; had he been a patrician, his junior colleague would have seen to it, which was why one at least of the consuls had to be a plebeian, to have access to the concilium plebis. And then it happened, perhaps because the gossip grapevine was in its usual splendid working order, and the word had sparkled up and down its tendrils with the speed of sunbeams. The Forum began to fill with people, thousands upon thousands of them hurrying from Esquiline, Caelian, Viminal, Quirinal, Subura, Palatine, Aventine, Oppian. The same crowd, Gaius Marius saw at once, which had jammed into the Forum during the elections of the tribunes of the plebs. And, with the trouble largely over and a feeling of peace within his heart, he looked out into that ocean of faces and saw what Lucius Appuleius Saturninus had seen: a source of power as yet untapped, innocent of the guile experience and education brought, ready to believe some passionately eloquent demagogue's self-seeking kharisma and put themselves under a different master. Not for me, thought Gaius Marius; to be the First Man in Rome at the whim of the gullible is no victory. I have enjoyed the status of First Man in Rome the old way, the hard way, battling the prejudices and monstrosities of the cursus honorum. But, Gaius Marius concluded his thoughts gleefully, I shall make one last gesture to show Scaurus Princeps Senatus, Catulus Caesar, Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, and the rest of the boni that if I had chosen Saturninus's way, they'd be dead inside the Curia Hostilia all covered in tiles, and I'd be running Rome single-handed. For I am to Saturninus what Jupiter is to Cupid. He stepped to that edge of the rostra which faced the lower Forum rather than the well of the Comitia, and held out his arms in a gesture which seemed to embrace the crowd, draw it to him as a father beckons his children. "People of Rome, go back to your houses!" he thundered. "The crisis is past. Rome is safe. And I, Gaius Marius, have great pleasure in announcing to you that a fleet of grain ships arrived in Ostia harbor yesterday. The barges will be coming upstream all day today, and by tomorrow there will be grain available from the State granaries of the Aventine at one sestertius the modius, the price which Lucius Appuleius Saturninus's grain law laid down. However, Lucius Appuleius is dead, and his law invalid. It is I, Gaius Marius, consul of Rome, who gives to you your grain! The special price will continue until I step down from office in nineteen days' time. After that, it is up to the new magistrates to decide what price you will pay. The one sestertius I shall charge you is my parting gift to you, Quirites! For I love you, and I have fought for you, and I have won for you. Never, never forget it! Long live Rome!" And down from the rostra he stepped amid a wave of cheers, his arms above his head, that fierce twisted grin a fitting farewell, with its good side and its bad side. Catulus Caesar stood rooted to the spot. "Did you hear that?" he gasped to Scaurus. "He just gave away nineteen days of grain in his name! At a cost to the Treasury of thousands of talents! How dare he!" "Are you going to get up on the rostra and contradict him, Quintus Lutatius?" asked Sulla, grinning. "With all your loyal young Good Men standing there getting off free?" "Damn him!" Catulus Caesar was almost weeping. Scaurus broke into peals of laughter. "He did it to us again, Quintus Lutatius!" he said when he was able. "Oh, what an earthshaker that man is! He stuck it to us, and he's left us to pay the bill! I loathe him but by all the gods, I do love him too!'' And away he went into another paroxysm. "There are times, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, when I do not even begin to understand you!" Catulus Caesar said, and stalked off in his best camel manner. "Whereas I, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, understand you all too well,'' said Sulla, laughing even harder than Scaurus.
