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

by Colleen McCullough

  As there was little the flamen Dialis could eat among the bountiful and expensive food offered after the meeting concluded, Caesar found an inconspicuous spot and set himself to listen to whatever conversations drifted past him as men sorted out their preferred couches. Rank dictated the positions of some, like those holding magistracies, priesthoods, augurships, but the bulk of the senators were at liberty to distribute themselves among cronies and settle to partake of viands the bottomless purse of Young Marius had provided.

  It was a thin gathering, perhaps no more than a hundred strong, so many senators had fled to join Sulla, and by no means all of those present to witness the inauguration of the consuls were partial to the consuls or their plans. Quintus Lutatius Catulus was there, but no lover of Carbo’s cause; his father, Catulus Caesar (who died during Marius’s bloodbath) had been an implacable enemy of Marius’s, and the son was cut from the same cloth, though not as gifted or educated. That, reflected the watching Caesar, was because his father’s Julian blood had been diluted in the son by his mother, a Domitia of the Domitii Ahenobarbi—Famous Family stock, but not famous for intellect. Caesar didn’t like him, a prejudice of looks; Catulus was weedy and undersized, and had his mother’s Domitian red hair as well as her freckles. He was married to the sister of the man who reclined next to him on the same couch, Quintus Hortensius, and Quintus Hortensius (another noble stay-in-Rome neutral) was married to Catulus’s sister, Lutatia. Still in his early thirties, Quintus Hortensius had become Rome’s leading advocate under the rule of Cinna and Carbo, and was held by some to be the best legal mind Rome had ever produced. He was quite a handsome man, his taste for life’s little luxuries was betrayed by a sensuous lower lip, and his taste for beautiful boys by the expression in his eyes as they rested upon Caesar. A veteran of such looks, Caesar extirpated any ideas Hortensius might have been forming by sucking his mouth in ridiculously and crossing his eyes; Hortensius flushed and turned his head immediately to look at Catulus.

  At that moment a servant came to whisper to Caesar that his cousin demanded his presence at the far end of the room. Rising from the bottom—tier step where he had huddled himself to look, Caesar slopped in his backless clogs to where Young Marius and Carbo lay, kissed his cousin on the cheek, then perched himself on the edge of the curule podium behind the couch.

  “Not eating?” asked Young Marius.

  “There’s not much I can eat.”

  “S’right, I forgot,” mumbled Young Marius through a mouthful of fish. He swallowed it, and pointed to the huge platter laid out on the table in front of his couch. “There’s nothing to stop you having some of that,” he said.

  Caesar eyed the partially dismembered carcass with distinct lack of enthusiasm; it was a licker—fish of the Tiber. “Thank you,” he said, “but 1 never could see any virtue in eating shit.”

  That provoked a chuckle from Young Marius, but couldn’t destroy his enjoyment in consuming a creature which thrived upon the excrement flowing out of Rome’s vast sewers; Carbo, Caesar noted with amusement, was not so strong—stomached, for his hand, which had been in the act of reaching out to tear off a chunk of licker—fish, suddenly grabbed at a tiny roast chicken instead.

  Of course here Caesar was more noticeable, but prominence carried considerable reward; he could see many more faces. While he exchanged idle badinage with Young Marius, his eyes were very busy skipping from man to man. Rome, he thought, might be pleased enough at the election of a twenty-six-year-old senior consul, but some of the men present at this feast were not pleased at all. Especially Carbo’s minions—Brutus Damasippus, Carrinas, Marcus Fannius, Censorinus, Publius Burrienus, Publius Albinovanus the Lucanian ... Of course there were some who were highly delighted, like Marcus Marius Gratidianus and Scaevola Pontifex Maximus—but they were both related to Young Marius, and had, so to speak, a vested interest in seeing the new senior consul do well.

  The younger Marcus Junius Brutus appeared behind Carbo’s end of the couch. He was greeted, Caesar noticed, with unusual fervor; Carbo did not normally indulge in rapturous welcomes. Seeing it, Young Marius weaved away in search of more convivial company, leaving Brutus to take his place. Brutus nodded in passing to Caesar, without displaying any interest in him. That was the best thing about being flamen Dialis; he interested nobody because he was so politically insignificant. Carbo and Brutus proceeded to talk openly.

