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

by Colleen McCullough

  He didn’t trust himself to see Cethegus; so he saw Lucius Marcius Philippus instead.

  “Praecia is willing,” he said curtly.

  “Excellent, Magnus! But why look so unhappy?”

  “He made me pimp for him.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t personal!”

  “Not much it wasn’t!”

  *

  In the spring of that year Nola fell. For almost twelve years that Campanian city of Samnite persuasion had held out against Rome and Sulla, enduring one siege after another, mostly at the hands of this year’s junior consul, Appius Claudius Pulcher. So it was logical that Sulla ordered Appius Claudius south to accept Nola’s submission, and logical too that Appius Claudius took great pleasure in telling the city’s magistrates the details of Sulla’s unusually harsh conditions. Like Capua, Faesulae and Volaterrae, Nola was to keep no territory whatsoever; it all went to swell the Roman ager publicus. Nor were the men of Nola to be given the Roman citizenship. The Dictator’s nephew, Publius Sulla, was given authority in the area, an added gall in view of last year’s mission to sort out the tangled affairs of Pompeii, where Publius Sulla’s brand of curt insensitivity had only ended in making a bad situation worse.

  But to Sulla the submission of Nola was a sign. He could depart with his luck intact when the place where he had won his Grass Crown was no more. So the months of May and June saw a steady trickle of his possessions wending their way to Misenum, and a team of builders toiled to complete certain commissions at his villa there—a small theater, a delightful park complete with sylvan dells, waterfalls and many fountains, a huge deep pool, and several additional rooms apparently designed for parties and banquets. Not to mention six guest suites of such opulence that all Misenum was talking: who could Sulla be thinking of entertaining, the King of the Parthians?

  Then came Quinctilis, and the last in the series of Sulla’s mock elections. To Catulus’s chagrin, he was to be the junior consul; the senior was Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, a name no one had expected to hear in the light of his independent line in the Senate since Sulla had assumed the Dictatorship.

  At the beginning of the month Valeria Messala and the twins left for the Campanian countryside; everything at the villa was ready. In Rome, no one anticipated surprises. Sulla would go—as he had come and as he had prevailed—in an aura of dense respectability and ceremony. Rome was about to lose her first dictator in a hundred and twenty years, and her first—ever dictator who had held the office for longer than six months.

  The ludi Apollinares, games first staged by Sulla’s remote ancestor, came and went; so did the elections. And the day after the curule elections a huge crowd gathered in the lower Forum Romanum to witness Sulla’s laying down of his self-inflicted task. He was going to do this in public rather than within the Curia Hostilia of the Senate—from the rostra, an hour after dawn.

  He did it with dignity and an impressive majesty, first dismissing his twenty-four lictors with extreme courtesy and (for Sulla) costly gifts, then addressing the crowds from the rostra before going with the electors to the Campus Martius, where he oversaw the repeal of Flaccus Princeps Senatus’s law appointing him Dictator. He went home from the Centuriate Assembly a private citizen, shorn of imperium and official auctoritas.

  “But I should like some of you to see me leave Rome,” he said to the consuls Vatia and Appius Claudius, to Catulus, Lepidus, Cethegus, Philippus. “Be at the Porta Capena an hour after dawn tomorrow. Nowhere else, mind! Watch me say goodbye to Rome.”

  They obeyed him to the letter, of course; Sulla might now be a privatus stripped of all magisterial power, but he had been the Dictator for far too long for any man to believe he truly lacked power. Sulla would be dangerous as long as he lived.

  Everyone bidden to the Porta Capena therefore came, though the three most favored Sullan protégés—Lucullus, Mamercus and Pompey—were not in Rome. Lucullus was on business for his games in September and Mamercus was in Cumae, while Pompey had gone back to Picenum to await the birth of his first child. When Pompey later heard of the events at the Capena Gate, he was profoundly thankful for his absence; Lucullus and Mamercus felt exactly the opposite.

