The First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

  “Always thinking of what tomorrow might bring! And have you picked any tribunes of the soldiers under your law?”

  “Twenty-one. The same number who died at Arausio.”

  “Including?”

  “Young Gaius Julius Caesar.”

  “Now that is good news! Relatives mostly aren’t. Do you remember Gaius Lusius? Fellow my brother-in-law’s sister Gratidia married?”

  “Vaguely. Numantia?”

  “That’s him. Awful wart! But very rich. Anyway, he and Gratidia produced a son and heir, now aged twenty-five. And they’re begging me to take him with me to fight the Germans. Haven’t even met the sprog, but had to say yes all the same, otherwise my brother, Marcus, would never have heard the end of it.”

  “Speaking of your vast collection of relatives, you’ll be pleased to know young Quintus Sertorius is at home in Nersia with his mother, and will be fit enough to go to Gaul with you.”

  “Good! As well Cotta went to Gaul this year, eh?”

  Rutilius Rufus blew a rudely expressive noise. “I ask you, Gaius Marius! One ex-praetor and five backbenchers to form a delegation charged with reasoning with the likes of Caepio? But I knew my Cotta, where Scaurus and Dalmaticus and Piggle-wiggle did not. I had no doubt that whatever could be salvaged out of it, Cotta would.”

  “And Caepio, now he’s back?”

  “Oh, his chin’s above water, but he’s paddling mighty hard to stay afloat, I can tell you. I predict that as time goes on, he’ll tire until only his nostrils are showing. There’s a huge swell of public feeling running against him, so his friends on the front benches are unable to do nearly as much for him as they’d like.”

  “Good! He ought to be thrown into the Tullianum and left to starve to death,” said Marius grimly.

  “Only after hand-cutting the wood for eighty thousand funeral pyres,” said Rutilius Rufus, teeth showing.

  “What of the Marsi? Quietened down?”

  “Their damages suit, you mean? The House threw it out of the courts, of course, but didn’t make any friends for Rome in so doing. The commander of the Marsic legion— name’s Quintus Poppaedius Silo—came to Rome intending to testify, and I’ll bet you can’t guess who was prepared to testify for him too,” said Rutilius Rufus.

  Marius grinned. “You’re right, I can’t. Who?”

  “None other than my nephew—young Marcus Livius Drusus! It seems they met after the battle—Drusus’s legion was next to Silo’s in the line, apparently. But it came as a shock to Caepio when my nephew—who happens to be his son-in-law—put his name up to testify in a case which has direct bearing on Caepio’s own conduct.”

  “He’ s a pup with sharp teeth,” said Marius, remembering young Drusus in the law court.

  “He’s changed since Arausio,” said Rutilius Rufus. “I’d say he’s grown up.”

  “Then Rome may have a good man for the future,” said Marius.

  “It seems likely. But I note a marked change in all those who survived Arausio,” said Rutilius Rufus sadly. “They’ve not yet succeeded in mustering all the soldiers who escaped by swimming the Rhodanus, you know. I doubt they ever will.”

  “I’ll find them,” said Marius grimly. “They’re Head Count, which means they’re my responsibility.”

  “That’s Caepio’s tack, of course,” said Rutilius Rufus. “He’s trying to shift the blame onto Gnaeus Mallius and the Head Count rabble, as he calls that army. The Marsi are not pleased at being labeled Head Count, nor are the Samnites, and my young nephew Marcus Livius has come out in public and sworn on oath that the Head Count had nothing to do with it. He’s a good orator, and a better showman.”

  “As Caepio’s son-in-law, how can he criticize Caepio?” Marius asked curiously. “I would have thought even those most against Caepio would be horrified at such lack of family loyalty.”

  “He’s not criticizing Caepio—at least not directly. It’s very neat, really. He says nothing about Caepio at all! He just refutes Caepio’s charge that the defeat was due to Gnaeus Mallius’s Head Count army. But I notice that young Marcus Livius and young Caepio Junior aren’t quite as thick as they used to be, and that’s rather difficult, since Caepio Junior is married to my niece, Drusus’s sister,” said Rutilius Rufus.

