Masters of Rome Boxset: First Man in Rome, the Grass Crown, Fortune's Favourites, Caesar's Women, Caesar

by Colleen McCullough

  “I’m here, Lucius. I won’t go away for a moment.”

  But as soon as possible Sulla did draw Apollodorus Siculus out of earshot to ask him what the matter was.

  “An inflammation of the lungs, Lucius Cornelius, difficult to deal with at any time, but more difficult in your son’s case.”

  “Why more difficult?”

  “The heart is involved, I fear. We do not quite know what is the significance of the heart, though I believe that it assists the liver. Young Lucius Cornelius’s lungs are swollen, and have transmitted some of their fluids to the envelope wrapping up the heart. It is being squashed.” Apollodorus Siculus looked frightened; the price he paid for his fame was paid on occasions like this, when he had to tell some august Roman that the patient was beyond the skills of any physician. “The prognosis is grave, Lucius Cornelius. I fear there is nothing I or any other doctor can do.”

  Sulla took it well outwardly, and had besides a reasonable streak which told him the physician was completely sincere—that, if he could, he would cure. A good physician, though most were quacks—look at the way he had investigated the death of Piggle-wiggle. But every body was subject to storms of such magnitude the doctors were rendered helpless, despite their lancets, their clysters, their poultices, their potions, their magical herbs. It was luck. And Sulla saw now that his beloved son did not have luck. The goddess Fortune did not care for him.

  Back he went to the bed, pushed the heaped pillows aside and took their place, holding his son within his arms.

  “Oh, tata, that does feel better! Don’t leave me!”

  “I won’t budge, my son. I love you more than the world.”

  For many hours he sat holding his lad up, his cheek on the dulled wet hair, listening to the labored breathing, the staccato gasps which were evidence of that remorseless pain. The boy could not be persuaded to cough anymore, the agony of it was too much to bear, nor could he be persuaded to drink, his lips encrusted with fever sores, his tongue furred and dark. Occasionally he spoke, always to his father, in a voice growing gradually weaker, more mumbling, the words he said ever less lucid, less sensible, until he wandered without logic or reason in a world too strange to comprehend.

  Thirty hours later he died in his father’s numbed arms. Not once had Sulla moved, except at the boy’s request; he had not eaten or drunk, had not relieved bladder or bowels, yet knew no discomfort whatsoever, so important was it that he be there for his son. It might have been a comfort for the father had Young Sulla acknowledged him at the moment of death, but Young Sulla had moved far from the room where he lay, the arms in which he lay, and died unknowing.

  Everyone feared Lucius Cornelius Sulla. So it was in breathless fear that four physicians loosened Sulla’s arms from about his breathless son, helped Sulla to his feet and held him on them, laid the boy out on his bed. But Sulla said or did nothing to inspire this fear; he behaved like the sanest, most admirable man. When he regained the use of his spasmed muscles, he helped them wash the boy and clothe him in the purple-bordered toga of childhood; in December of this year, on the feast of Juventas, he would have become a man. To allow weeping slaves to change the bed, he picked up his son’s limp grey form and held it in his arms, then laid him down on the fresh clean sheets, tucked his arms along his sides, put the coins on his eyelids to keep them closed, and slipped the coin into his mouth to pay Charon the price of that last lonely voyage.

  Nor had Aelia moved from the doorway during all those terrible hours; now Sulla took her by the shoulders and guided her to a chair beside the bed, sat her down so she could look at the boy she had reared from his nursery days, and thought of as her own. Cornelia Sulla was there, face frightful from punishment; and Julia, and Gaius Marius, and Aurelia.

  Sulla greeted them like a sane man, accepted their tearful condolences, even smiled a little, and answered their hesitant questions in a firm clear voice.

  “I must bathe and change,” he said then. “It’s dawn of the day I stand my trial in the treason court. Though my son’s death would serve as a legitimate excuse, I will not give Censorinus the satisfaction. Gaius Marius, will you accompany me as soon as I’m ready to go?”

  “Gladly, Lucius Cornelius,” said Marius gruffly, wiping the tears from his eyes. He had never admired Sulla more.

