And so the tally was almost complete. With the single exception of Marcus Lamponius of Lucania, every powerful enemy who had opposed Sulla's return to Italy was dead. Had he wished it, Sulla could indeed have made himself undisputed King of Rome. But he had found a solution more to the liking of one who firmly believed in all the traditions of a Republican mos maiorum, and thus rode through the middle of the Circus Maximus absolutely free of kingly intent. He was old and ill, and for fifty eight years he had done battle against a mindless conspiracy of circumstances and events which had succeeded time and time again in stripping from him the pleasures of justice and reward, the rightful place in Rome's scheme of things to which birth and ability entitled him. No choice had he been offered, no opportunity to pursue his ascent of the cursus honorum legally, honorably. At every turn someone or something had blocked him, made the straight and legal way impossible. So here he was, riding in the wrong direction down the length of the empty Circus Maximus, a fifty eight year old wreck, his bowels knotted with the twin fires of triumph and loss. Master of Rome. The First Man in Rome. Vindication at last. And yet the disappointments of his age and his ugliness and his approaching death curdled his joy with the sourest sadness, destroyed pleasure, exacerbated pain. How late, how bitter, how warped was this victory. ... He didn't think of the Rome he now held at his mercy with love or idealism; the price had been too high. Nor did he look forward to the work he knew he had to do. What he most desired was peace, leisure, the fulfillment of a thousand sexual fantasies, head spinning drunken binges, total freedom from care and from responsibility. So why couldn't he have those things? Because of Rome, because of duty, because he couldn't bear the thought of laying down his job with so much work undone. The only reason he rode in the wrong direction down the length of the empty Circus Maximus lay in the knowledge that there was a mountain of work to be done. And he had to do it. There was literally no one else who could. He chose to assemble Senate and People together in the lower Forum Romanum, and speak to both from the rostra. Not with complete truth was it Scaurus who had called him politically nonchalant? He couldn't remember. But there was too much of the politician in him to be completely truthful, so he blandly ignored the fact that it had been he who pinned up the first head on the rostra Sulpicius, to frighten Cinna. "This hideous practice which has come into being so very recently that I was urban praetor in a Rome who did not know of it" he turned to gesture at the row of speared heads "will not cease until the proper traditions of the mos maiorum have been totally restored and the old, beloved Republic rises again out of the ashes to which it has been reduced. I have heard it said that I intend to make myself King of Rome! No, Quirites, I do not! Condemn myself to however many years I have left of intrigues and plots, rebellions and reprisals? No, I will not! I have worked long and hard in the service of Rome, and I have earned the reward of spending my last days free of care and free of responsibilities free of Rome! So one thing I can promise you, Senate and People both I will not set myself up as King of Rome, or enjoy one single moment of the power I must retain until my work is over." Perhaps no one had really expected this, even men as close to Sulla as Vatia and Metellus Pius, but as Sulla went on, some men began to understand that Sulla had shared his secrets with one other the Princeps Senatus, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, who stood on the rostra with him, and did not look surprised at one word Sulla was saying. "The consuls are dead," Sulla went on, hand indicating the heads of Carbo and Young Marius, "and the fasces must go back to the Fathers, be laid upon their couch in the temple of Venus Libitina until new consuls are elected. Rome must have an interrex, and the law is specific. Our Leader of the House, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, is the senior patrician of the Senate, of his decury, of his family." Sulla turned to Flaccus Princeps Senatus. "You are the first interrex. Please assume that office and acquit yourself of all its duties for the five days of your interregnum." "So far, so good," whispered Hortensius to Catulus. "He has done exactly what he ought to do, appoint an interrex." Tace!'' growled Catulus, who was finding it difficult to understand every word Sulla was saying. "Before our Leader of the House takes over the conduct of this meeting," Sulla said slowly and carefully, "there are one or two things I wish to say. Rome is safe under my care, no one will come to any harm. Just law will be returned. The Republic will go back to its days of glory. But those are all things which must come from the decisions of our interrex, so I shall not dwell upon them any further. What I do want to say is that I have been well served by fine men, and it is time to thank them. I will start with those who are not here today. Gnaeus Pompeius, who has secured the grain supply from Sicily, and has thereby guaranteed that Rome will not be hungry this winter. . . Lucius Marcius Philippus, who last year secured the grain supply from Sardinia, and this year had to contend with the man who was sent against him, Quintus Antonius Balbus. He did contend with Antonius, who is dead. Sardinia is safe.... In Asia I left three splendid men behind to care for Rome's richest and most precious province Lucius