  The marketplace inside the gate was jammed with busy folk going about their various activities—selling, buying, peddling, teaching, strolling, flirting, eating. Of course the party in uniformly purple-bordered togas was eyed with great interest; the usual volley of loud, anti—upper—class, derogatory insults was thrown from every direction, but the curule senators had heard it all before, and took absolutely no notice. Positioning themselves close to the imposing arch of the gate, they waited, talking idly.

  Not long afterward came the strains of music—pipes, little drums, tuneful flutes, outlining and filling in an unmistakably Bacchic lay. A flutter ran through the marketplace throng, which separated, stunned, to permit the progress of the procession now appearing from the direction of the Palatine. First came flower—decked harlots in flame—colored togas, thumping their wrists against jingling tambourines, dipping their hands into the swollen sinuses of their togas to strew the route with drifts of rose petals. Then came freaks and dwarves, faces pugged or painted, some in horn—bedecked masks sewn with bells, capering on malformed legs and clad in the motley of centunculi, vividly patched coats like fragmented rainbows. After them came the musicians, some wearing little more than flowers, others tricked out like prancing satyrs or fanciful eunuchs. In their midst, hedged about by giggling, dancing children, staggered a fat and drunken donkey with its hooves gilded, a garland of roses about its neck and its mournful ears poking out of holes in a wide—brimmed, wreathed hat. On its purple-blanketed back sat the equally drunken Sulla, waving a golden goblet which slopped an endless rain of wine, robed in a Tyrian purple tunic embroidered with gold, flowers around his neck and atop his head. Beside the donkey walked a very beautiful but obviously male woman, his thick black hair just sprinkled with white, his unfeminine physique draped in a semi—transparent saffron woman’s gown; he bore a large golden flagon, and every time the goblet in Sulla’s right hand descended in his direction he topped up its splashing purple contents.

  Since the slope toward the gate was downward the procession gained a certain momentum it could not brake, so when the archway loomed immediately before it and Sulla started shouting blearily for a halt, everyone fell over squealing and shrieking, the women’s legs kicking in the air and their hairy, red-slashed pudenda on full display. The donkey staggered and cannoned into the wall of a fountain; Sulla teetered but was held up by the travestied flagon—bearer alongside him, then toppled slowly into those strong arms. Righted, the Dictator commenced to walk toward the stupefied party of curule senators, though as he passed by one wildly flailing pair of quite lovely female legs, he bent to puddle his finger inside her cunnus, much to her hilarious and apparently orgasmic delight.

  As the escort regained its feet and clustered, singing and playing music and dancing still—to the great joy of the gathering crowd—Sulla arrived in front of the consuls to stand with his arm about his beautiful supporter, waving the cup of wine in an expansive salute.

  “Tacete!” yelled Sulla to the dancers and musicians. They quietened at once. But no other voices filled the silence.

  “Well, it’s here at last!” he cried—to whom, no one could be sure: perhaps to the sky. “My first day of freedom!”

  The golden goblet described circles in the air as the richly painted mouth bared its gums in the broadest and happiest of smiles. His whole face beneath the absurd ginger wig was painted as white as the patches of intact skin upon it, so that the livid areas of scar tissue were gone. But the effect was not what perhaps he had hoped, as the red outline of his mouth had run up into the many deep fissures starting under nose and on chin and foregathering at the lips; it looked like a red gash sewn loosely together with wide red stitches. But it smiled, smiled, smiled. Sulla was drunk, and he didn’t care.

  “For thirty years and more,” he said
to the slack—featured Vatia and Appius Claudius, “I have denied my nature. I have denied myself love and pleasure—at first for the sake of my name and my ambition, and later—when these had run their course—for the sake of Rome. But it is over. Over, over, over! I hereby give Rome back to you—to all you little, cocksure, maggot—minded men! You are at liberty once more to vent your spleen on your poor country—to elect the wrong men, to spend the public moneys foolishly, to think not beyond tomorrow and your own gigantic selves. In the thirty years of one generation I predict that you and those who succeed you will bring ruin beyond redemption upon Rome’s undeserving head!”

  His hand went up to touch the face of his supporter, very tenderly and intimately. “You know who this is, of course, any of you who go to the theater. Metrobius. My boy. Always and forever my boy!” And he turned, pulled the dark head down, kissed Metrobius full upon the mouth.

