Then winter came early, and was an unusually severe one. To split the size of his more than doubled forces, Sulla sent some cohorts off to invest Capua as well as Sinuessa and Neapolis, thus compelling other parts of Campania than Teanum to help feed his troops. Verres and Cethegus proved capable victuallers, even devised a method of storing fish caught in the Adriatic in bins of packed—down snow; fish lovers who could never get enough of it fresh, Sulla’s soldiers reveled in this unexpected treat, and the army surgeons found themselves coping with case after case of bone-in-the—throat.
All of which was of no importance to Sulla, who had picked at some of the scabs on his healed face, and started the itching again. Everyone who came into contact with him had begged him to let them fall off naturally, but that restless temperament couldn’t wait; when they began to lift and dangle, he picked.
The outbreak was a very bad one, and (perhaps because of the cold? wondered Varro, pressed into service because he had revealed a scientific curiosity) raged without let for three full months. Three months of a sodden, genuinely lunatic Sulla, who moaned and scratched, screamed and drank. At one stage Varro bound his hands to his sides to keep them from his face, and though—like Ulysses tied to the mast while the Sirens sang—he was willing enough to endure this confinement, at the same time he implored to be freed. And of course succeeded eventually in freeing himself. To scratch again.
It was at the turn of the year that Varro despaired, went to warn Metellus Pius and Pompey that he doubted whether Sulla would recover by the spring.
“There’s a letter for him from Tarsus,” said Metellus Pius, who was resigned to keeping Pompey company through the winter; Crassus was among the Marsi, and Appius Claudius and Mamercus were in charge of siege operations elsewhere.
Varro looked alert. “Tarsus?”
“That’s right. From the ethnarch Morsimus.”
“Is there a jar?’’
“No, just a letter. Can he read it?”
“Definitely not.”
“Then you’d better read it, Varro,” said Pompey.
Metellus Pius looked scandalized. “Really, Pompeius!”
“Oh, Piglet, stop being so sanctimonious!” said Pompey wearily. “We know he’s been hoping for some magic salve or other, and we know he’d charged Morsimus with finding it. Now there’s news of some sort, but he can’t read. Don’t you think—for his sake, if for no one else’s—that Varro ought to see what Morsimus has to say?”
So Varro was allowed to see what Morsimus had to say.
Here is the recipe, which is the most I can do for you, dear Lucius Cornelius, my friend and patron. It seems the salve has to be freshly prepared more often than the length of a journey from the Pyramus of Cilicia Pedia all the way to Rome would permit. So you must seek out the ingredients and make it for yourself. Luckily none of the ingredients is exotic, though many of them apparently are hard to extract.
The cure has to come from a sheep, or sheep. First you take a fleece of absolutely raw wool, and set someone to scraping the fibers with an instrument sharp enough to crush them, yet not sharp enough to cut them through. You will find that on the edge of your strigilis a substance builds up—rather oily, but having the consistency of cheese curds. You must scrape until you have a great mound of this—many fleeces, was how my source put it. Then you soak the substance in warm water—warm, not hot!—though it cannot be too cool either. The best test is a fingertip in the water—it should feel hot, but by no means unbearable. The substance will partially melt into a layer which floats on top. That layer is the part you want, in measure a full beaker.
Then you take a fleece with its hide attached, making sure some fat adheres to the back of the hide—the animal must have been freshly slaughtered, as indeed all must have been—and you boil it. The fat you obtain from this you must render twice over, and then you must reserve a full beaker of it.
The fat of a sheep, so said my source, needs some special fat from inside the beast also, for sheep fat is very hard, even in a warm room. My source—the smelliest and most detestable of crones, not to mention the most rapacious of creatures!—said this internal fat must be plucked from amid the harder fat on top of the sheep’s kidneys, and mashed. Then it must be melted in warm water, as with the scrapings from the wool. You must lift off the layer which forms on top of the water, in the amount of two thirds of a beaker. To this, add one third of a beaker of bile freshly drawn from the sheep’s gallbladder immediately after its slaughtering.