Licinius Murena, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, and Gaius Scribonius Curio.... And here standing with me are the men who have been my loyalest followers through times of hardship and despair Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius and his legate, Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus Publius Servilius Vatia the elder Gnaeus Cornelius Dolabella Marcus Licinius Crassus ..." "Ye gods, the list will be endless!" grumbled Hortensius, who loathed listening to any man save himself speak, especially one whose rhetoric was as unskilled as Sulla's. "He's finished, he's finished!" said Catulus impatiently. "Come on, Quintus, he's calling the Senate to the Curia, he'll tell these Forum fools no more! Come on, quickly!" But it was Lucius Valerius Flaccus Princeps Senatus who took the curule chair, surrounded only by the skeletal body of magistrates who had remained in Rome and survived. Sulla sat off to the right of the curule podium, probably about where he ought to have ordinarily placed himself in the front row of consulars, ex censors, ex praetors. He had not, however, changed out of his armor, and that fact told the senators that he was by no means relinquishing his control of the proceedings. "On the Kalends of November," said Flaccus in his wheezing voice, "we almost lost Rome. Had it not been for the valor and promptness of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, his legates, and his army, Rome would now be in the power of Samnium, and we would be passing under the yoke just as we did after the Caudine Forks. Well, I need go no further on that subject! Samnium lost, Lucius Cornelius won, and Rome is safe." "Oh, get on with it!" breathed Hortensius. "Ye gods, he's growing more senile every day!" Flaccus got on with it, fidgeting a little because he was not comfortable. "However, even with the war over, Rome has many other troubles to plague her. The Treasury is empty. So are the temple coffers. The streets are thin of business, the Senate thin of numbers. The consuls are dead, and only one praetor is left of the six who commenced at the beginning of the year." He paused, drew a deep breath, and launched heroically into what Sulla had ordered him to say. "In fact, Conscript Fathers, Rome has passed beyond the point where normal governance is possible. Rome must be guided by the most able hand. The only hand capable of reaching out and drawing our beloved Lady Roma to her feet. My term as interrex is five days long. I cannot hold elections. I will be succeeded by a second interrex who will also serve for five days. He will be expected to hold elections. It may not lie in his power to do so, in which case a third interrex will have to try. And so on, and so forth. But this sketchy governance will not do, Conscript Fathers. The time is one of the acutest emergency, and I see only one man present here capable of doing what has to be done. But he cannot do what has to be done as consul. Therefore I propose a different solution one which I will ask of the People in their Centuries, the most senior voting body of all. I will ask the People in their Centuries to draft and pass a lex rogata appointing and authorizing Lucius Cornelius Sulla the Dictator of Rome." The House stirred; men looked at each other, amazed. "The office of Dictator is an old one," Flaccus went on, "and normally confined to the conduct of a war. In the past, it has been the Dictator's job to pursue a w
ar when the consuls could not. And it is over one hundred years since the last Dictator was put into power. But Rome's situation today is one she has never experienced before. The war is over. The emergency is not. I put it to you, Conscript Fathers, that no elected consuls can put Lady Roma back on her feet. The remedies called for will not be palatable, will incur huge resentments. At the end of his year in office, a consul can be compelled to answer to the People or the Plebs for his actions. He can be charged with treason. If all have turned against him he may be sent into exile and his property confiscated. Knowing himself vulnerable to such charges in advance, no man can produce the strength and resolution Rome needs at this moment. A Dictator, however, does not fear retribution from People or Plebs. The nature of the office indemnifies him against all future reprisals. His acts as the Dictator are sanctioned for all time. He is not prosecutable at law on any charge. Bolstered by the knowledge that he is immune, that he cannot be vetoed by a tribune of the plebs or condemned in any assembly, a Dictator can utilize every ounce of his strength and purpose to put matters right. To set our beloved Lady Roma on her feet." "It sounds wonderful, Princeps Senatus," said Hortensius loudly, "but the hundred and twenty years which have elapsed since the last Dictator took office have spoiled your memory! A Dictator is proposed by the Senate, but must be appointed by the consuls. We have no consuls. The fasces have been sent to the temple of Venus Libitina. A Dictator cannot be appointed." Flaccus sighed. "You were not listening to me properly, Quintus Hortensius, were you? I told you how it could be done. By means of a lex rogata passed by the Centuries. When there are no consuls to act as executives, the People in their Centuries are the executive. The only executive, as a matter of fact the interrex must apply to them to execute his only function which is to organize and hold curule elections. The People in their tribes are not an executive. Only the Centuries." "All right, I concede the point," said Hortensius curtly. "Go