  Then with a hiccough and a giggle he allowed himself to be helped back to his drunken ass, and hoisted upon it. The tawdry procession re-formed and weaved off through the gate down the common line of the Via Latina and the Via Appia, with half the people from the marketplace following and cheering.

  No one in the senatorial party knew where to look, especially after Vatia burst into noisy tears. So for want of firmer guidance they drifted off in ones and twos, Appius Claudius trying to give comfort to the devastated Vatia.

  “I don’t believe it!” said Cethegus to Philippus.

  “I think we must,” said Philippus. “That’s why he invited us to this parade of travesties. How else could he begin to shake us loose from his bonds?”

  “Shake us loose? What do you mean?”

  “You heard him. For thirty years and more he has denied his nature. He fooled me. He fooled everyone who matters. And what an exquisite revenge this day has been for a ruined childhood! Rome has been controlled, directed and healed by a deviate. We’ve been diddled by a mountebank. How he must have laughed!”

  *

  He did laugh. He laughed all the way to Misenum, carried in a flower—decked litter with Metrobius by his side and accompanied by his Bacchic revelers, all invited to stay in his villa as his guests for as long as they wanted. The party had been augmented by Roscius the comedian and Sorex the arch—mime, as well as many lesser theatrical lights.

  They descended upon the newly renovated villa which once had been a fitting home for Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi and teemed irreverently through its hallowed portals, Sulla in their midst still riding upon his inebriated ass.

  “Liber Pater!” they called him, saluting him with blown kisses and little trills on their pipes; and he, so drunk he was only half conscious, chuckled and whinnied and whooped.

  The party went on for a market interval, notable mainly for the enormous amounts of food and wine that were consumed and the number of uninvited guests who poured in from all the surrounding villas and villages. Their host, rollicking and carousing, took them to his heart and introduced them to sexual high jinks most of them had never even heard of.

  Only Valeria was left out of things, entirely of her own choice; she had taken one look at the arrival of her husband and fled to her own rooms, there to lock herself in and weep. But, said Metrobius after he had persuaded her to open her door,

  “It won’t always be so unbearable, lady. He’s been looking forward to this for so long that you must give him his head. In a few days’ time he’ll pay for it—he’ll be terribly ill and not at all inclined to be the life of the party.”

  “You’re his lover,” she said, feeling nothing beyond a black, despairing confusion.

  “I have been his lover for more years than you have seen the sun,” said Metrobius gently. “I belong to him. I always have. But so do you belong to him.”

  “Love between men is disgusting!”

  “Nonsense. That’s your father and your brother and all of those cousins talking. How do you know? What have you seen of life, Valeria Messala, beyond the dismally confined isolation of a Roman noblewoman’s lot? My presence doesn’t mean you’re not necessary to him, any more than your presence means I’m not necessary to him. If you want to stay, you’re going to have to accept the fact that there have been—and still are!—many loves in Sulla’s life.”

  “I don’t have much choice, really,” she said, almost to herself. “Either I go back to my brother’s house, or I learn to get on amid this riotous assemblage.”

  “That is so,” he said, smiled at her with understanding and considerable affection, then leaned across to caress the back of her neck, which somehow he seemed to know ached from the effort of holding up her proud patrician head.

  “You’re far too good for him,” she said, surprising herself.

  “All that I am, I owe to him,” said Metrobius gravely. “If it had not been for him I would be nothing more than an actor.”

  “Well, there seems no alternative other than to join this circus! Though if you don’t mind, not at its height. I have not the sinews or the training for such revelry. When you think he needs me, tell me.”

  And so they left it. As Metrobius had predicted, some eight days after the commencement of his binge Sulla’s underlying ailments asserted themselves and the revelers were sent home. The arch—mime, Sorex, and Roscius the comedian slunk away to their suites and hid, while Valeria and Metrobius and Lucius Tuccius dealt with the ravages his breakout had inflicted upon Sulla. Who was sometimes grateful, and sometimes very difficult to help.

