“If you would like, Quintus Servilius,” said Fabricius when his guests appeared, “we could go to the theater this afternoon. They’re playing Plautus’s Bacchides.”
“That sounds delightful,” said Quintus Servilius, sitting in a shady, cushioned chair. “I haven’t been to see a play since I left Rome.” He sighed voluptuously. “Flowers everywhere, I noticed, yet hardly a person on the streets. Is that because of this woodpecker’s festival?”
Fabricius frowned. “No. Apparently it has something to do with a peculiar new policy the Italians have adopted. Fifty Asculan children—all Italians—were sent off to Sulmo early this morning, and Asculum is waiting to receive fifty of Sulmo’s children in place of their own.”
“How extraordinary! If one didn’t know better, one might be excused for presuming they’re exchanging hostages,” said Quintus Servilius comfortably.’’ Are the Picentes thinking of going to war against the Marrucini? That’s what it seems like, doesn’t it?”
“I haven’t heard of any rumors of war,” said Fabricius.
“Well, they’ve sent fifty Asculan children off to a town of the Marrucini and they’re expecting fifty Marrucine children in their place, so it certainly suggests uneasy relations between the Picentes and the Marrucini, to say the least.” Quintus Servilius giggled. “Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if they started fighting each other? It would certainly keep their minds off acquiring our citizenship, not so?’’ He sipped his wine and looked up, startled. “My dear Publius Fabricius! Chilled wine?”
“A nice conceit, isn’t it?” asked Fabricius, pleased that he could actually astonish a Roman praetor with a name as old and famous and patrician as Servilius. “I send an expedition to the snows every second day, and have enough snow brought down to chill my wine all through summer and autumn.”
“Delicious,” said Quintus Servilius, leaning back in his chair. “What’s your line?” he asked abruptly.
“I have an exclusive contract with most of the orchardists hereabouts,” said Publius Fabricius. “I buy all their apples and pears and quinces. The best of them I ship straight to Rome for sale as fresh fruit. The rest I make into jam in my little factory, then I send the jam to Rome. I’ve also got a contract for chick-pea.’’
“Oh, very nice!”
“Yes, I must say I’ve done very well,” said Fabricius in tones of distinct self-congratulation. “Mind you, it’s typical of the Italians that once they see a man with the Roman citizenship start living better than they are, they begin to carp about monopolies and unfair trade practices and all the rest of that idler’s rubbish. The truth is, they don’t want to work, and those who do don’t have business heads! If it were left to them, their fruit and produce would rot on the ground. I didn’t come to this cold and desolate hole to steal their businesses, I came here to establish a business! When I first started, they couldn’t do enough for me, they were so grateful. Now, I’m persona non grata with every Italian in Asculum. And my Roman friends here all tell the same story, Quintus Servilius.”
“It’s a story I’ve heard before, from Saturnia to Ariminum,” said the praetor delegated to look into “the Italian question.”
When the sun was about a third of the way down the western sky and the heat was beginning in that cool mountain air to diminish, Publius Fabricius and his distinguished guests walked to the theater, a temporary wooden structure built against the city wall so that the audience was shaded while the sun still lit up the scaena upon which the play would be performed. Perhaps five thousand Picentines were already installed, though not in the two front rows of the semicircular building; those seats were reserved for the Romans.
Fabricius had made some last-minute alterations to the center of the very first row, where he had erected a pleasant dais shaded by a canopy. It contained enough room for the curule chair of Quintus Servilius, a chair for his legate Fonteius, and a third chair for Fabricius himself. That the structure obscured the view of those in the rows immediately behind didn’t worry him at all. His guest was a Roman praetor with a proconsular imperium—far more important than a lot of Italians.
The party entered the auditorium through a tunnel beneath the curving cavea, and emerged on an aisle perhaps twelve rows from the dais, which fronted on to the orchestra, an unoccupied half circle of space between audience and stage. First came the strutting lictors shouldering their axed fasces, then came the praetor and his legate with a beaming Fabricius trotting beside them, and behind came the twenty troopers. Fabricius’s wife—to whom the Roman visitors had not been introduced—sat with her friends to the right of the dais, but in the row behind; the front row was reserved exclusively for Roman citizen men.
