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

by Colleen McCullough

  Quirites Roman citizens of civilian status.

  quod erat demonstrandum “That was the thing to be proved.”

  Regia The ancient little building in the Forum Romanum, oddly shaped and oriented toward the north, that served as the offices of the Pontifex Maximus and the headquarters of the College of Pontifices. It was an inaugurated temple and contained shrines or altars or artifacts of some of Rome’s oldest and most shadowy gods—Opsiconsiva, Vesta, Mars of the sacred shields and spears. Within the Regia the Pontifex Maximus kept his records. It was never his residence. Republic The word was originally two words—res publica—meaning the thing which constitutes the people as a whole: that is, the government.

  Rex Sacrorum During the Republic, he was the second—ranking member of the College of Pontifices. A relic of the days of the Kings of Rome, the Rex Sacrorum had to be a patrician, and was hedged around with as many taboos as the flamen Dialis.

  rhetoric The art of oratory, something the Greeks and Romans turned into a science. An orator was required to speak according to carefully laid out rules and conventions which extended far beyond mere words; body language and movements were an intrinsic part of it. There were different styles of rhetoric; the Asianic was florid and dramatic, the Attic more restrained and intellectual in approach. It must always be remembered that the audience which gathered to listen to public oration—be it concerned with politics or with the law courts—was composed of connoisseurs of rhetoric. The men who watched and listened did so in an extremely critical way; they had learned all the rules and techniques themselves, and were not easy to please.

  Ria Plutarch (writing in Greek almost two hundred years later) gives the name of Quintus Sertorius’s mother as Rhea; but this is not a Latin gentilicial name. However, even today “Ria” is a diminutive commonly used in Europe for women named “Maria.” It was some years before I discovered that my Dutch housekeeper, Ria, was actually Maria. Maria would be the name of a female member of the Marii, Gaius Marius’s gens. The attachment of Quintus Sertorius to Gaius Marius from his earliest days in military service right through to the end which saw even his loyalest adherents recoil in horror makes me wonder about that name, Rhea. Sertorius, says Plutarch also, was very devoted to his mother. Why then should not Sertorius’s mother have been a Maria called Ria for short, and a close blood relative of Gaius Marius’s? To have her this answers many questions. As part of my novelist’s license I have chosen to assume that Sertorius’s mother was a blood relative of Marius’s. However, this is pure speculation, albeit having some evidence to support it. In this Roman series I have severely limited my novelist’s imagination, and do not allow it to contradict history.

  Roma The proper title in Latin of Rome. It is feminine.

  Romulus and Remus The twin sons of Rhea Silvia, daughter of the King of Alba Longa, and the god Mars. Her uncle Amulius, who had usurped the throne, put the twins in a basket made of rushes and set it adrift on the Tiber (shades of Moses?). They were washed up beneath a fig tree at the base of the Palatine Mount, found by a she—wolf, and suckled by her in a cave nearby. Faustulus and his wife Acca Larentia rescued them and raised them to manhood. After deposing Amulius and putting their grandfather back on his throne, the twins founded a settlement on the Palatine. Once its walls were built and solemnly blessed, Remus jumped over them—apparently an act of horrific sacrilege. Romulus put him to death. Having no people to live in his Palatine town, Romulus then set out to find people, which he did by establishing an asylum in the depression between the two humps of the Capitol. This asylum attracted criminals and escaped slaves, which says something about the original Romans! However, he still had no women. These were obtained by tricking the Sabines of the Quirinal into bringing their women to a feast; Romulus and his desperadoes kidnapped them. Romulus ruled for a long time. Then one day he went hunting in the Goat Swamps of the Campus Martius and was caught in a terrible storm; when he didn’t come home, it was believed he had been taken by the gods and made immortal.

  rosea rura The most fertile piece of ground in Italy lay outside the Sabine city of Reate. It was called the rosea rura. Apparently it was not tilled, perhaps because it grew a wonderful kind of grass which regenerated so quickly it was very difficult to overgraze. Many thousands of mares grazed on it, and stud donkeys which fetched huge prices at auction; the object of the pastoral rosea rura activities was the breeding of mules, these being the best mules available.

  rostra A rostrum (singular) was the reinforced oak beak of a war galley used to ram other ships. When in 338 B.C. the consul Gaius Maenius attacked the Volscian fleet in Antium harbor, he defeated it completely. To mark the end of the Volsci as a rival power to Rome, Maenius removed the beaks of the ships he had sent to the bottom or captured and fixed them to the Forum wall of the speaker’s platform, which was tucked into the side of the Well of the Comitia. Ever after, the speaker’s platform was known as the rostra—the ships’ beaks. Other victorious admirals followed Maenius’s example, but when no more beaks could be put on the wall of the rostra, they were fixed to tall columns erected around the rostra.

  Roxolani A people inhabiting part of the modem Ukraine and Rumania, and a sept of the Sarmatae. Organized into tribes, they were horse—people who tended to a nomadic way of life except where coastal Greek colonies of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. impinged upon them sufficiently to initiate them into agriculture. All the peoples who lived around the Mediterranean despised them as barbarians, but after he conquered the lands around the Euxine Sea, King Mithridates VI used them as troops, mostly cavalry.