  But, returned eventually to some vestige of tranquillity and health, the ex-Dictator applied himself to the writing of his memoirs; a paean, he informed Valeria and Metrobius, to Rome and men like Catulus Caesar—as well as to himself—besides being a metaphorical assassination of Gaius Marius, Cinna, Carbo, and their followers.

  *

  By the end of the old year and the end of the consulships of Vatia and Appius Claudius, Sulla’s regimen at Misenum was so well established that the whole villa oscillated through his cycles in a fairly placid way. For a while he would scribble away at his memoirs, chuckling whenever his pen produced a particularly apt and vitriolic phrase at Gaius Marius’s expense; while writing his book on the war against Jugurtha he was delirious with pleasure at the thought that now in his own words he admitted it was his personal feat in capturing Jugurtha won the war—and that Marius had deliberately suppressed this fact. Then the pen and paper would be put away and Sulla would embark upon an orgy of privately staged comedies and mimes, or else would throw a gigantic party lasting a whole market interval. He varied all these activities with others as they occurred to his ever—fertile imagination, including mock hunts with naked young boys and girls the quarry, competitions to see who could come up with the most bizarre posture for sexual intercourse, elaborate charades wherein the participants were able to requisition almost anything by way of costume or trapping. He held joke parties, nude parties by moonlight, daytime parties beside his vast white marble swimming pool while the revelers watched, enraptured, the sport of naked youths and maidens in the water. There seemed no end to his invention, nor an end to his passion for novelties of every sexual kind; though it was noticed that he indulged in no practices involving cruelty or animals, and that upon discovering one guest so inclined, he had the man driven from his house.

  There could be no doubt, however, that his physical well-being was deteriorating. After the New Year had come and gone, his own sexual prowess flagged badly; by the end of February nothing had the power to stimulate him. And when this happened, his mood and temper took a turn for the worse.

  Only one of his highborn Roman friends sought out Sulla’s company after the move to Misenum. Lucullus. Who had been in Africa with his brother during Quinctilis, personally supervising the capture of beasts for their games at the beginning of September. When he returned to Rome halfway through Sextilis he found the city still in an uproar constantly fueled by reports of the newest extravagances at the villa in Misenum, and was subjected to scandalized li
tanies of Sulla’s behavior.

  “All you who judge him, look first to yourselves,” Lucullus said stiffly. “He is entitled to do whatever he chooses.”

  But it was not until several days after the conclusion of the ludi Romani in September that Lucullus could spare time to visit Sulla, whom he found in one of his more lucid intervals, at work on the memoirs and full of glee at what he was doing to the reputation and deeds of Gaius Marius.

  “You’re the only one, Lucullus,” he said, a trace of the old Sulla flickering in his rheumy, pain—racked eyes.

  “No one has any right to criticize you!” Lucullus said, nostrils pinched. “You gave up everything for Rome.”

  “True, I did. And I don’t deny it was hard. But my dear boy, if I hadn’t denied myself for all those years I wouldn’t be enjoying this present excess half so much!”

  “I can see where it might have its attractions,” Lucullus said, eyes following the gyrations of an exquisite female child just budding into puberty as she danced naked for Sulla in the sun outside his window.

  “Yes, you like them young, don’t you?” Sulla chuckled, leaned forward to grasp Lucullus by the arm. “You’d better stay to see the end of her dance. Then you can take her for a walk.”

  “What have you done with their mothers?”

  “Nothing. I buy them from their mothers.”

  Lucullus stayed. And came back often.

  But in March, his fires dead, Sulla became extremely hard to handle, even for Metrobius and Valeria, who had learned to work as a team. Somehow—she didn’t quite know how—Valeria had found herself pregnant. By Sulla, she hoped. But couldn’t tell him, and dreaded the day when her condition became apparent. It had happened about the turn of the year, when Lucullus had produced some peculiar fungi he said he had found in Africa and the inner circle of friends had eaten of them, including Valeria. In some nightmarish dream she half—remembered every man present enjoying her, from Sulla to Sorex and even Metrobius. It was the only incident she could blame, and fear ruled her after she realized its appalling outcome.