  “Well, what can you expect when all you wretched nobles insist upon marrying each other’s cousins rather than letting some new blood in?” Marius demanded, and shrugged. “But enough of that! Any more news?”

  “Only about the Marsi, or rather, the Italian Allies. Feelings are running high against us, Gaius Marius. As you know, I’ve been trying to recruit for months. But the Italian Allies refuse to co-operate. When I asked them for Italian Head Count—since they insist they’ve no propertied men left of an age for service—they said they had no Head Count either!”

  “Well, they’re rural peoples, I suppose it’s possible,” said Marius.

  “Nonsense! Sharecroppers, shepherds, migrating field workers, free farm laborers—when has any rural community not had plenty of their like? But the Italian Allies insist there is no Italian Head Count! Why? I asked them in a letter. Because, they said, any Italian men who might have qualified as Head Count were now all Roman slaves, mostly taken for debt bondage. Oh, it is very bitter!” said Rutilius Rufus gravely. “Every Italian nation has written in strong terms to the Senate protesting at its treatment by Rome—not just official Rome, mark you, but private Roman citizens in positions of power too. The Marsi—the Paeligni—the Picentines—the Umbrians—the Samnites—the Apulians—the Lucanians—the Etrurians—the Marrucini—the Vestini—the list is complete, Gaius Marius!”

  “Well, we’ve known there’s trouble brewing for a long time,” said Marius. “My hope is that the common threat of the Germans knits up our rapidly unraveling peninsula.”

  “I don’t think it will,” said Rutilius Rufus. “All the nations say that Rome has taken to keeping their propertied men away from home so long that their farms or businesses have fallen into bankruptcy from inadequate care, and all the men lucky enough to have survived a career fighting for Rome have come home to find themselves in debt to Roman landowners or local businessmen with the Roman citizenship. Thus, they say, Rome already owns their Head Count—as slaves scattered from one end of the Middle Sea to the other! Particularly, they say, where Rome needs slaves with agricultural skills—Africa, Sardinia, Sicily.”

  Marius began to look equally uneasy. “I had no idea things had come to such a pass,” he said. “I own a lot of land in Etruria myself, and it includes many farms confiscated for debt. But what else can one do? If I didn’t buy the farms, Piggle-wiggle or his brother, Dalmaticus, would! I inherited estates in Etruria from my mother Fulcinia’s family, which is why I’ve concentrated on Etruria. But there’s no getting away from the fact that I’m a big landowner there.’’

  “And I’ll bet you don’t even know what your agents did about the men whose farms you confiscated,” said Rutilius.

  “You’re right, I don’t,” said Marius, looking uncomfortable. ‘ ‘I had no idea there were so many Italians enslaved to us. It’s like enslaving Romans!”

  “Well, we do that too when Romans fall into debt.”

  “Less and less, Publius Rutilius!”

  “True.”

  “I shall see to the Italian complaint the moment I’m in office,” said Gaius Marius with decision.

  Italian dissatisfaction hovered darkly in the background that December, its nucleus the warlike tribes of the central highlands behind the Tiber and Liris valleys, led by the Marsi and the Samnites. But there were other rumblings as well, aimed more at the privileges of the Roman nobility, and generated by other Roman nobles.

  The new tribunes of the plebs were very active indeed. Smarting because his father was one of those incompetent generals held in such odium at the moment, Lucius Cassius Longinus tabled a startling law for discussion in a contio meeting of the Plebeian Assembly. All those men whom the Assembly had stripped of their i
mperium must also lose their seats in the Senate. That was declaring war upon Caepio with a vengeance! For of course it was generally conceded that Caepio, if and when tried for treason under the present system, would be acquitted. Thanks to his power and wealth, he held too many knights in the First and Second Classes in his sway not to be acquitted. But the Plebeian Assembly law stripping him of his seat in the Senate was something quite different. And fight back though Metellus Numidicus and his colleagues did, the bill proceeded on its way toward becoming law. Lucius Cassius was not going to share his father’s odium.

