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

by Colleen McCullough

  The crimson patches of scar tissue on Sulla’s face stood out more starkly than usual. “Then what does exist?’’

  The women speak of haemorrhage, but the loss of blood is too slow for that,” said the little doctor, frowning. “There is some blood, but mixed with a foul—smelling substance I would call pus were she a wounded soldier. I diagnose some kind of internal suppuration, but with your permission, Lucius Cornelius, I would like to obtain some further opinions.”

  “Do whatever you like,” said Sulla sharply. “Just keep the comings and goings unobtrusive tomorrow—I have a wedding to see to. I suppose my wife cannot attend?”

  “Definitely not, Lucius Cornelius.”

  Thus it was that Aemilia Scaura, five months pregnant by her previous husband, married Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus in Sulla’s house without the support of anyone who loved her. And though beneath her veils of flame and saffron she wept bitterly, Pompey set himself the moment the ceremony was over to soothing and pleasing her, and succeeded so well that by the time they left, she was smiling.

  It ought to have been Sulla who informed Dalmatica of this unexpected bonus, but Sulla continued to find excuse after excuse as to why he couldn’t visit his wife’s rooms.

  “I think,” said Cornelia Sulla, upon whom his communication with Dalmatica had devolved, “that he can’t bear to see you looking so ill. You know what he’s like. If it’s someone he doesn’t care about he is utterly indifferent. But if it’s someone he loves, he can’t bring himself to face the situation.”

  There was a smell of corruption in the big airy room where Dalmatica lay, reinforced the closer a visitor came to the bed. She was, Cornelia Sulla knew, dying; Lucius Tuccius had been right, no baby was growing inside her. What was pushing her poor laboring belly into a travesty of pregnancy no one seemed to know, except that it was morbid, malign. The putrid discharge flowed out of her with sluggish remorselessness, and she burned with a fever no amount of medicine or care seemed to cool: She was still conscious, however, and her eyes, bright as two flames, were fixed on her stepdaughter painfully.

  “I don’t matter,” she said now, rolling her head upon her sweat—soaked pillow. “I want to know how my poor little Aemilia got on. Was it very bad?’’

  “Actually, no,” said Cornelia Sulla, with surprise in her voice. “Believe it or not, darling stepmother, by the time she left to go to her new home, she was quite happy. He’s rather a remarkable fellow, Pompeius—I’d never more than seen him in the distance before today, and I had all a Cornelian’s prejudice against him. But he’s terribly good-looking—far more attractive than silly Glabrio!—and turned out to have a great deal of charm. So she started out in floods of tears, but a few moments of Pompeius’s telling her how pretty she was and how much he loved her already, and she was quite lifted out of her despond. I tell you, Dalmatica, the man has more to him than ever I expected. I predict he makes his women happy.”

  Dalmatica appeared to believe this. “They do tell stories about him. Years ago, when he was scarcely more than a child, he used to have congress with Flora—you know who I mean?’’

  “The famous whore?”

  “Yes. She’s a little past her prime now, but they tell me she still mourns the passing of Pompeius, who never left her without leaving the marks of his teeth all over her—I cannot imagine why that pleased her, but apparently it did! He tired of her and handed her over to one of his friends, which broke her heart. Poor, silly creature! A prostitute in love is a butt.”

  “Then it may well be that Aemilia Scaura will end in thanking tata for freeing her from Glabrio.”

  “I wish he would come to see me!”

  *

  The day before the Ides of Sextilis arrived; Sulla donned his Grass Crown and triumphal regalia, this being the custom when a man of military renown sacrificed on the Ara Maxima in the Forum Boarium. Preceded by his lictors and heading a procession of members of the Senate, the Dictator walked the relatively short distance from his house to the Steps of Cacus, and down them to the empty area in which the meat markets were normally located. When he passed by the statue of the god—today also clad in full triumphal regalia—he paused to salute it and pray. Then on he went to the Great Altar, beyond which stood the little round temple of Hercules Invictus, an old plainly Doric structure which enjoyed some fame because inside it were located some frescoes executed by the famous tragic poet Marcus Pacuvius.