After which, you mix all the ingredients together gently, but thoroughly. The ointment is rather hard, but not as hard as the rendered fat on its own. Smear it on at least four times a day. I warn you, dear Lucius Cornelius, that it stinks disgustingly. But my source insists that it be used without the addition of perfumes or spices or resins.
Please let me know if it works! The vile old crone swears it was she who made that original jar you used with such success, though I myself am in some doubt.
Vale from Morsimus.
*
Off went Varro to marshal a small army of slaves, and set the slaves to find a flock of sheep. After which, in a little house close by the more solid building in which Sulla lived, he hovered anxiously between cauldrons and toiling scrapers, insisting upon personally inspecting every carcass and every kidney, insisting that he personally test the temperature of all the water, measuring meticulously and driving the servants to the point of exasperation with his fusses and clucks and tches. For perhaps an hour before his ointment factory commenced work he fretted and fumed over the size of the beaker; and then, at the end of the hour, he saw the truth, and laughed until he cried. Provided his beakers were all the same size, what did size matter?
One hundred sheep later (the bile and the rendered-down fat came from only two sheep, but the little bit of fat on top of the kidneys and the scrapings from the wool were painfully slow in accumulating), Varro found himself with a fairly large porphyry jar of ointment. As for the exhausted slaves, they found themselves with a hundred largely untouched carcasses of delicious mutton, and counted their labors well done for the chance of a full belly of roasted meat.
The hour was late, and Sulla, so his attendant whispered, was asleep on a couch in his dining room.
“Drunk,” nodded Varro.
“Yes, Marcus Terentius.”
“Well, I think that’s probably good.”
In he went on tiptoe, and stood for a moment looking down at the poor tortured creature Sulla had become. The wig had fallen off and lay with its gauze interior gaping; many thousands of hairs had gone into its manufacture, each one painstakingly knotted onto that base of gauze. To think that it took longer to make than my ointment! Varro thought, and sighed, shook his head. Then, very delicately, he applied his salve—caked fingers to the bleeding mess of Sulla’s face.
The eyes snapped open at once, pain and terror shrieking from beneath their wine—blinded glaze; the mouth opened, the lips stretched to show gums and tongue. Yet no sound did he emit.
“It is the ointment, Lucius Cornelius,” Varro whispered. “I have made it to the exact recipe. Can you bear it if I try to smear some on?”
Tears welled, pooled in the sockets of Sulla’s eyes because he lay flat on his back. Before they could overflow from each outer corner, Varro had dabbed them away with a piece of softest cloth. Still they welled. Still Varro dabbed.
“You mustn’t weep, Lucius Cornelius. The salve has to be applied to dry skin. Now lie quietly, and close your eyes.”
So Sulla lay quietly, eyes closed. After a few reflexive jerks because his face was being touched, he made no other protest, and slowly the tension oozed out of him.
Varro finished, took a lamp with five flames and held it up to view his handiwork. A clear, watery fluid was popping up in beads wherever the skin had broken down, but the layer of ointment seemed to have tamed the bleeding.
“You must try not to scratch. Does it itch?” Varro asked.
The eyes r
emained closed. “Yes, it itches. But I’ve known it to itch far worse. Tie my hands to my sides.”
Varro did that. “I’ll come back toward dawn and smear some more on. Who knows, Lucius Cornelius? Perhaps by dawn the itching will have gone away.” Then he tiptoed out.
At dawn the itch was still present, but to Varro’s clinically detached gaze Sulla’s skin looked—what was the word?—calmer. On went more ointment; Sulla asked that his hands remain tied. But by nightfall, three applications later, he announced that he thought he could refrain from scratching if Varro loosed his bonds. And four days after that, he told Varro that the itching was gone.
“The stuff works!” cried Varro to Pompey and the Piglet, afire with the satisfaction of a vindicated physician, for all that he was no physician, nor wanted to be.
“Will he able to command in the spring?’’ asked Pompey.
“Provided that the stuff continues to work, probably well before the spring,” said Varro, and bustled off with his porphyry jar to embed it in the snow. Kept cold, it would last longer, though Varro’s hands stank of what he suspected was the rancid version of it. “Truly he is felix!” said Varro to himself; he meant, of course, that Sulla had luck.