  And then the religious storm broke, burying all other considerations under its fury; since it had its funny side, this was inevitable, given the Roman delight in the ridiculous. When Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus had dropped dead on the rostra during the row about Gaius Marius’s standing for the consulship in absentia, he left one loose end behind that it was not in his power to tie up. He was a pontifex, a priest of Rome, and his death left a vacancy in the College of Pontifices. At the time, the Pontifex Maximus was the ageing Lucius Gaecilius Metellus Dalmaticus, and among the priests were Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus, and Publius Licinius Crassus, and Scipio Nasica.

  New priests were co-opted by the surviving members of the college, a plebeian being replaced by a plebeian, and a patrician by a patrician; the colleges of priests and of augurs normally stood at half-plebeian, half-patrician. According to tradition, the new priest would belong to the same family as the dead priest, thus enabling priesthoods and augurships to pass from father to son, or uncle to nephew, or cousin to cousin. The family honor and dignitas had to be preserved. And naturally Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus Junior, now the head of his branch of the family, expected to be asked to take his father’s place as a priest.

  However, there was a problem, and the problem’s name was Scaurus. When the College of Pontifices met to co-opt its new member, Scaurus announced that he was not in favor of giving the dead Ahenobarbus’s place to his son. One of his reasons he did not mention aloud, though it underlay everything he said, and loomed equally large in the minds of the thirteen priests who listened to him; namely, that Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus had been a pigheaded, argumentative, irascible, and unlikable man, and had sired a son who was even worse. No Roman nobleman minded the idiosyncrasies of his peers, and every Roman nobleman was prepared to put up with quite a gamut of the less admirable character traits; provided, that is, that he could get away from these fellows. But the priestly colleges were close-knit and met within the cramped confines of the Regia, the little office of the Pontifex Maximus—and young Ahenobarbus was only thirty-three years old. To those like Scaurus who had suffered his father for many years, the idea of suffering the son was not at all attractive. And, as luck would have it, Scaurus had two valid reasons to offer his fellow priests when moving that the new place not go to young Ahenobarbus.

  The first was that when Marcus Livius Drusus the censor had died, his priesthood had not gone to his son, nineteen at the time. This had been felt to be just a little too underage. The second was that young Marcus Livius Drusus was suddenly displaying alarming tendencies to abandon his natural inheritance of intense conservatism; Scaurus felt that if he was given his father’s priesthood, it would draw him back into the fold of his tradition-bound ancestors. His father had been an obdurate enemy of Gaius Gracchus, yet the way young Drusus was carrying on in the Forum Romanum, he sounded more like Gaius Gracchus! There were extenuating circumstances, Scaurus argued, particularly the shock of Arausio. So, what nicer and better way could there be than to co-opt young Drusus into his father’s priestly college?

  The thirteen other priests, including Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus, thought this was a splendid way out of the Ahenobarbus dilemma, particularly because old Ahenobarbus had secured an augurship for his younger son, Lucius, not long before he died. The family could not therefore argue that it was utterly devoid of priestly clout.

  But when Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus the younger heard that his expected priesthood was going to Marcus Livius Drusus, he was not pleased. In fact, he was outraged. At the next meeting of the Senate he announced that he was going to prosecute Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus on charges of sacrilege. The occasion had been the adoption of a patrician by a plebeian, this complicated affair needing a sanction from the College of Pontifices as well as the Lictors of the Thirty Curiae; young Ahenobarbus alleged that Scaurus had not attended to the requirements properly. Well aware of the real reason behind this sudden espousal of sacerdotal punctiliousness, the House was not a bit impressed. Nor was Scaurus, who simply got to his feet and looked down his nose at the puce-faced Ahenobarbus.

  “Do you, Gnaeus Domitius—not even a pontifex!—accuse me, Marcus Aemilius, pontifex and Leader of the House, of sacrilege?” asked Scaurus in freezing tones. “Run away and play with your new toys in the Plebeian Assembly until you finally grow up!”

  And that seemed the end of the matter. Ahenobarbus flounced out of the House amid roars of laughter, catcalls, cries of “Sore loser!”

  But Ahenobarbus wasn’t beaten yet. Scaurus had told him to run away and play with his new toys in the Plebeian Assembly, so that was precisely what he would do! Within two days he had tabled a new bill, and before the old year was done he had pushed it through the discussion and voting processes into formal law. In future, new members for priesthoods and for augurships would not be co-opted by the surviving members, said the lex Domitia de sacerdotiis; they would be elected by a special tribal assembly, and anyone would be able to stand.