When Glaucia killed himself with his sword and Marius extended the amnesty to Gaius Claudius and his followers, Rome breathed more easily; the Forum strife might be presumed to be over. But that was not so. The young Brothers Luculli brought Gaius Servilius Augur to trial in the treason court, and violence broke out afresh. Senatorial feelings ran high because the case split the Good Men; Catulus Caesar and Scaurus Princeps Senatus and their followers were firmly aligned with the Luculli, whereas Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus and Crassus Orator were committed by ties of patronage and friendship to Servilius the Augur. The unprecedented crowds which had filled the Forum Romanum during the troubles with Saturninus had disappeared, but the habitual Forum frequenters turned out in force to witness this trial, attracted by the youth and pathos of the two Luculli who were fully aware of this, and determined to use it in every way they could. Varro Lucullus, the younger brother, had donned his toga of manhood only days before the trial began; neither he nor the eighteen-year-old Lucius Lucullus yet needed to shave. Their agents, cunningly placed among the crowd, whispered that these two poor lads had just received the news that their exiled father was dead and that the long-ennobled family Licinius Lucullus now had only these two poor lads to defend its honor, its dignitas. Composed of knights, the jury had decided ahead of time that it was going to side with Servilius the Augur, who was a knight elevated to the Senate by his patron Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus. Even when this jury was being chosen, violence had played its part; the hired ex-gladiators of Servilius the Augur tried to prevent the trial's going on. But the handy little band of young nobles run by Caepio Junior and Metellus Pius Piglet had driven the bully-boys from the scene, killing one as it did so. The jury understood this message, and resigned itself to listening to the Brothers Luculli with more sympathy than it had originally intended. "They'll convict the Augur," said Marius to Sulla as they stood off to one side, watching and listening keenly. "They will indeed," said Sulla, who was fascinated by Lucius Lucullus, the older boy. "Brilliant!" he exclaimed when young Lucullus finished his speech. “I like him, Gaius Marius!" But Marius was unimpressed. "He's as haughty and pokered up as his father was." "You're known to support the Augur," said Sulla stiffly. That shaft went wide; Marius just grinned. "I would support a Tingitanian ape if it made life difficult for the Good Men around our absent Piggle-wiggle, Lucius Cornelius." "Servilius the Augur is a Tingitanian ape," said Sulla. "I'm inclined to agree. He's going to lose." A prediction borne out when the jury (eyeing Caepio Junior's band of young nobles) returned a unanimous verdict of DAMNO, even after being moved to tears by the impassioned defense speeches of Crassus Orator and Mucius Scaevola. Not surprisingly, the trial ended in a brawl which Marius and Sulla viewed from a suitably aloof distance, and with huge enjoyment from the moment when Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus punched an intolerably jubilant Catulus Caesar on the mouth. "Pollux and Lynceus!" said Marius, delighted when the pair settled down to engage in serious fisticuffs. "Oh, go it, Quintus Lutatius Pollux!" he roared. "Not a bad classical allusion, given that the Ahenobarbi all swear it was Pollux put the red in their inky beards," said Sulla when a punch properly directed by Catulus Caesar smeared Ahenobarbus's whole face with blood. "And hopefully," said Marius, turning away as soon as the brawl ended in defeat for Ahenobarbus, "that brings events in the Forum to an end for this hideous year." "Oh, I don't know, Gaius Marius. We've still to endure the consular elections." "They're not held in the Forum, one mercy."
Two days later Marcus Antonius held his triumph, and two days after that he was elected senior consul for the coming year; his colleague in the consulship was to be none other than Aulus Postumius Albinus, whose invasion of Numidia had, ten years ago, precipitated the war against Jugurtha. "The electors are complete asses!" said Marius to Sulla with some passion. "They've just elected as junior consul one of the best examples I know of ambition allied to no talent of any kind! Tchah! Their memories are as short as their turds!" "Well, they say constipation causes mental dullness," said Sulla, grinning despite the emergence of a new fear. He was hoping to run for praetor in the next year's elections, but had today sensed a mood in the electors of the Centuriate Assembly that boded ill for Marian candidates in future. Yet how do I dissociate myself from this man who has been so good to me? he asked himself unhappily. "Luckily, I predict it's going to be a mentally dull year, and Aulus Albinus won't be given a chance to ruin things," Marius went on, unaware of Sulla's thoughts. "For the first time in a long time, Rome has no enemies worth a mention. We can rest. And Rome can rest." Sulla made an effort, swung his mind away from a praetorship he knew was going to prove elusive. "What about the prophecy?" he asked abruptly. "Martha distinctly said you'd be consul of Rome seven times." "I will be consul seven times, Lucius Cornelius." "You believe that." "I do." Sulla sighed. "I'd be happy to reach praetor." A facial hemiparesis enabled its sufferer to blow the most wonderfully derisive noises; Marius blew one now. "Rubbish!" he said vigorously. "You are consul material, Lucius Cornelius. In fact, one day you'll be the First Man in Rome." "I thank you for your faith in me, Gaius Marius." Sulla turned a smile upon Marius almost as twisted as Marius's were these days. "Still, considering the difference in our ages, I won't be vying with you for the title," he said. Marius laughed. "What a battle of the Titans that would be! No danger of it," he said with absolute certainty. “With your retiring from the curule chair and not planning to attend the House, you'll no longer be the First Man in Rome yourself, Gaius Marius." "True, true. But oh, Lucius Cornelius, I've had a good run! And as soon as this awful affliction of mine goes away, I'll be back." "In the meantime, who will be the First Man in Rome?" asked Sulla. "Scaurus? Catulus?" "Nemo!" bellowed Gaius Marius, and laughed uproariously. "Nobody! That's the best joke of all! There's not one of them can fill my shoes!" Joining in the laughter, Sulla put his right arm across Marius's togate back, gave it a squeeze of pure affection, and set their feet upon the road home from the saepta. In front of them reared the Capitoline Mount; a broad finger of chilly sun alighted upon the gilding of Victory's four-horse chariot atop Jupiter Optimus Maximus's temple pediment, and turned the city of Rome to dazzling gold. "It hurts my eyes!" cried Sulla in real pain. But could not look away.
FINIS