3
When the onset of that cold and early winter brought snow to Rome, many of those who lived there saw the freeze as an ill omen. Neither Norbanus nor Scipio Asiagenus had returned after their respective defeats, nor did cheering news come of their subsequent activities; Norbanus was now under halfhearted siege in Capua, while Scipio drifted around Etruria recruiting.
Toward the end of the year, the Senate thought about convening to debate what its—and Rome’s—future held. Numbers were down to about a third of Sulla’s original fairly plump body of men, between those who had streamed to join Sulla in Greece, and this latest outpouring anxious to align itself with Sulla now he was back in Italy. For despite the protestations of a group of senators who insisted upon calling themselves neutral, everyone in Rome from highest to lowest knew very well that the lines were drawn. All of Italy and Italian Gaul were not large enough to accommodate Sulla and Carbo in peaceful coexistence; they stood for opposite values, systems of government, ideas of where Rome ought to go.
Sulla stood for the mos maiorum, the centuries—old customs and traditions which embodied the landed aristocrats as leaders in peace and war, whereas Carbo stood for the commercial and business leaders—the knights and the tribuni aerarii. As neither group would agree to share an equal dominance, one or the other would have to win dominance by means of another civil war.
That the Senate even toyed with the idea of meeting was due only to the return of Carbo from Italian Gaul, summoned from Ariminum by the tribune of the plebs Marcus Junius Brutus, he who had legislated the status of a fully Roman city for Capua. They met in Brutus’s house on the Palatine, a place with which Gnaeus Papirius Carbo was very familiar; he and Brutus had been friends for many years. It was besides a discreeter location than Carbo’s house, where (so rumor had it) even the boy who cleaned out the chamber pots was taking bribes from several people interested in knowing what Carbo was thinking of doing next.
That Brutus’s house was free from corrupt servants was entirely thanks to Brutus’s wife, Servilia, who ran her establishment more stringently by far than Scipio Asiagenus had his army. She tolerated no kind of misbehavior, seemed to have as many eyes in her head as Argus, and as many ears as a colony of bats. The servant who could outwit or outgeneral her did not exist, and the servant who was not afraid of her lasted scant days.
So it was that Brutus and Carbo could settle to their very private conversation in complete security. Except, of course, for Servilia herself. Nothing happened or was said in her house that she did not know about, and this very private conversation was not conducted out of her hearing, she made sure of that. The two men were inside Brutus’s study with the doors shut, and Servilia crouched outside on the colonnade beneath the one open window. A cold and uncomfortable place for an eavesdropper, but Servilia thought that of little consequence compared to what might be said inside the cozy room.
They began with pleasantries.
“How is my father?” asked Brutus.
“He’s well, sends you his regards.”
“I’m surprised you can put up with him!” burst from Brutus, who stopped, obviously shocked at what he had said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound angry. I’m really not angry.”
“Just somewhat bewildered that I can put up with him?”
“Yes.”
“He’s your father,” said Carbo in tones of comfort, “and he’s an old man. I understand why you might find him a trouble. However, he isn’t to me. It’s as simple as that. After Verres absconded with what was left of my governor’s allowance, I had to find a replacement quaestor anyway. Your dad and I have been friends ever since he returned with Marius from exile, as you well know.” Carbo paused, probably to pat Brutus on the arm, thought the eavesdropper cynically; she knew how Carbo handled her husband. He then went on. “When you married, he bought you this house so he wouldn’t be underfoot. What he didn’t count on was the loneliness of living by himself after you and he had been—well, bachelors together might be the best way to put it—for so long. I imagine he made a nuisance of himself, and may have annoyed your wife. So when I wrote and asked him to be my new proquaestor, he accepted with alacrity. I see no need for guilt in you, Brutus. He’s happy where he is.”
“Thank you,” said Brutus with a sigh.
“Now what’s so urgent I had to come in person?”