  The victim, a plump and perfect cream—colored heifer, was waiting in the care of popa and cultarius, chewing her drugged cud and watching the frenzied pre-banquet activity within the marketplace through gentle brown eyes. Though Sulla wore his Grass Crown, the rest of those assembled were crowned with laurel, and when the younger Dolabella—who was urban praetor and therefore in charge of this day’s ceremonies—began his prayers to Hercules Invictus, no one covered his head. A foreigner within the sacred boundary, Hercules was prayed to in the Greek way, with head bare.

  Everything proceeded in flawless fashion. As donor of the heifer and celebrant of the public feast, Sulla bent to catch some of the blood in the skyphos, a special vessel belonging to Hercules. But as he crouched and filled the cup, a low black shape slunk like a shadow between the Pontifex Maximus and the cultarius, dipped its snout into the growing lake of blood on the cobbles, and lapped noisily.

  Sulla’s shriek of horror ripped out of him as he leaped back and straightened; the skyphos emptied as it fell from his nerveless hand, and the wizened, stringy Grass Crown tumbled off his head to lie amid the blood. By this the panic was spreading faster than the ripples on the crimson pool at which the black dog, starving, still lapped. Men scattered in all directions, some screaming thinly, some hurling their laurels away, some plucking whole tufts from their hair; no one knew what to do, how to end this nightmare.

  It was Metellus Pius the Pontifex Maximus who took the hammer from the stupefied popa and brought it crashing down upon the dog’s working head. The cur screeched once and began to whirl in a circular dance, its bared teeth snapping and gnashing, until after what seemed an eternity it collapsed in a convulsing tangle of limbs and slowly stilled, dying, its mouth spewing a cascade of bloodied foam.

  Skin whiter than Sulla’s, the Pontifex Maximus dropped the hammer to the ground. “The ritual has been profaned!” he cried in the loudest voice he had ever produced. “Praetor urbanus, we must begin again! Conscript Fathers, compose yourselves! And where are the slaves of Hercules, who ought to have made sure no dog was here?”

  Popa and cultarius rounded up the temple slaves, who had drifted off before the ceremony got under way to see what sort of goodies were being piled upon the readied tables. His wig askew, Sulla found the strength at last to bend over and pick up his blood—dabbled Grass Crown.

  “I must go home and bathe,” he said to Metellus Pius. “I am unclean. In fact, all of us are unclean, and must go home and bathe. We will reassemble in an hour.” To the younger Dolabella he said, less pleasantly, “After they’ve cleared away the mess and thrown the carcass of the heifer and that frightful creature into the river, have the viri capitales lock the slaves up somewhere until tomorrow. Then have them crucified—and don’t break their legs. Let them take days to die. Here in the Forum Boarium, in full sight of the god Hercules. He doesn’t want them. They allowed his sacrifice to be polluted by a dog.”

  Unclean, unclean, unclean, unclean: Sulla kept repeating the word over and over as he hurried home, there to bathe and clothe himself this time in toga praetexta—a man did not have more than one set of triumphal regalia, and that one set only if he had triumphed. The Grass Crown he washed with his own hands, weeping desolately because even under his delicate touch it fell apart. What remained when finally he laid it to dry on a thick pad of white cloth was hardly anything beyond a few tired, limp fragments. My corona graminea is no more. I am accursed. My luck is gone. My luck! How can I live without my luck? Who sent it, that mongrel still black from its journey through the nether darknesses? Wh
o has spoiled this day, now that Gaius Marius cannot? Was it Metrobius? I am losing Dalmatica because of him! No, it is not Metrobius….

  So back to the Ara Maxima of Hercules Invictus he went, now wearing a laurel wreath like everyone else, his terrified lictors ruthlessly clearing a path through the crowds gathering to descend on the feast once it was laid out. There were still a few ox—drawn carts bringing provisions to the tables, which created fresh panics as their drivers saw the cavalcade of approaching priests and hastened to unyoke their beasts, drive them out of the way; if one ox plopped a pile of dung in the path of priests, the priests were defiled and the owner of the ox liable to be flogged and heavily fined.