  But first Sulla went to his house’s modest latrine, and found no one, slave or free, inside it. His bowels loosened at last, he sat alone in that place, with its four shaped seats in the marble bench, listening to the deep sound of running water below, his hands fiddling with the disordered folds of his toga, which he had not thought to remove before settling to that last vigil with his son. His fingers encountered an object, wondering; he drew it forth to look at it in the growing light, only recognizing it from some huge distance, as if it belonged to another life. The emerald quizzing-glass of Censorinus! When he was done and had tidied himself, he turned to face the marble bench, and dropped the priceless thing down into the void. The water ran too loudly to hear its splash.

  As he appeared in the atrium to join Gaius Marius, walk down to the Forum Romanum, some strange agency had given him back every atom of the beauty of his youth, so that he shone, and everyone who saw him gasped.

  He and Gaius Marius trod in silence all the way to the Pool of Curtius, where several hundred knights had gathered to offer themselves for jury duty, and the court officials were readying the jars to draw the lots; eighty-one would be chosen, but fifteen would be removed at the request of the prosecution, and fifteen at the request of the defense, leaving fifty-one—twenty-six knights, and twenty-five senators. That extra knight was the price the Senate had paid to put the courts under senatorial presidency.

  Time wore on. The jurors were chosen. And when Censorinus had not appeared, the defense, led by Crassus Orator and Scaevola, was permitted to remove its fifteen jurors. Still Censorinus did not come. At noon, the entire court restless, and now in possession of the knowledge that the defendant had come straight from his only son’s deathbed, the President sent a messenger to Censorinus’s house to find out where he was. Long moments later, the clerk returned with the news that Censorinus had packed up his portable belongings the day before and left for an unknown destination abroad.

  “This court is dismissed,” said the President. “Lucius Cornelius, you have our profound apologies as well as our condolences.”

  “I’ll walk with you, Lucius Cornelius,” said Marius. “An odd situation, this! What happened to him?”

  “Thank you, Gaius Marius, I would prefer to be alone,” said Sulla calmly. “As for Censorinus, I imagine he’s gone to seek asylum with King Mithridates.” There came a hideous grin. “I had a little word with him, you see.”

  From the Forum Romanum, Sulla walked swiftly in the direction of the Esquiline Gate. Almost completely covering the Campus Esquilinus outside the Servian Walls lay Rome’s necropolis, a veritable city of tombs—some humble, some splendid, most in between—housing the ashes of Rome’s inhabitants, citizens and non-citizens, slaves and free, native and foreign.

  On the eastern side of a great crossroads some hundreds of paces from the Servian Walls stood the temple of Venus Libitina, she who ruled the extinction of the life force. Surrounded by a large grove of cypresses, it was a beautiful building, painted a rich green with purple columns, their Ionic capitals picked out in gold and red, and a yellow roof to its portico. The many steps were paved with a deep pink terrazzo, and the pediment portrayed the gods and goddesses of the Underworld in vivid colors; atop the peak of the temple roof was a wonderful gilded statue of Venus Libitina herself, riding in a car drawn by mice, harbingers of death.

  Here amid the cypress grove the Guild of Undertakers set up their stalls and touted for business, not a doleful or sad or hushed activity. Prospective customers were grabbed at, harangued, coaxed, badgered, cajoled, prodded and pushed and pulled, for undertaking was a business like any other, and this was the marketplace of the servants of death. Sulla passed like
a ghost among the booths, his uncanny knack of repelling people keeping even the most importunate at bay until he came to the firm which buried the Cornelii, and made his arrangements.

  The actors would be sent to his house for instructions on the following day, and all would be splendidly readied for the funeral, to be held on the third day; a Cornelius, Young Sulla would be inhumed rather than cremated, as was the family tradition. Sulla paid in full with a promissory note for twenty silver talents at his bank, the price of a funeral Rome would talk about for days, and did not count the cost, he who normally squeezed every sestertius so carefully, so ungenerously.