  “I think we can congratulate ourselves on an excellent ploy,” said Brutus, digging his fingers into the disintegrating carcass of the licker—fish.

  “Huh.” The chicken, barely nibbled, was thrown down with a grimace of distaste; Carbo took bread.

  “Oh, come now! You ought to be elated.”

  “About what? Him? Brutus, he’s as hollow as a sucked egg! I’ve seen enough of him during the past month to know that, I do assure you. He may hold the fasces for the month of January, but it’s I who will have to do all the work.”

  “You didn’t expect that to be different, surely?”

  Carbo shrugged, tossed the bread away; since Caesar’s remark about eating shit, his appetite had vanished. “Oh, I don’t know…. Maybe I’d hoped to see him grow a little sense. After all, he is Marius’s son, and his mother is a Julian. You’d think those facts would be worth something.”

  “They’re not, I take it.”

  “Not your granny’s used handkerchief. The most I can say about him is that he’s a useful ornament—he makes us look very pretty, and he sucks in the recruits.”

  “He might command troops well,” said Brutus, wiping his greasy hands on the linen napkin a slave passed to him.

  “He might. My guess is he won’t. I intend to take your advice in that area, certainly.”

  “What advice?”

  “To make sure he isn’t given the best soldiers.”

  “Oh.” Brutus flipped the napkin into the air without bothering to see whether the silent servant hovering near Caesar managed to catch it. “Quintus Sertorius isn’t here today. I had at least hoped he’d come to Rome for this occasion. After all, Young Marius is his cousin.”

  Carbo laughed, not a happy sound. “Sertorius, my dear Brutus, has abandoned our cause. He left Sinuessa to its fate, made off to Telamon, enlisted a legion of Etrurian clients of Gaius Marius’s, and sailed on the winter winds for Tarraco. In other words, he’s taken up his governorship of Nearer Spain very early. No doubt he hopes that by the time his term is over, there will be a decision in Italy.”

  “He’s a coward!” said Brutus indignantly.

  Carbo made a rude noise. “Not that one! I’d rather call him strange. He’s got no friends, haven’t you ever noticed it? Nor a wife. But he doesn’t have Gaius Marius’s ambition, for which we all ought to thank our lucky stars. If he did, Brutus, he’d be senior consul.”

  “Well, I think it’s a pity he’s left us in the lurch. His presence on the battlefield would have made all the difference. Aside from anything else, he knows how Sulla fights.”

  Carbo belched, pressed his belly. “I think I’m going to retire and take an emetic. The young cub’s prodigious assortment of food is too rich for my stomach.”

  Brutus assisted the junior consul from the couch and led him off toward a screened corner of the hall behind the podium, where several servants tended an array of chamber pots and bowls for those in need.

  Flicking a scornful glance at Carbo’s back, Caesar decided he had heard the most important conversation likely to take place at this consular inaugural feast. He kicked off his clogs, picked them up, and quietly stole away.

  Lucius Decumius was lurking in a sheltered corner of the Senate House vestibule, and appeared at Caesar’s side the moment he had fully emerged from the doorway. His arms were full of more sensible garments—decent boots, a hooded cloak, socks, a pair of woolen breeches. Off came the regalia of the flamen Dialis. Behind Lucius Decumius loomed an awesome personage who took apex, laena and clogs from Lucius Decumius and stuffed them into a drawstringed leather bag.
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  “What, back from Bovillae, Burgundus?’’ asked Caesar, gasping with the cold as he struggled to pull on a laceless boot.

  “Yes, Caesar.”

  “How goes it? All well with Cardixa?”

  “I am the father of another son.”

  Lucius Decumius giggled. “I told you, Pavo my peacock! He will have given you a whole bodyguard by the time you’re the consul!”

  “I will never be consul,” said Caesar, and looked out at the shrouded end of the Basilica Aemilia, swallowing painfully.