  Chrysogonus had obtained a second heifer quite as lovely as the first, and already flagging from the drug the frantic steward had literally rammed down its throat. A fresh start was made, and this time all went smoothly right to the last. Every one of the three hundred senators present spent more time making sure no dog lurked than in paying attention to the ritual.

  A victim sacrificed to Hercules Invictus could not be taken from the pyre alongside the god’s Great Altar, so like Caesar’s white bull on the Capitol, it was left to consume itself among the flames, while those who had witnessed the morning’s dreadful events scurried home the moment they were free to do so. Save for Sulla, who went on as he had originally planned; he must walk through the city wishing the feasting populace a share of his good fortune. Only how could he wish them that when Fortune’s favoritism had been canceled out of existence by a black mongrel?

  Each made of planks laid on top of trestles, five thousand tables groaned with food, and wine ran faster than blood on a battlefield. Unaware of the disaster at the Ara Maxima, more than half a million men and women gorged themselves on fish and fruit and honey cakes, and stuffed the sacks they had brought with them full to the top so that those left at home—including slaves—might also feast. They greeted Sulla with cheers and invocations to the gods, and promised him that they would remember him in their prayers until they died.

  Night was falling when he finally returned to his house on the Palatine, there to dismiss his lictors with thanks and the news that they would be feasted on the morrow in their precinct, behind the inn on the corner of the Clivus Orbius.

  Cornelia Sulla was waiting for him in the atrium.

  “Father, Dalmatica is asking for you,” she said.

  “I’m too tired!” he snapped, knowing he could never face his wife, whom he loved—but not enough.

  “Please, Father, go to her! Until she sees you, she won’t abandon this idiotic notion your conduct has put into her head.”

  “What idiotic notion?” he asked, stepping out of his toga as he walked to the altar of the Lares and Penates on the far wall. There he bent his head, broke a salt—cake upon the marble shelf, and laid his laurel wreath upon it.

  His daughter waited patiently until this ceremony was done with and Sulla turned back in her direction.

  “What idiotic notion?” he asked again.

  “That she is unclean. She keeps saying she’s unclean.”

  Like stone he stood there, the horror crawling all over him, in and out and round and round, a wormy army of loathsome sensations he could neither control nor suffer. He jerked, flung his arms out as if to ward off assassins, stared at his daughter out of a madness she had not seen in him in all her life.

  “Unclean!” he screamed. “Unclean!”

  And vanished, running, out of the house.

  Where he spent the night no one knew, though Cornelia Sulla sent parties armed with torches to look for him amid the ruins of those five thousand tables, no longer groaning. But with the dawn he walked, clad only in his tunic, into the atrium, and saw his daughter still waiting there. Chrysogonus, who had remained with Cornelia Sulla throughout the night because he too had much to fear, advanced toward his master hesitantly.

  “Good, you’re here,” said Sulla curtly. “Send to all the priests—minor as well as major!—and tell them to meet me in one hour’s time at Castor’s in the Forum.”

  “Father?” asked Cornelia Sulla, bewildered.

  “Today I have no truck with women” was all he said before he went to his own rooms.

  He bathed scrupulously, then rejected three purple-bordered togas before one was presented to him that he considered perfectly clean. After which, preceded by his lictors (four of whom were ordered to change into unsoiled togas), he went to the temple of Castor and Pollux, where the priests waited apprehensively.

  “Yesterday,” he said without preamble, “I offered one tenth of everything I own to Hercules Invictus. Who is a god of men, and of men only. No women are allowed near his Great Altar, and in memory of his journey to the Underworld no dogs are permitted in his precincts, for dogs are chthonic, and all black creatures. Hercules is served by twenty slaves, whose main duty is to see that neither women nor dogs nor black creatures pollute his precincts. But yesterday a black dog drank the blood of the first victim I offered him, a frightful offense against every god—and against me. What could I have done, I asked myself, to incur this? In good faith I had come to offer the god a huge gift, together with a sacrificial victim of exactly the right kind. In good faith I expected Hercules Invictus to accept my gift and my sacrifice. But instead, a black dog drank the heifer’s blood right there at the foot of the Ara Maxima. And my Grass Crown was polluted when it fell into the blood the black dog drank.”

