The First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

  “Jugurtha—does Jugurtha know all this?” whispered the King of Mauretania.

  “There’s very little escapes Jugurtha,” Sulla said, and sat back, and waited.

  “Very well, Lucius Cornelius, it shall be as you say. I will send Aspar to Jugurtha and offer to betray you.” The King drew himself up, dignity a little threadbare. “However, you must tell me exactly how I am to go about it.”

  Sulla leaned forward and spoke crisply. “You will ask for Jugurtha to come here the night after next, and promise him that you will hand over to him the Roman quaestor Lucius Cornelius Sulla. You will inform him that this quaestor is alone in your camp, endeavoring to persuade you to ally yourself with Gaius Marius. He knows it to be true, because Aspar has been reporting to him. He also knows there are no Roman soldiers within a hundred miles, so he won’t bother to bring his army with him. And he thinks he knows you, King Bocchus. So he won’t dream that it is he who will be yielded up rather than me.” Sulla pretended not to see Bocchus wince. “It’s not you or your army Jugurtha is afraid of. He’s only afraid of Gaius Marius. Rest assured, he’ll come, and he’ll come believing every word Aspar tells him.”

  “But what will I do when Jugurtha never returns to his own camp?” asked Bocchus, shivering anew.

  Sulla smiled a nasty smile. “I strongly recommend, King Bocchus, that the moment you have turned Jugurtha over to me, you strike camp and march for Tingis as fast as you can.”

  “But won’t you need my army to keep Jugurtha prisoner?” The King stared at Sulla, palpitating; never was a man more patently terrified. “You have no men to help you take him to Icosium! And his camp is there in between.”

  “All I want is a good set of manacles and chains, and six of your fastest horses,” said Sulla.

  *

  Sulla found himself looking forward to the confrontation, and did not experience one twinge of self-doubt or trepidation. Yes, it would be his name linked to the capture of Jugurtha forever! Little matter that he acted under Gaius Marius’s orders; it was his valor and intelligence and initiative which effected the deed, and that could not be taken away from him. Not that he thought Gaius Marius would try to take the credit. Gaius Marius wasn’t greedy for glory, he knew he had more than his fair share. And he would not oppose the leaking of the story of Jugurtha’s capture. For a patrician, the kind of personal fame necessary to ensure election as consul was hampered by the fact that a patrician could not be a tribune of the plebs. Therefore a patrician had to find other ways of earning approbation, making sure the electorate knew he was a worthy scion of his family. Jugurtha had cost Rome dearly. And all of Rome would know that it was Lucius Cornelius Sulla, indefatigable quaestor, who had single-handedly achieved the capture of Jugurtha.

  So when he joined Bocchus to go to the appointed place, he was confident, exhilarated, eager to get it done.

  “Jugurtha isn’t going to expect to see you in chains,” said Bocchus. “He’s under the impression that you’ve asked to see him, with the intention of persuading him to surrender. And he has instructed me to bring sufficient men to make you captive, Lucius Cornelius.”

  “Good,” said Sulla shortly.

  When Bocchus rode in with Sulla beside him and a strong troop of Moorish cavalry at his back, Jugurtha was waiting, escorted only by a handful of his barons, including Aspar.

  Pricking his mount, Sulla forged ahead of Bocchus and trotted straight to Jugurtha, then slid to the ground and held out his hand in the universal gesture of peace and friendship.

  “King Jugurtha,” he said, and waited.

  Jugurtha looked down at the hand, then dismounted to take hold of it. “Lucius Cornelius.”

  While this was going on, the Moorish cavalry had silently formed a ring around the central participants, and while Sulla and Jugurtha stood with hands joined, the capture of Jugurtha was effected as neatly and smoothly as even Gaius Marius could have wished. The Numidian barons were overcome without a sword being drawn; Jugurtha was taken too firmly to struggle, and borne to the ground. When he was set upon his feet again, he wore heavy manacles on both wrists and ankles, all connected to chains just long enough to permit that he shuffle along bowed over in a crouch.

  His eyes, Sulla noted in the torchlight, were very pale in so dark a man; he was big too, and well preserved. But his years sat heavily upon his beaky face, so he looked much older than Gaius Marius. Sulla knew he could manage to get him as far as he had to without an escort.