  At home again, he sent Aelia and Cornelia Sulla out of the room where Young Sulla lay and sat in Aelia’s chair, staring at his devastated son. He didn’t know what he felt, how he felt. The grief, the loss, the finality of it all sat within him like a huge lead boulder; to carry the burden was as much as he could manage, he had nothing left over with which to explore his feelings. There before him lay the ruin of his house, there lay all that was left of his dearest friend, the companion of his old age, the heir to his name, his fortune, his reputation, his public career. Vanished in the space of thirty hours, a decision of no god, not even a whim of fate. The cold had worsened, the lungs had become inflamed, and the heart squeezed dry of animation. The story of a thousand illnesses. No one’s fault, no one’s design. An accident. For the boy, who could know nothing, feel nothing, it was simply the end of life, suffered to conclusion. For those left behind, knowing all, feeling all, it was the prelude to an emptiness in the midst of life that would not cease until life was over. His son was dead. His friend was gone forever.

  When Aelia came back two hours later he went to his study, and sat to write a note to Metrobius.

  My son is dead. The last time you came to my house, my wife died. Given your trade, you ought to be precursor of joy, the deus ex machina of the play. Instead, you are the veiled one, precursor of sorrow.

  Never come to my house again. I see now that my patroness, Fortuna, does not permit rivals. For I have loved you with that same space inside me she regards as exclusively her own. I have set you up like an idol. To me, you have become the personification of perfect love. But she demands to be that. And she is female, both beginning and end of every man.

  If a day should come when Fortune finishes with me, I shall call to you. Until that day, nothing. My son was a good son, a fitting and proper son. A Roman. Now he is dead, and I am alone. I do not want you.

  He sealed it carefully, summoned his steward, and instructed him as to whereabouts it was to be sent. Then stared at the wall whereon—how strange life was!—Achilles sat on the edge of a bier, holding Patroclus within his arms. Obviously influenced by the tragic masks of the great plays, the artist had put a look of gape-mouthed agony upon the face of Achilles that seemed to Sulla utterly wrong, a presumptuous incursion into a world of private pain never to be shown to the motley. He clapped his hands, and when his steward returned, said, “Tomorrow, find someone to remove that painting there.”

  “Lucius Cornelius, the undertakers have been. The lectus funebris is set up in the atrium ready to receive your son for his lying in state,” said the steward, weeping.

  Inspecting the bier, which was beautifully carved and gilded, with black cloth and black pillows upon it, Sulla nodded his approval. He carried his son to it himself, feeling the beginning of the rigor of death; the pillows were piled up and the boy placed in a sitting position, his arms held up by more pillows. Here in the atrium he would remain until eight black-clad bearers picked up the lectus funebris and carried it in the funeral procession. Its head was aligned with the door to the peristyle-garden, its foot with the outside door, on the street side of which cypress branches were fixed.

  On the third day, the funeral of Young Sulla took place. As a mark of courtesy toward one who had been praetor urbanus and would in all likelihood be consul, public business in the Forum Romanum had been suspended; those who would have been engaged in it waited instead for the cortege to appear, all clad in the toga pulla, the black toga of mourning. Because of the chariots, the procession originating at Sulla’s house wended its way down the Clivus Victoriae to the Velabrum, turned into the Vicus Tuscus, and entered the Forum Romanum between the temple of Castor and Pollux and the Basilica Sempronia. First came two undertakers in black togas, then came black-clad musicians playing straight military trumpets, curved horns, and flutes made from the shinbones of Roman enemies slain in battle. The dirges were solemn, owning little melody or grace. With the musicians came the black-clad women who earned their livings as proper professional mourners, keening their own dirges and beating their breasts, every last one of them weeping genuine tears. A group of dancers followed, twisting and turning in ritual movements older than Rome herself, waving cypress branches. And after them came the actors wearing the five wax masks of Sulla’s ancestors, each riding in a black chariot drawn by two black horses; then came the bier, held on high by eight black-garbed freedmen who had once belonged to Sulla’s stepmother, Clitumna, and had passed into Sulla’s clientele when she freed them in her will. Sulla walked in the rear of the lectus funebris, his black toga pulled up to veil his head; with him walked his nephew, Lucius Nonius, Gaius Marius, Sextus Julius Caesar, Quintus Lutatius Caesar and his two brothers, Lucius Julius Caesar and Gaius Julius Caesar Strabo, all with their heads veiled; and behind the men walked the women, dressed in black but bareheaded, hair in disarray.