As the party appeared, a great murmur ran through the rows upon rows of Picentines, who leaned forward, craning their necks to see; the murmur grew to a growl, a roar, a howl, larded with boos and hisses. Though secretly astonished and dismayed at this hostile reception, Quintus Servilius of the Augur’s family stalked, nose in air, onto the dais, and placed himself regally in his ivory seat, looking for all the world like the patrician Servilius he was not. Fonteius and Fabricius followed, while the lictors and troopers filed into the front-row seats on either side of and adjacent to the dais, tucking spears and fasces between their bare knees.
The play began, one of Plautus’s finest and funniest— and one of his most delightfully musical. The cast was a strolling one, but good, of mixed origins in that some were Roman, some were Latin, and some were Italian; of Greeks there were none, as this company specialized in Latin comedy theater. The festival of Picus in Asculum Picentum was one of their regular stops each year, but this year the mood was different; the undercurrents of anti-Roman feeling running through the Picentine audience were entirely new. So the actors threw themselves into their routines with redoubled vigor, broadened the funny lines with additional nuances of walk and gesture, and determined that before the performance was over, they would have succeeded in jollying the Picentines out of their ill humor.
Unfortunately the ranks were split between the players too; while a pair of Romans acted shamelessly to the men on the dais, the Latins and the Italians concentrated upon the native Asculans. After the prologue came the establishment of the plot, some hilarious exchanges between the major characters, and a pretty duet sung against the warbling of a flute. Then came the first canticum, a glorious tenor aria sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. The singer, an Italian from Samnium as famous for his ability to alter the playwright’s lines as for his voice, stepped to the front of the stage and played directly to the dais of honor.
“All hail to thee, praetor of Rome!
All hail to thee, and get thee home!
What need have we at this Picalia
To blinded be by Rome’s regalia?
Look at him raised to haughty height
Never amazed by any sight!
It is not fair, men of Asc’lum
That he should share our ergast’lum!
Come one come all, let’s toss him out!
Let’s see him fall, the filthy lout!
He sits too tall on his iv’ry seat—
Just got one ball and it’s dead meat!
Give him a kick, the Roman prick,
Make him real sick with ours to lick!”
He got no further with his invented song. One of Quintus Servilius’s bodyguards disengaged his spear from between his knees, and without even bothering to get up, threw it; the Samnite tenor fell dead, the spear protruding hideously through back and front, his face still wearing its look of utter contempt.
A profound silence descended, the Picentine audience not able to believe what had happened, no one sure what to do. And as they sat numbed, the Latin actor Saunio, a favorite of the crowd, bounded to the far side of the stage and began feverishly to talk while four of his fellows dragged the body away and the two Roman actors disappeared in a hurry.
“Dear Picentes, I am not a Roman!” Saunio cried, clinging like an ape to one o
f the pillars and jigging up and down, his mask dangling from the fingers of one hand. “Do not, I implore you, lump me in with those fellows there!” He pointed to the Roman dais. “I am a mere Latin, dear Picentes, I too suffer the fasces marching up and down our beloved Italy, I too deplore the acts of these arrogant Roman predators!”
At which point Quintus Servilius rose from his ivory curule chair, stepped down from the dais, walked across the orchestra space, and mounted the stage.
“If you don’t want a spear through your chest, actor, get yourself off!” said Quintus Servilius to Saunio. “Never in my life have I had to put up with such insults! Think yourselves lucky, you Italian scum, that I don’t order my men to kill the lot of you!”
He turned from Saunio to the audience, the acoustics so good he was able to speak in a normal voice and be heard at the very top of the cavea. “I shall not forget what was said here!” he snapped. “Roman auctoritas has been mortally offended! The citizens of this Italian dungheap will pay dearly, so much I promise you!”