on, Princeps Senatus." "It is my intention to convoke the Centuriate Assembly at dawn tomorrow. I will then ask it to formulate a law appointing Lucius Cornelius Sulla the Dictator. The law need not be very complicated in fact, the simpler it is, the better. Once the Dictator is legally appointed by the Centuries, all other laws can come from him. What I will ask of the Centuries is that they formally appoint and authorize Lucius Cornelius Sulla the Dictator for however long it may take him to fulfill his commission; that they sanction all his previous deeds as consul and proconsul; that they remove from him all official odium in form of outlawry or exile; that they guarantee him indemnity from all his acts as Dictator at any time in the future; that they protect his acts as Dictator from tribunician veto and any Assembly's rejection or negation, from the Senate and People in any form or through any magistrates, and from appeal to any Assembly or body or magistrates." "That's better than being King of Rome!" cried Lepidus. "No, it is simply different," said Flaccus stubbornly; he had taken some time to get into the spirit of what Sulla wanted from him, but he was now well and truly launched. "A Dictator is not answerable for his actions, but he does not rule alone. He has the services of the Senate and all the Comitia as advisory bodies, he has his Master of the Horse, and he has however many magistrates he chooses to see elected beneath him. It is the custom for consuls to serve under the Dictator, for instance." Lepidus spoke up loudly. "The Dictator serves for six months only," he said. "Unless my hearing has suddenly grown defective, what you propose to ask of the Centuries is that they appoint a Dictator with no time limit to his office. Not constitutional, Princeps Senatus! I am not against seeing Lucius Cornelius Sulla appointed the Dictator, but I am against his serving one moment longer than the proper term of six months." "Six months won't even see my work begun," said Sulla without rising from his stool. Believe me, Lepidus, I do not want the wretched job for one single day, let alone for the rest of my life! When I consider my work is finished, I will step down. But six months? Impossible." "How so?" asked Lepidus. "For one thing," Sulla answered, "Rome's finances are in chaos. To right them will take a year, perhaps two years. There are twenty seven legions to discharge, find land for, pay out. The men who supported the lawless regimes of Marius, Cinna and Carbo have to be sought out and shown that they cannot escape just punishment. The laws of Rome are antiquated, particularly with regard to her courts and her governors of provinces. Her civil servants are disorganized and prey to both lethargy and cupidity. So much treasure, money and bullion were robbed from our temples that the Treasury still contains two hundred and eighty talents of gold and one hundred and twenty talents of silver, even after this year's profligate waste. The temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus is a cinder." He sighed loudly. "Must I go on, Lepidus?" All right, I concede that your task will take longer than six months. But what's to stop your being reappointed every six months for however long the job takes?" asked Lepidus. Sulla's sneer was superlatively nasty without his teeth, despite the fact that those long canines were missing. "Oh, yes, Lepidus!" he cried. "I can see it all now! Half of every six month period would have to be spent in conciliating the Centuries! Pleading, explaining, excusing, drawing pretty pictures, pissing in every knight businessman's purse, turning myself into the world's oldest and saddest trollop!" He rose to his feet, fists clenched, and shook both of them at Marcus Aemilius Lepidus with more venom in his face than most men there had seen since he had quit Rome to go to war with King Mithridates. "Well, comfortable stay at home Lepidus, married to the daughter of a traitor who did try to set himself up as King of Rome, I will do it my way or not at all! Do you hear me, you miserable pack of self righteous stay at home fools and cravens? You want Rome back on her feet, but you want the undeserved right to make the life of the man who is undertaking to do that as miserable and anxious and servile as you possibly can! Well, Conscript Fathers, you can make up your minds to it right here and now Lucius Cornelius Sulla is back in Rome, and if he has a mind to it, he can shake her rafters until she falls down in ruins! Out there in the Latin countryside I have an army that I could have brought into this city and set on your despicable hides like wolves on lambs! I did not do that. I have acted in your best interests since first I entered the Senate. And I am still acting in your best interests. Peacefully. Nicely. But you are trying my patience, I give all of you fair warning. I will be Dictator for as long as I need to be Dictator. Is that understood? Is it, Lepidus?" Silence reigned absolutely for many long moments. Even Vatia and Metellus Pius sat white faced and trembling, gazing at the naked clawed monster fit only to screech at the moon oh, how could they have forgotten what lived inside Sulla? Lepidus too gazed white faced and trembling, but the nucleus of his terror was not the monster inside Sulla; he was thinking of his beloved Appuleia, wife of many years, darling of his heart, mother of his sons and daughter of Saturninus, who had indeed tried to make himself King of Rome. Why had Sulla made reference to her in the midst of that appalling outburst? What did he intend to do when he became Dictator?