  At the rostra the musicians, professional mourners, dancers, and undertakers assembled in the Forum below the back wall, while the actors wearing the wax masks were guided by attendants up the steps to the top of the rostra and seated upon ivory curule chairs. They wore the purple-bordered toga of Sulla’s ancestors’ high rank, that Sulla who had been flamen Dialis robed in his priestly garments. The bier was put upon the rostra, and the mourning relatives—all save Lucius Nonius and Aelia attached in some way to the Julian house—ascended it to stand and hear the eulogy. Sulla delivered it himself, very briefly.

  “Today I bury my only son,” he said to the silent crowd which had gathered. “He was a member of the gens Cornelia, of a branch two hundred and more years old, containing consuls and priests, most venerable men. In December he too would have become a Cornelian man. But it was not to be. At the time of his death, he was almost fifteen years old.”

  He turned to look at the family mourners, Young Marius in a black toga with his head veiled, for he had put on the toga of manhood; his new status placed him well away from Cornelia Sulla, who gazed at him sorrowfully from out of a torn and swollen face. Aurelia was there, and Julia, but while Julia wept and physically supported Aelia, Aurelia stood erect and tearless, looking more grim than sad.

  “My son was a beautiful fellow, well loved and well cared for. His mother died when he was very young, but his stepmother has been all that his real mother might have been. Had he lived, he would have proven a true scion of a noble patrician house, for he was educated, intelligent, interested, courageous. When I traveled to the East to interview the Kings of Pontus and Armenia, he went with me, and survived all the dangers foreign places entail. He saw my meeting with the Parthian envoys, and would have been the logical man of his generation for Rome to send to deal with them. He was my best companion, my loyalest follower. That illness should cut him down inside Rome was his fate. Rome will be the poorer, as I and all my family are the poorer. I bury him now with great love and greater sorrow, and offer you gladiators for his funeral games.”

  The ceremonies on the rostra were now concluded; everyone got up, the cortege reassembled to wend its way toward the Capena Gate, for Sulla had procured his son a tomb upon the Via Appia, where most of the Cornelii were buried. At the door of the tomb Young Sulla was lifted by his father from his funeral couch, and placed inside a marble sarcophagus mounted upon skids. The lid was levered into position, it was pushed into the tomb by the freedmen who had carried the boy’s bier, and the skids removed.
Sulla closed the great bronze door. And closed a part of himself inside as well. His son was gone. Nothing could ever be the same again.

  3

  Several days after Young Sulla was laid to rest, the lex Livia agraria was passed. It went to the Plebeian Assembly with the stamp of the Senate’s approval upon it, despite the impassioned opposition of Caepio and Varius in the House, and met unexpectedly bitter resistance in the Comitia. What Drusus had not counted on was opposition from the Italians, but opposition from the Italians he had aplenty. Though the lands in question were not theirs, Italian lands mostly bordered Roman ager publicus, and surveying had fallen far behind need for surveying. Many a little white boundary stone had been surreptitiously moved, many an Italian-owned estate incorporated land it ought not. A huge resurveying would now take place as part of the dividing of the public lands into ten-iugera plots, and discrepancies would automatically be rectified. Those public lands in Etruria seemed to be most affected, probably because Gaius Marius was one of the biggest latifundia proprietors in the area, and Gaius Marius didn’t worry much if his Italian Etrurian neighbors filched a little of the edges of Roman State land. Umbria too was restive, though Campania lay low and said little.

  Drusus, however, was very pleased, and could write to Silo in Marruvium that all was looking good; Scaurus, Marius, and even Catulus Caesar had been impressed by Drusus’s reasoning about the ager publicus, and between them managed to persuade the junior consul, Philippus, to be quiet. No one could shut Caepio up, but his words fell on largely deaf ears, partly due to his minimal skill as an orator, and partly due to a highly effective whispering campaign about people who inherited masses of gold—no one in Rome would ever forgive the Servilii Caepiones for that.

  So please, Quintus Poppaedius, see what you can do to persuade the Etrurians and the Umbrians to cease complaining. The last thing I need is a fuss from those who originally owned the lands I am trying to give away.