  “Rubbish! Of course you’ll get there,” said Lucius Decumius, and reached up his mittened hands to cup Caesar’s face. “Now you just stop all that gloomy business! There’s not nothing in the whole world will stop you once you make up your mind to it, hear me?’’ Down came the hands, one of them gesturing impatiently at Burgundus. “Go on, you great German lump! Clear a path for the master!”

  *

  It went on as it had begun, that terrible winter, and seemed as if it would never end. The seasons were in fair company to the calendar after some years of Scaevola as Pontifex Maximus; he, like Metellus Dalmaticus, believed in keeping date and season in harmony, though the Pontifex Maximus between them, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, had allowed the calendar to gallop ahead—it was ten days shorter than thesolar year—because he despised finicky Greek habits, he had said.

  But finally in March the thaw set in, and Italy began to believe that warmth would return to countryside and house. Asleep since October, the legions stirred, woke into activity. Braving the deep snow of early March, Gaius Norbanus issued out of Capua with six of his eight legions and marched to join Carbo, who was back in Ariminum. He went straight past Sulla, who chose to ignore him; on the Via Latina and then the Via Flaminia, Norbanus could manage to move despite the snow, and soon reached Ariminum. His arrival plumped out Carbo’s forces there to thirty legions and several thousand cavalry, an enormous burden for Rome—and the Ager Gallicus—to carry.

  But before leaving for Ariminum, Carbo had solved his most pressing problem: where the money to keep all these troops under arms would come from. Perhaps it was the melted gold and silver from the burned temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus stored as ingots in the Treasury gave him the idea, for certainly he commenced by seizing them, leaving in their stead a promissory note that Rome owed her Great God so many talents of gold and so many talents of silver. A large number of Rome’s temples were rich in their own right, and since religion was. a part of the State and run by the State, Carbo and Young Marius took it upon themselves to “borrow” the money held in Rome’s temples. In theory this was not unconstitutional, but in practice it was abhorrent, a solution to financial crises which was never put into effect. But out of the temple strong rooms came chest after chest after chest of coins: the single sestertius which was given at the birth of a Roman citizen’s male or female child to Juno Lucina; the single denarius which was given upon maturation of a Roman citizen male child to Juventas; the many denarii donated to Mercury after a businessman wetted his laurel bough at the sacred fountain; the single sestertius which was given at the death of a Roman citizen to ‘Venus Libitina; the sesterces which were donated by successful prostitutes to Venus Erucina—all this money and much more was commandeered to fund Carbo’s war machine. Bullion too was taken, and any gold or silver temple gift not felt to be an artistic loss was melted down.

  The stammering praetor Quintus Antonius Balbus—not one of the noble Antonii—was given the job of minting new coins and sorting out the old. Sacrilegious many may have deemed it, but the value of the haul was staggering. Carbo was able to leave Young Marius in charge of Rome and the campaign in the south, and journey to Ariminum with an easy mind.

  Though neither camp was aware it shared something in common, both Sulla and Carbo had made a similar resolution—that this was one civil war would not wreck Italy, that every mouthful of provender for man and beast involved in the hostilities must be paid for in hard cash, that the amount of land ruined by army maneuvers must be kept to an absolute minimum. The Italian War had brought the whole country to the brink of extinction; the country could not afford another war like it, especially so soon. And this, both Sulla and Carbo knew.

  They were also aware that the war between them lacked in the eyes of ordinary people the nobility of purpose and ironclad reason which the Italian War had possessed in abundance. That had been a struggle between Italian states which wanted to be independent of Rome, and Rome which wanted the Italian states kept in a certain degree of vassalage. But what was this new conflict really all about? Simply, which camp would end in ruling and owning Rome. It was a struggle for ascendancy between two men, Sulla and Carbo, and no amount of propaganda either camp put out could really disguise that fact. Nor were the ordinary people of Rome and Italy fooled. Therefore the country could not be subjected to extreme hardship, nor the economic well-being of the Roman and Italian communities diminished.

  Sulla was borrowing from his soldiers, but the only ones Carbo could borrow from were the gods. And always at the back of each man’s mind there loomed an awful dilemma: how, when the struggle was over, could the debt be paid back?