  “Put him up on the big bay,” he instructed Bocchus’s men, and stood watching closely as the chains were snapped to special loops on the modified saddle. Then he checked the girth and the locks. After that he accepted a hoist up onto another bay, and took the bridle of Jugurtha’s horse, and secured it to his own saddle; if Jugurtha took it into his head to kick his mount into bolting, it would have no leeway, nor could the reins be wrested from Sulla. The four spare mounts were tethered together and tied by a fairly short line to Jugurtha’s saddle. He was now doubly handicapped. And finally, to make absolutely sure, another length of chain was snapped to Jugurtha’s right wrist’s manacle, and its other end was fastened to a manacle on Sulla’s own left wrist.

  Sulla had said not a word to the Moors from the time Jugurtha was taken; now, still silent, he kicked his horse and rode off, Jugurtha’s horse following docilely enough as the reins and the chain linking him to Sulla drew taut. The four spare horses followed. And in very few moments all the mounts had disappeared into the shadows between the trees.

  Bocchus wept. Volux and Dabar watched helplessly.

  “Father, let me catch him!” pleaded Volux suddenly. “He can’t travel fast so trammeled—I can catch him!”

  “It is too late.” Taking the fine handkerchief his servant gave him, King Bocchus dried his eyes and blew his nose. “He will never let himself be caught, that one. We are as helpless babes compared to Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who is a Roman. No, my son, poor Jugurtha’s fate is out of our hands. We have Mauretania to think of. It’s time to go home to our beloved Tingis. Perhaps we don’t belong in the world of the Middle Sea.”

  *

  For perhaps a mile Sulla rode without speaking or letting his pace slacken. All his jubilance, his fantastic pleasure in his own brilliance, he kept as tightly reined as he did his prisoner, Jugurtha. Yes, if he did the dissemination properly, and without detracting from the achievements of Gaius Marius, the story of his capture of Jugurtha would join those other wonderful stories mothers told their children—the leap of young Marcus Curtius into the chasm in the Forum Romanum, the heroism of Horatius Cocles when he held the Wooden Bridge against Lars Porsenna of Clusium, the drawing of the circle around the King of Syria’s feet by Gaius Popillius Laenas, the killing of his treasonous sons by Lucius Junius Brutus, the killing of Spurius Maelius the would-be King of Rome by Gaius Servilius Ahala—yes, the capture of Jugurtha by Lucius Cornelius Sulla would join all those and many more bedtime stories, for it had all the necessary elements, including the ride through the middle of Jugurtha’s camp.

  But he was not by nature a romancer, a dreamer, a builder of fantasies, so he found it easy to abandon these thoughts when it came time to halt, to dismount. Keeping well clear of Jugurtha, he went to the lead holding the four spare horses, and cut it, then sent the animals careering in all directions with a shower of well-placed stones.

  “I see,” said Jugurtha, watching Sulla scramble astride his bay by grabbing at its mane. “We have to ride a hundred miles on the same horses, eh? I was wondering how you were going to manage to transfer me from one beast to another.” He laughed jeeringly. “My cavalry will catch you, Lucius Cornelius!”

  “Hopefully not,” said Sulla, and jerked his prisoner’s mount forward.

  Instead of proceeding due north to the sea, he headed due east across a small plain, and rode for ten miles through the breathless night of early summer, his way lit up by a sliver of moon in the west. Then in the far distance reared a range of mountains, solidly
black; in front of it and much closer was a huddle of gigantic round rocks piled in jumbled heaps, looming above the sparse and stunted trees.

  “Right where it ought to be!” Sulla exclaimed joyously, and whistled shrilly.

  His own Ligurian cavalry squadron spilled out of the shelter afforded by the boulders, each man encumbered by two spare mounts; silently they rode to meet Sulla and his prisoner, and produced two extra horses. And two mules.

  “I sent them here to wait for me six days ago, King Jugurtha,” Sulla said. “King Bocchus thought I came to his camp alone, but as you see, I didn’t. I had Publius Vagiennius following close behind me, and sent him back to bring up his troop to wait for me here.”

  Freed from his encumbrances, Sulla supervised the remounting of Jugurtha, who now was chained to Publius Vagiennius. And soon they were riding away, bearing northeast to skirt Jugurtha’s camp by many miles.

