The First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

  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 begi
nning 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.