Sick to death of civil wars, of economic depression and far too many legions marching endlessly up and down Italy, the Centuriate Assembly voted in a law which appointed Lucius Cornelius Sulla the Dictator for an unspecified period of time. Tabled at contio on the sixth day of November, the lex Valeria dictator legibus scribundis et rei publicae constituendae passed into law on the twenty third day of November. It contained no specifics beyond the time span; as it bestowed virtually unlimited powers upon Sulla and also rendered him unanswerable for a single one of his actions, it did not need specificity. Whatever Sulla wanted to enact or do, he could. Many in the city fully expected a flurry of activity from him the moment his appointment as Dictator was tabled, but he did nothing until the appointment was ratified three nundinae later, in accordance with the lex Caecilia Didia. Having taken up residence in the house which had belonged to Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (now a refugee in Africa), Sulla did, it seemed, little except walk constantly through the city. His own house had been wrecked and burned to the ground after Gaius Marius and Cinna had taken over Rome, and he walked
across the Germalus of the Palatine to inspect its site, poke slowly among the heaps of rubble, gaze over the Circus Maximus to the lovely contours of the Aventine. At any time of day from dawn to dusk he might be seen standing alone in the Forum Romanum, staring up at the Capitol, or at the life size statue of Gaius Marius near the rostra, or at some other among the numerous smaller statues of Marius, or at the Senate House, or at the temple of Saturn. He walked along the bank of the Tiber from the great trading emporium of the Aemilii in the Port of Rome all the way to the Trigarium, where the young men swam. He walked from the Forum Romanum to every one of Rome's sixteen gates. He walked up one alley and down another. Never did he display the slightest sign of fear for life or limb, never did he ask a friend to accompany him, let alone take a bodyguard along. Sometimes he wore a toga, but mostly he just wrapped himself voluminously in a more easily managed cloak the winter was early, and promised to be as cold as the last. On one fine, unseasonably hot day he walked clad only in his tunic, and it could be seen then how small he was though he had been a well made man of medium size, people remembered. But he had shrunk, he was bent over, he crabbed along like an octogenarian. The silly wig was always on his head, and now that the outbreaks on his face were under control he had taken once more to painting his frost fair brows and lashes with stibium. And by the time one market interval of the Dictator's wait for ratification was over, those who had witnessed his awful rage in the Senate but had not been direct objects of it (like Lepidus) had begun to feel comfortable enough to speak of this walking old man with some degree of contempt; so short is memory. "He's a travesty!" said Hortensius to Catulus, sniffing. "Someone will kill him," said Catulus, bored. Hortensius giggled. "Or else he'll tumble over in a fit or an apoplexy." He grasped at his brother in law's toga swaddled left arm with his right hand, and shook it. "Do you know, I can't see why I was so afraid! He's here, but he's not here. Rome doesn't have a hard taskmaster after all very peculiar! He's cracked, Quintus. Senescent." An opinion which was becoming prevalent among all classes as every day his uninspiring figure could be seen plodding along with wig askew and stibium garishly applied. Was that powder covering up his mulberry hued scars? Muttering. Shaking his head. Once or twice, shouting at no one. Cracked. Senescent. It had taken a great deal of courage for such a vain man to expose his aged crudities to general gaze; only Sulla knew how much he loathed what disease had done to him, only Sulla knew how much he yearned again to be the magnificent man he was when he left to fight King Mithridates. But, he had told himself, shunning his mirror, the sooner he nerved himself to show Rome what he had become, the sooner he would learn to forget what the mirror would have shown him had he looked. And this did happen. Chiefly because his walks were not aimless, not evidence of senility. Sulla walked to see what Rome had become, what Rome needed, what he had to do. And the more he walked, the angrier he became and the more excited, because it was in his hand to take this dilapidated, threadbare lady and turn her into the beauty she used to be. He waited too for the arrival of some people who mattered to him, though he didn't think of himself as loving them, or even needing them his wife, his twins, his grown up daughter, his grandchildren and Ptolemy Alexander, heir to the throne of Egypt. They had been waiting patiently for many months under the care of Chrysogonus, first in Greece, then in Brundisium, but by the end of December they would be in Rome. For a while Dalmatica would have to live in Ahenobarbus's house, but Sulla's own residence had recently begun rebuilding; Philippus looking brown