  “I don’t suppose, your royal Majesty,” said Publius Vagiennius with delicate diffidence, “that you would be able to tell me whereabouts I’d find snails around Cirta? Or around anywhere else in Numidia, for that matter?”

  By the end of June the war in Africa was over. For a little while Jugurtha was housed in appropriately comfortable quarters within Utica, as Marius and Sulla tidied up. And there his two sons, Iampsas and Oxyntas, were brought to keep him company while his court disintegrated and the scrabbling for places of influence under the new regime began.

  King Bocchus got his treaty of friendship and alliance from the Senate, and Prince Gauda the invalid became King Gauda of a considerably reduced Numidia. It was Bocchus who reaped the extra territory from a Rome too busy elsewhere to expand her African province by many hundreds of miles.

  And as soon as a small fleet of good ships and stable weather ensured a smooth passage, Marius loaded King Jugurtha and his sons on board one of these hired vessels, and sent them to Rome for safekeeping. The Numidian threat vanished over the horizon with the passing of Jugurtha.

  With them sailed Quintus Sertorius, determined that he was going to see action against the Germans in Gaul-across-the-Alps. He had applied to his cousin Marius for permission to leave.

  “I am a fighting man, Gaius Marius,” said the grave young contubernalis, “and the fighting here is finished. Recommend me to your friend Publius Rutilius Rufus, and let him give me duty in Further Gaul!”

  “Go with my thanks and blessings, Quintus Sertorius,” said Marius with rare affection. “And give my regards to your mother.”

  Sertorius’s face lit up. “I will, Gaius Marius!”

  “Remember, young Sertorius,” said Marius on the day that Quintus Sertorius and Jugurtha sailed for Italy, “that I will need you again in the future. So guard yourself in battle if you’re fortunate enough to find one. Rome has honored your bravery and skill with the Gold Crown, with phalerae and torcs and bracelets—all of gold. A rare distinction for one so young. But don’t be rash. Rome is going to need you alive, not dead.”

  “I’ll stay alive, Gaius Marius,” Quintus Sertorius promised.

  “And don’t go off to your war quite the moment you arrive in Italy,” Marius admonished. “Spend some time with your dear mother first.”

  “I will, Gaius Marius,” Quintus Sertorius promised.

  When the lad took his leave, Sulla looked at his superior ironically. “He makes you as clucky as an old hen sitting on one lone egg.”

  Marius snorted. “Rubbish! He’s my cousin on his mother’s side, and I’m fond of her.”

  “Certainly,” said Sulla, grinning.

  Marius laughed. “Come now, Lucius Cornelius, admit that you’re as fond of young Sertorius as I am!”

  “I admit it freely. Nonetheless, Gaius Marius, he does not make me clucky!”

  “Mentulam caco!” said Marius.

  And that was the end of the subject.

  2

  Rutilia, who was the only sister of Publius Rutilius Rufus, enjoyed the unusual distinction of being married to each of two brothers. Her first husband had been Lucius Aurelius Cotta, colleague in the consulship with Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus some fourteen years earlier; it was the same year Gaius Marius had been tribune of the plebs, and defied Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus.

  Rutilia had gone to Lucius Aurelius Cotta as a girl, whereas he had been married before, and already had a nine-year-old son named Lucius, like himself. They were married the year after Fregellae was leveled to the ground for rebelling against Rome, and in the year of Gaius Gracchus’s first term as a tribune of the plebs, they had a daughter named Aurelia. Lucius Cotta’s son was then ten years old, and very pleased to have acquired a little half sister, for he liked his stepmother, Rutilia, very much.

  When Aurelia turned five years old, her father, Lucius Aurelius Cotta, died suddenly, only days after the end of his consulship. The widow Rutilia, twenty-four years old, clung for comfort to Lucius Cotta’s younger brother, Marcus, who had not yet found a wife. Love grew between them, and with her father’s and her brother’s permission, Rutilia married her brother-in-law, Marcus Aurelius Cotta, eleven months after the death of Lucius Cotta. With her into Marcus’s care, Rutilia brought her stepson and Marcus’s nephew, Lucius Junior, and her daughter and Marcus’s niece, Aurelia. The family promptly grew: Rutilia bore Marcus a son, Gaius, less than a year later, then another son, Marcus Junior, the year after that, and finally a third son, Lucius, seven years later.