What happened next happened so quickly that no one afterward quite understood its mechanics; the whole five thousand Picentines in the audience descended in one screaming, flailing mass upon the two Roman front rows, leaping to the vacant half circle of the orchestra and turning there to fall upon troopers and lictors and togate Roman citizens in a solid wall of moving bodies and plucking, pulling, pinching hands. Not one spear was raised, not one sword was drawn, not one axe was detached from its surrounding bundle of rods; troopers and lictors, togate men and their ornamented women, all were literally torn apart. The front of the theater became a welter of blood, bits of bodies were thrown like balls from one side of the orchestra to the other. The crowd shrieked and squealed shrilly, wept with joy and hate, and reduced forty Roman officials and two hundred Roman businessmen and their women to chunks of bleeding meat. Fonteius and Fabricius perished among the first.
Nor did Quintus Servilius of the Augur’s family escape. Some of the crowd jumped onto the stage before he could think of moving, and took exquisite pleasure in tearing off his ears, twisting his nose until it came away, gouging out his eyes, ripping his fingers off all cruelly bitten by their rings, and then, as he screamed without pause, they lifted him at feet and hands and head, and pulled him effortlessly into six heaving pieces.
When it was finished the Picentines of Asculum cheered and danced, heaped the various bits of every Roman slain in the theater upon a pile in the forum, and ran through the streets dragging those Romans who had not gone to see the play to their deaths. By nightfall, no Roman citizen or relative of a Roman citizen remained alive within Asculum Picentum. The town shut its massive gates and began to discuss how it would both provision itself and survive. No one regretted the madness of a moment; it was rather as if the action had finally lanced a huge festering abscess of hate within them, and now they could enjoy that hate, vow never again to tolerate Rome.
3
Four days after the events at Asculum Picentum, the news of them reached Rome. The two Roman actors had escaped the stage and hidden, shivering in terror, watching the ghastly slaughter in the theater, then had fled the city just before the gates were closed. It took them four days to get to Rome, walking part of the way, begging seats in mule carts and pillion rides on horses, too terrified to say a word about Asculum Picentum until they reached safety. As they were actors, the tale lost nothing in its retelling; all of Rome recoiled in incredulous horror, the Senate donned mourning for its lost praetor, and the Vestal Virgins made an offering for Fonteius, the father of their newest little acquisition.
If anything about the massacre could be termed fortunate, it was perhaps that the elections in Rome had already taken place, thus sparing the Senate at least the ordeal of having to cope with Philippus unaided. Lucius Julius Caesar and Publius Rutilius Lupus were the new consuls, a good man in Caesar tied by economic necessity to a conceited but rich inadequacy like Lupus. It was another eight-praetor year, with the usual mixture of patrician and plebeian, competent and incompetent, getting in; the new consul Lucius Julius Caesar’s cross-eyed younger brother, Caesar Strabo, was a curule aedile. The quaestors included none other than Quintus Sertorius, whose winning of the Grass Crown in Spain would procure him any and every office. Gaius Marius, the cousin of his mother, had already ensured that Sertorius possessed the senatorial census; when a new pair of censors were elected, he was sure to be admitted to the Senate. Of law courts he may have seen little, but for such a young man, his name was quite famous, and he had that magical appeal to the general populace Gaius Marius also possessed.
Among an unusually impressive collection of tribunes of the plebs was one hideous name—Quintus Varius Severus Hybrida Sucronensis, already vowing that the moment the new college entered office, he would see that those who had supported citizenship for Italy would pay, from the highest to the lowest. When the news of the massacre at Asculum Picentum arrived, it provided Varius with wonderful ammunition; not yet in office, he canvassed tirelessly among the knights and Forum frequenters for support of his program of vengeance in the Plebeian Assembly. For the Senate, exasperated by the harping reproaches of Philippus and Caepio, the old year could not wind down quickly enough.
Then hard on the heels of the news from Asculum Picentum came a deputation of twenty Italian noblemen from the new capital of Italica, though they said nothing about Italica or Italia; they simply demanded an audience with the Senate on the matter of granting the franchise to every man south of—not the Arnus and the Rubico, but—the Padus in Italian Gaul! That new boundary had been shrewdly calculated to antagonize everyone in Rome from Senate to Head Count, for the leaders of the new nation Italia no longer wanted to be enfranchised. They wanted war.