  “Ducky,” said Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus to Scaurus. “Just ducky!”

  But Scaurus only laughed and laughed. “Oh, Lucius Caecilius, admit he’s twisted our pontifical tails beautifully!” he said, wiping his eyes. “I like him the better for it, I must say.”

  “The next one of us to pop off, he’s going to be running for election,” said Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus gloomily.

  “And why not? He’s earned it,” said Scaurus.

  “But what if it’s me? He’d be Pontifex Maximus as well!”

  “What a wonderful comeuppance for all of us that would be!” said Scaurus, impenitent.

  “I hear he’s after Marcus Junius Silanus now,” said Metellus Numidicus.

  “That’s right, for illegally starting a war with the Germans in Gaul-across-the-Alps,” said Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus.

  “Well, he can have the Plebeian Assembly try Silanus for that, where a treason charge means going to the Centuries,” said Scaurus, and whistled. “He’s good, you know! I begin to regret that we didn’t co-opt him to take his father’s place.”

  “Oh, rubbish, you do not!” said Metellus Numidicus. “You are enjoying every moment of this ghastly fiasco.”

  “And why shouldn’t I?” asked Scaurus, feigning surprise. “This is Rome, Conscript Fathers! Rome as Rome ought to be! All of us noblemen engaged in healthy competition!”

  “Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish!” cried Metellus Numidicus, still seething because Gaius Marius would be consul very soon. “Rome as we know it is dying! Men elected consul a second time within three years and who weren’t even present in Rome to show themselves in the toga Candida— the Head Count admitted into the legions—priests and augurs elected—the Senate’s decisions about who will govern what overturned by the People—the State paying out fortunes to field Rome’s armies—New Men and recent arrivals running things—tchah!”

  THE

  SEVENTH YEAR

  104 - 102 B.C.

  IN THE CONSULSHIP OF

  GAIUS MARIUS (II)

  AND

  GAIUS FLAVIUS FIMBRIA

  THE

  EIGHTH YEAR

  IN THE CONSULSHIP OF

  GAIUS MARIUS (III)

  AND

  LUCIUS AURELIUS ORESTES

  THE

  NINTH YEAR

  102 B.C.

  IN THE CONSULSHIP OF

  GAIUS MARIUS (IV)

  ANDr />
  QUINTUS LUTATIUS CATULUS CAESAR

  1

  It had been left to Sulla to organize Marius’s triumphal parade; he followed orders scrupulously despite his inner misgivings, these being due to the result of Marius’s instructions.

  “I want the triumph over and done with quick-smart,” Marius had said to Sulla in Puteoli when they had first landed from Africa. “Up on the Capitol by the sixth hour of day at the very latest, then straight into the consular inaugurations and the meeting of the Senate. Rush through the lot, because I’ve decided it’s the feast must be memorable. After all, it’s my feast twice over, I’m a triumphing general as well as the new senior consul. So I want a first-class spread, Lucius Cornelius! No hard-boiled eggs and run-of-the-mill cheeses, d’you hear? Food of the best and most expensive sort, dancers and singers and musicians of the best and most expensive sort, the plate gold and the couches purple.”

  Sulla had listened to all this with a sinking heart. He will never be anything but a peasant with social aspirations, Sulla thought; the hurried parade and hasty consular ceremonies followed by a feast of the kind he’s ordered is poor form. Especially that vulgarly splashy feast!

  However, he followed instructions to the letter. Carts carrying clay tanks waxed inside to make them waterproof trundled trays of Baiae oysters and Campanian crayfish and Crater Bay shrimps into Rome, while other carts similarly fitted out trundled freshwater eels and pikes and bass from the upper reaches of the Tiber; a team of expert licker-fishermen were stationed around Rome’s sewer outlets; fattened on a diet of honey cakes soaked in wine, capons and ducks, piglets and kids, pheasants and baby deer were sent to the caterers for roasting and stuffing, forcing and larding; a big consignment of giant snails had come from Africa with Marius and Sulla, compliments of Publius Vagiennius, who wanted a report on Roman gourmet reactions.