and extremely fit had arrived from Sardinia, unofficially convoked the Senate, and browbeaten that cowed body into voting nonexistent public funds to give back to Sulla what the State had taken away. Thank you, Philippus! On the twenty third day of November, Sulla's dictatorship was formally ratified, and passed into law. And on that day Rome awoke to find every statue of Gaius Marius gone from the Forums Romanum, Boarium, Holitorium, various crossroads and squares, vacant pieces of land. Gone too were the trophies hung in his temple to Honor and Virtue on the Capitol, fire damaged but still habitable for lifeless suits of enemy armor, flags, standards, all his personal decorations for valor, the cuirasses he had worn in Africa, at Aquae Sextiae, at Vercellae, at Alba Fucentia. Statues of other men had gone too Cinna, Carbo, Old Brutus, Norbanus, Scipio Asiagenus but perhaps because they were far fewer in number, their going was not noticed in the same way as the disappearance of Gaius Marius. He left a huge gap, a whole grove of empty plinths with his name obliterated from each, herms with their genitalia hammered off. And at the same time the whispers increased about other, more serious disappearances; men were vanishing too! Men who had been strong and loud in their support of Marius, or Cinna, or Carbo, or of all three. Knights in the main, successful in business during a time when business success was difficult; knights who had gained lucrative State contracts, or loaned to partisans, or enriched themselves in other ways from affiliations to Marius, to Cinna, to Carbo, or to all three. Admittedly no senator had puffed out of existence, but suddenly the total of men who had was big enough to be noticed. Whether because of this public awareness or as a side effect of it, people now saw these men vanishing; some sturdy looking private individuals, perhaps ten or fifteen in number, would knock upon a knight's street door, be admitted, and then scant moments later would emerge with the knight in their midst, and march him off to no one knew where! Rome stirred uneasily, began to see the peregrinations of her wizened master as something more than just benign excursions; what had been quite amusing in a saddened way now took on a more sinister guise, and the innocent eccentricities of yesterday became the suspicious purposes of today and the terrifying objectives of tomorrow. He never spoke to anyone! He talked to himself! He stood in one place for far too long looking at who knew what! He had shouted once or twice! What was he really doing? And why was he doing it? Exactly in step with this growing apprehension, the odd activities of those innocuous looking bands of private persons who knocked on the street doors of houses belonging to knights became more overt. They were now noticed to stand here or there taking notes, or to follow like shadows behind an affluent Carboan banker or a prosperous Marian broker. The disappearing men disappeared with increasing frequency. And then one group of private persons knocked upon the street door of a pedarius senator who had always voted for Marius, for Cinna, for Carbo. But the senator was not marched away. When he emerged into the street there was a flurry of arms, the sweep of a sword, and his head fell to the ground with a hollow thock!, and rolled away. The body lay emptying itself of blood down the gutter, but the head disappeared. Everyone began to find a reason for drifting past the rostra to count the heads Carbo, Young Marius, Carrinas, Censorinus, Scipio Asiagenus, Old Brutus, Marius Gratidianus, Pontius Telesinus, Brutus Damasippus, Tiberius Gutta of Capua, Soranus, Mutilus.... No, that was all! The head of the backbencher senator was not there. Nor any head of any man who had vanished. And Sulla continued to walk with his idiotic wig not quite straight, and his brows and lashes painted. But whereas before people used to stop and smile to see him albeit smiled with pity now people felt a frightful hole blossom in their bellies at sight of him, and scrambled in any direction save toward him, or bolted at a run away from him. Wherever Sulla now was, no one else was. No one watched him. No one smiled, albeit with pity. No one accosted him. No one molested him. He brought a cold sweat in his wake, like the wraiths which issued from the mundus on the dies religiosi. Never before had one of the great public figures been so shrouded in mystery, so opaque of purpose. His behavior was not normal. He should have been standing on the rostra in the Forum telling everyone in magnificent language all about his plans, or throwing rhetorical sand in the Senate's eyes. Speeches of intent, litanies of complaint, flowery phrases he should have been talking. To someone, if not everyone. Romans were not prone to keep their counsel. They talked things over. Hearsay ruled. But from Sulla, nothing. Just the solitary walks which acknowledged no complicity, implied no interest. And yet all of it had to be emanating from him! This silent and uncommuni
cative man was the master of Rome.
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