  Aurelia remained the only girl her mother bore, fascinatingly situated; by her father, she had a half brother older than herself, and by her mother, she had three half brothers younger than herself who also happened to be her first cousins because her father had been their uncle, where their father was her uncle. It could prove very, very bewildering to those not in the know, especially if the children explained it.

  “She’s my cousin,” Gaius Cotta would say, pointing to Aurelia.

  “He’s my brother,” Aurelia would riposte, pointing to Gaius Cotta.

  “He’s my brother,” Gaius Cotta would then say, pointing to Marcus Cotta.

  “She’s my sister,” Marcus Cotta would say in his turn, pointing to Aurelia.

  “He’s my cousin,” Aurelia would say last of all, pointing to Marcus Cotta.

  They could keep it up for hours; little wonder most people never worked it out. Not that the complex blood links worried any of that strong-minded, self-willed cluster of children, who liked each other as well as loved each other, and all basked in a warm relationship with Rutilia and her second Aurelius Cotta husband, who also happened to adore each other.

  The family Aurelius was one of the Famous Families, and its branch Aurelius Cotta was respectably elderly in its tenure of the Senate, though new to the nobility bestowed by the consulship. Rich because of shrewd investments, huge inheritances of land, and many clever marriages, the Aurelius Cottas could afford to have multiple sons without worrying about adopting some of them out, and to dower the daughters more than adequately.

  The brood which lived under the roof of Marcus Aurelius Cotta and his wife, Rutilia, was therefore financially very eligible marriage material, but also possessed great good looks. And Aurelia, the only girl, was the best-looking of them all.

  “Flawless!” was the opinion of the luxury-loving yet restlessly brilliant Lucius Licinius Crassus Orator, who was one of the most ardent—and important—suitors for her hand.

  “Glorious!” was the way Quintus Mucius Scaevola— best friend of and first cousin of Crassus Orator—put it; he too had entered his name on the list of suitors.

  “Unnerving!” was Marcus Livius Drusus’s comment; he was Aurelia’s cousin, and very anxious to marry her.

  “Helen of Troy!” was how Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus Junior described her, suing for her hand.

  Indeed, the situation was exactly as Publius Rutilius Rufus had described it to Gaius Marius in his letter; everyone in Rome wanted to marry his niece Aurelia. That quite a few of the applicants had wives already neith
er disqualified nor dishonored them—divorce was easy, and Aurelia’s dowry was so large a man didn’t need to worry about losing the dowry of an earlier wife.

  “I really do feel like King Tyndareus when every important prince and king came to sue for Helen’s hand,” Marcus Aurelius Cotta said to Rutilia.

  “He had Odysseus to solve his dilemma,” Rutilia commented.

  “Well, I wish I did! No matter whom I give her to, I’m going to offend everyone who doesn’t get her.”

  “Just like Tyndareus,” nodded Rutilia.

  And then Marcus Cotta’s Odysseus came to dinner, though properly he was Ulysses, being a Roman of the Romans, Publius Rutilius Rufus. After the children—including Aurelia—had gone to bed, the conversation turned as always to the subject of Aurelia’s marriage. Rutilius Rufus listened with interest, and when the moment came, offered his answer; what he didn’t tell his sister and brother-in-law was that the real unraveler of the conundrum was Gaius Marius, whose terse letter he had just received from Africa.

  “It’s simple, Marcus Aurelius,” he said.

  “If it is, then I’m too close to see,” said Marcus Cotta. “Enlighten me, Ulysses!”

  Rutilius Rufus smiled. “No, I can’t see the point of making a song and dance about it, the way Ulysses did,” he said. “This is modern Rome, not ancient Greece. We can’t slaughter a horse, cut it up into four pieces, and make all Aurelia’s suitors stand on it to swear an oath of fealty to you, Marcus Aurelius.”

  “Especially not before they know who the lucky winner is!” said Cotta, laughing. “What romantics those old Greeks were! No, Publius Rutilius, I fear what we have to deal with is a collection of litigious-minded, hairsplitting Romans.”

  “Pre-cisely,” said Rutilius Rufus.

  “Come, brother, put us out of our misery and tell us,” urged Rutilia.

  “As I said, my dear Rutilia, simple. Let the girl pick her own husband.”

  Cotta and his wife stared.

  “Do you really think that’s wise?” asked Cotta.