  The ninety men he had commanded to attend him stood without moving, hackles rising at the very thought of so much profanation. Everyone present in Castor’s had been at the ceremony the day before, had recoiled in horror, and then had spent the rest of that day and the night which followed in wondering what had gone wrong, why the god had vented such displeasure upon Rome’s Dictator.

  “The sacred books are gone, we have no frame of reference,” Sulla went on, fully aware of what was going through the minds of his auditors. “It was left to my daughter to act as the god’s messenger. She fulfilled all the criteria: she spoke without realizing what she said; and she spoke in ignorance of the events which occurred before the Great Altar of Hercules Invictus.”

  Sulla stopped, peering at the front ranks of priests without seeing the face he was looking for. “Pontifex Maximus, come out before me!” he commanded in the formal tones of a priest.

  The ranks moved, shuffled a little; out stepped Metellus Pius. “I am here, Lucius Cornelius.”

  “Quintus Caecilius, you are closely concerned in this. I want you in front of the rest because no man should see your face. I wish I too had that privilege, but all of you must see my face. What I have to say is this: my wife, Caecilia Metella Dalmatica, daughter of one Pontifex Maximus and first cousin of our present Pontifex Maximus, is”—Sulla drew a deep breath—“unclean. In the very instant that my daughter told me this, I knew it for the truth. My wife is unclean. Her womb is rotting. Now I had been aware of that for some time. But I did not know that the poor woman’s condition was offensive to the gods of men until my daughter spoke. Hercules Invictus is a god of men. So too is Jupiter Optimus Maximus. I, a man, have been entrusted with the care of Rome. To me, a man, has been given the task of helping Rome recover from the wars and vicissitudes of many years. Who I am and what I am matters. And nothing in my life can be unclean. Even my wife. Or so I see it today. Am I right in my assumption, Quintus Caecilius, Pontifex Maximus?”

  How much the Piglet has grown! thought Sulla, the only one privileged to see his face: Yesterday it was the Piglet took charge, and today it is only he who fully understands.

  “Yes, Lucius Cornelius,” said Metellus Pius in steady tones.

  “I have called all of you here today to take the auspices and decide what must be done,” Sulla went on. “I have informed you of the situation, and told you what I believe. But under the laws I have passed, I can make no decision without consulting you. And that is reinforced because the person most affected is my wife. Naturally I cannot have it
said that I have used this situation to be rid of my wife. I do not want to rid myself of my wife, I must make that clear. To all of you, and through you, to all of Rome. Bearing that in mind, I believe that my wife is unclean, and I believe the gods of men are offended. Pontifex Maximus, as the head of our Roman religion, what do you say?”

  “I say that the gods of men are offended,” said Metellus Pius. “I say that you must put your wife from you, that you must never set eyes upon her again, and that you must not allow her to pollute your dwelling or your legally authorized task.”

  Sulla’s face revealed his distress; that was manifest to everyone. “I love my wife,” he said thickly. “She has been loyal and faithful to me. She has given me children. Before me, she was a loyal and faithful wife to Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, and gave him children. I do not know why the gods of men require this of me, or why my wife has ceased to please them.”

  “Your affection for your wife is not in question,” said the Pontifex Maximus, her first cousin. “Neither of you needs to have offended any god, of men or of women. It is better to say that her presence in your house and your presence in her life have in some unknown way interrupted or distorted the pathways whereby divine grace and favor are conducted to Rome. On behalf of my fellow priests, I say that no one is to blame. That we find no fault on either your side, Lucius Cornelius, or on your wife’s side. What is, is. There can be no more to be said.”

  He spun round to face the silent assemblage, and said in loud, stern, unstammering voice, “I am your Pontifex Maximus! That I speak without stammer or stumble is evidence enough that Jupiter Optimus Maximus is using me as his vessel, and that I am gifted with his tongue. I say that the wife of this man is unclean, that her presence in his life and house is an affront to our gods, and that she must be removed from his life and his house immediately. I do not require a vote. If any man here disagrees with me, let him say so now.”

  The silence was profound, as if no men stood there at all.