Closeted with the delegation in the Senaculum, a little building adjacent to the temple of Concord, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus attempted to deal with this piece of blatant impudence. A loyal supporter of Drusus, after the death of Drusus he saw no point in continuing to press for a general enfranchisement; he liked being alive.
“You may tell your masters that nothing can be negotiated until full reparation for Asculum Picentum has been made,” said Scaurus disdainfully. “The Senate will not see you.”
“Asculum Picentum is simply steely evidence of how strongly all Italy feels,” said the leader of the delegation, Publius Vettius Scato of the Marsi. “It is not in our power to demand anything of Asculum Picentum, anyway. That decision belongs to the Picentes.”
“That decision,” said Scaurus harshly, “belongs to Rome.”
“We ask again that the Senate see us,” said Scato.
“The Senate will not see you,” said Scaurus, adamant.
Whereupon the twenty men turned to leave, none looking at all downcast, Scaurus noted. Last to go, Scato slipped a rolled document into Scaurus’s hand. “Please take this, Marcus Aemilius, on behalf of the Marsi,” he said.
Scaurus didn’t open the document until he got home, when his scribe, to whom he had entrusted it, gave it back to him. Pulling it apart with some annoyance because he had forgotten it, he began to decipher its contents with growing amazement.
At dawn he summoned a meeting of the Senate, poorly attended because of the short notice; as usual, Philippus and Caepio did not bother to turn up. But Sextus Caesar did, as did the incoming consuls and praetors, all the outgoing tribunes of the plebs and most of the incoming ones—with the conspicuous exception of Varius. The consulars were present; counting heads, Sextus Caesar saw in some relief that he did have a quorum after all.
“I have here,” said Scaurus Princeps Senatus, “a document signed by three men of the Marsi—Quintus Poppaedius Silo, who calls himself consul—Publius Vettius Scato, who calls himself praetor—and Lucius Fraucus, who calls himself councillor. I shall read it out to you.
“To the Senate and People of Rome. We, the elected representatives of the Marsic nation, do hereby on behalf of our people declare that we withdraw from ou
r Allied status with Rome. That we will not pay to Rome any taxes, tithes, duties, or dues which may be demanded of us. That we will not contribute troops to Rome. That we will take back from Rome the town of Alba Fucentia and all its lands. Please regard this as a declaration of war.”
The House hummed; Gaius Marius extended his hand for the document, and Scaurus gave it to him. Slowly it went round the ranks of those present, until everyone had seen for himself that it was both genuine and unequivocal.
“It appears that we have a war on our hands,” said Marius.
“With the Marsi?” asked Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus. “I know when I spoke to Silo outside the Colline Gate he said it would be war—but the Marsi couldn’t defeat us! They don’t have enough people to go to war against Rome! Those two legions he had with him would be about as many as the Marsi could scrape up.”
“It does seem peculiar,” admitted Scaurus.
“Unless,” said Sextus Caesar, “there are other Italian nations involved as well.”
But that no one would believe, including Marius. The meeting dissolved without any conclusion being reached, save that it would be prudent to keep a closer eye on Italy— only not with another pair of itinerant praetors! Servius Sulpicius Galba, the praetor deputed to investigate “the Italian question” to the south of Rome, had written to say he was on his way back. When he arrived, the House thought it would be in better case to decide what ought to be done. War with Italy? Perhaps so. But not yet.
“I know that when Marcus Livius was alive, I believed with fervor that war with Italy was just around the corner,” said Marius to Scaurus as the meeting broke up, “but now that he’s gone, I cannot credit it! And I have been asking myself if it was just that way he had. Now—I don’t honestly know. Are the Marsi in this alone? Surely they must be! And yet—I never thought of Quintus Poppaedius Silo as a fool.”
“I echo everything you have just said, Gaius Marius,” Scaurus agreed. “Oh, why didn’t I read that paper while Scato was still inside Rome? The gods are toying with us, I feel it in my bones.”
Masters of Rome Boxset: First Man in Rome, the Grass Crown, Fortune's Favourites, Caesar's Women, Caesar Page 172