  None of this impinged upon the thoughts of Young Marius, the son of a fabulously wealthy man never brought up to care about money, be it the money to pay for some expensive personal trifle, or the money to pay the legions. If old Gaius Marius had talked to anyone about the fiscal side of war, it had been to Caesar during those months when Caesar had helped him recover from his second stroke. To his son, he had hardly talked at all. For by the time he had needed his son, Young Marius was of an age to be seduced more by the charms of Rome than by his father. To Caesar—nine years younger than his cousin—fell the lot of Gaius Marius’s reminiscences. And Caesar had listened avidly to much the arrival of his priesthood had rendered worse than useless.

  When the thaw set in after the middle of March, Young Marius and his staff of legates moved from Rome to a camp outside the little town of Ad Pictas on the Via Labicana, a diverticulum which avoided the Alban Hills and rejoined the Via Latina at a place called Sacriportus. Here on a flat alluvial plain eight legions of Etrurian and Umbrian volunteers had been encamped since early winter, under as strict and intensive a training program as the cold made possible. Their centurions were all Marian veterans, and good at training, but when Young Marius arrived toward the end of March, the troops were still very green. Not that Young Marius cared; he genuinely believed that the greenest recruit would fight for him the way hardened soldiers had fought for his father. And he faced the task of stopping Sulla with unimpaired confidence.

  There were men in his camp who understood far better than Young Marius the enormity of that task, but not one of them tried to enlighten their consul—commander. If taxed for a reason why, each one would probably have answered that beneath all his bluster, Young Marius did not have the internal resources to cope with so much truth. The figurehead, Young Marius must be cherished and protected, kept together.

  When intelligence reports arrived to inform him that Sulla was preparing to move, Young Marius cheered. For Sulla it seemed had detached eleven of his eighteen legions along with all save a few squadrons of cavalry, and sent this big force under the command of Metellus Pius the Piglet toward the Adriatic coast and Carbo in Ariminum. Which left Sulla with seven legions only, a smaller force than Young Marius owned.

  “I can beat him!” he said to his senior legate, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus.

  Married to Cinna’s elder girl, Ahenobarbus was committed to Carbo’s side despite a natural inclination in Sulla’s direction; he was very much in love with his beautiful red-haired wife, and sufficiently under her thumb to do whatever shewished. The fact that most of his close relatives were either sternly neutral or with Sulla he contrived to ignore.

  Now he listened to Young Marius in jubilant mood, and felt a much greater degree of unease; perhaps he ought to start thinking of how and where to flee if Young Marius didn’
t make good his boast and beat the old red fox, Sulla.

  On the first day of April, Young Marius in high fettle moved his army out of camp and marched through the ancient pylons at Sacriportus onto the Via Latina, heading southeast toward Campania and Sulla. He wasted no time, for there were two bridges to cross within five miles of each other, and he wanted to be clear of them before he encountered the enemy. No one offered him any advice as to the prudence of marching to meet Sulla rather than remaining where he was, and though he had traveled the Via Latina dozens of times, Young Marius did not have the kind of mind which remembered terrain or saw terrain in military terms.

  At the first bridge—spanning the Veregis he remained behind while his troops marched across in high spirits, and suddenly realized that the ground was better for fighting around the pylons of Sacriportus than in the direction he was going. But he didn’t stop. At the second bridge—across the bigger, more torrential stream of the Tolerus—it finally dawned on him that he was steadily moving into country where his legions would find it difficult to maneuver. His scouts arrived to tell him that Sulla was ten miles down the road and rapidly passing the town of Ferentinum, whereupon Young Marius panicked.

  “I think we’d better go back to Sacriportus,” he said to Ahenobarbus. “I can’t hope to deploy the way I want to in this country, and I can’t get past Sulla to more open ground. So we’ll face him at Sacriportus. Don’t you think that’s best?”

  “If you think so,” said Ahenobarbus, who was well aware of the effect an order to face about and retreat would have on these green troops, but decided not to say a word. “I’ll give the command. Back to Sacriportus.”