“The elections. Since the desertion of everyone’s friend, Philippus, morale in Rome has plummeted. No one will lead, no one has the courage to lead. That’s why I felt you had to come to Rome, at least until after the elections. I can find no one well qualified who wants to be consul! No one qualified wants to hold any position of importance, for that matter,” said Brutus nervously; he was a nervous man.
“What about Sertorius?’’
“He’s a stickler, you know that. I wrote to him in Sinuessa and begged him to stand for the consulship, but he declined. For two reasons, though I had expected only one—that he is still a praetor, and ought to wait the customary two years before being consul. I had hoped to talk him over that hurdle, and might have, had it been his only reason. The second reason I found impossible.”
“What was his second reason?”
“He said Rome was finished, that he refused to be consul in a place full of cowards and opportunists.”
“Elegantly put!”
“He would be governor of Nearer Spain, he said, and take himself right away.”
“Fellator!” snarled Carbo.
Brutus, who did not like strong language, said nothing to this, and apparently had nothing further to say on any subject, as nothing was said for some time.
Exasperated, the listener on the colonnade applied her eye to the ornate lattice of the shutter, and saw Carbo and her husband sitting one on either side of Brutus’s desk. They might, she thought idly, have been brothers—both very dark, both rather homely of features, and neither particularly tall nor particularly well built.
Why, she had asked herself often, had Fortune not favored her with a more impressive-looking husband, one she could be sure would shine politically? Of a military career for Brutus she had abandoned hope early, so politics it must be. But the best Brutus could think of was to legislate to give Capua the status of a Roman city. Not a bad idea—and certainly it had saved his tribunate of the plebs from utter banality!—but he would never be remembered as one of the great tribunes of the plebs, like her Uncle Drusus.
*
Brutus had been Uncle Mamercus’s choice, though in himself Uncle Mamercus was mind and body Sulla’s man, and had been in Greece with Sulla at the time it became necessary to find a husband for the eldest of his six wards, Servilia. They were all still living in Rome under the chaperonage of a poor relation, Gnaea, and her mother, Porcia Liciniana—
a terrifying woman! Any guardian, no matter how geographically removed from his wards he might happen to be, need have no worry about the virtue and moral status of a child living under the thumb of Porcia Liciniana! Even her daughter, Gnaea, just grew plainer and more spinsterish as the years passed.
Thus it had been Porcia Liciniana who had received the suitors for Servilia’s hand in marriage as her eighteenth birthday approached, and Porcia Liciniana who had transmitted relevant information about the various suitors to Uncle Mamercus in the east. Together with penetrating remarks about virtue, morality, prudence, temperance, and all the other qualities she considered desirable in a husband. And though Porcia Liciniana had never once committed the gross solecism of expressing an outright preference for one suitor above any other, those penetrating remarks of hers did sink into Uncle Mamercus’s mind. After all, Servilia had a huge dowry and the felicitude of a splendid old patrician name, and was, Uncle Mamercus had been assured by Porcia Liciniana, not unattractive in her person besides.
So Uncle Mamercus took the easy way out; he chose the man Porcia Liciniana had hinted about most heavily. Marcus Junius Brutus. Since he was a senator in his early thirties, he was deemed old enough to be beyond youthful follies and indiscretions; he would be the head of his branch of the family when Old Brutus died (which could not be too far away, said Porcia Liciniana); and he was a wealthy man of impeccable (if plebeian) ancestry.
Servilia herself did not know him, and even after Porcia Liciniana informed her of her impending marriage, she was not allowed to meet Brutus until their wedding day arrived. That this antique custom was levied upon her was not due to the daunting Porcia Liciniana; it was rather the direct outcome of a childhood punishment. Because she had served as her estranged father’s spy in the household of her Uncle Drusus, her Uncle Drusus had sentenced her to a form of domestic imprisonment: she was never to be allowed to have her own room or any vestige of privacy within his house, and never to be allowed to leave that house unless accompanied by people who would police her smallest step or expression. And all that had been years and years before she reached marriageable age, and every adult in her life at that time—mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandmother, stepfather—was long dead. But still the rule continued to be enforced.
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