  Sabines The Oscan—speaking people of unknown racial origin who lived to the north and east of Rome between the Quirinal Hill inside Rome and the crest of the Apennines. Their ties to Rome went back to the apocryphal “rape,” and they resisted Roman incursions into their lands for several centuries. The chief Sabine towns were Reate, Nersae and Amiternum. Sabines were famous for their integrity, bravery, and independence.

  sacer Though it more usually meant sacred to a god, sacer in the sense used in this book meant one whose person and property had been forfeited to a god because some divine law had been profaned; Sulla used the term in his proscriptions because Roma was a goddess.

  saepta “The sheepfold.” During the Republic this was simply an open area on the Campus Martius not far from the Via Lata. Here the Centuriate Assembly met. The saepta was divided up for the occasion by temporary fences so that the five Classes could vote in their Centuries.

  salii A college of priests in service to Mars; the name meant “leaping dancers.” There were twenty-four of them in two colleges of twelve. They had to be patrician. saltatrix tonsa This delicious political slur was most famously used by Cicero to describe Lucius Afranius, a Picentine adherent of Pompey’s. It translates as a “barbered dancing—girl”: that is, a male homosexual who dressed as a woman and sold his sexual favors. In a day when slander and defamation were not charges pursuant at law, anything went in the political slur department!

  Samnites, Samnium Rome’s most obdurate enemies among the peoples of Italy lived in lands lying between Latium, Campania, Apulia, Picenum and the Adriatic, though as a people the Samnites spilled into southern Picenum and southern Campania. The area was largely mountainous and not particularly fertile; its towns tended to be poor and small, and numbered among them Caieta, Aeclanum and Bovianum. The two really prosperous cities, Aesernia and Beneventum, were Latin Rights colonies seeded by Rome. Besides the true Samnites, peoples called Frentani, Paeligni, Marrucini and Vestini inhabited parts of Samnium. Several times during Rome’s history the Samnites inflicted hideous defeats upon Roman armies; no Roman general thought of them lightly. Whenever there seemed a chance that some insurgent movement might overthrow Rome, the Samnites enlisted in its ranks.

  Sarmatians A people, probably of Germanic stock, the Sarmatians occupied the steppelands on the northwestern side of the Euxine Sea—the modern Ukraine—though originally they had lived to the east of
the Tanais (the Don). They were nomadic in habit and all rode horses. The tribal culture permitted a rare equality of women with men; the women attended councils and fought as warriors. By the last century B.C. they had lost several subgroups which became nations in themselves, principally the Roxolani (q.v.) and the Iazyges, who settled further south. Mithridates used Sarmatae as cavalry troops in his armies.

  satrap The title given by the Kings of Persia to their provincial or territorial governors. Alexander the Great seized upon the term and employed it, as did the later Arsacid Kings of the Parthians and the Kings of Armenia. The region administered by a satrap was called a satrapy.

  Saturninus Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, tribune of the plebs in 103, 100 and 99 B.C. His early career was marred by an alleged grain swindle while he was quaestor of the grain supply at Ostia, and the slur remained with him throughout the rest of his life. During his first term as a tribune of the plebs he allied himself with Gaius Marius and succeeded in securing lands in Africa for resettlement of Marius’s veteran troops. He also defined a new kind of treason, “maiestas minuta” or “little treason,” and set up a special court to try cases of it. His second term as a tribune of the plebs in 100 B.C. was also in alliance with Marius, for whom he obtained more land for veterans from the German campaign. But eventually Saturninus became more of an embarrassment to Marius than a help, so Marius repudiated him publicly; Saturninus then turned against Marius. Toward the end of 100 B.C., Saturninus began to woo the Head Count, as there was a famine at the time, and the Head Count was restless. He passed a grain law which he could not implement, as there was no grain to be had. When the elections were held for the tribunate of the plebs for 99 B.C., Saturninus ran again, only to be defeated. His boon companion, Gaius Servilius Glaucia, arranged the murder of one of the lucky candidates, and Saturninus took the dead man’s place. He was tribune of the plebs for the third time. Stirred by the famine and Saturninus’s oratory, the Forum crowds became dangerous enough to force Marius and Scaurus Princeps Senatus into an alliance which resulted in the passing of the Senate’s Ultimate Decree. Apprehended after the water supply to the Capitol was cut off, Saturninus and his friends were imprisoned in the Senate House until they could be tried. But before the trials could take place, they were killed by a rain of tiles from the Senate House roof. All of Saturninus’s laws were then annulled. It was said ever after that Saturninus had aimed at becoming King of Rome. His daughter, Appuleia, was married to the patrician Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. For a fuller narration of the career of Saturninus, see the entry in the glossary of The Grass Crown.

  Scipio Africanus Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus was born in 236 B.C. and died around the end of 184 B.C. A patrician of august family, he distinguished himself as a very young man in battle, then at the age of twenty-six, still a private citizen, he was invested with a proconsular imperium by the People rather than the Senate, and dispatched to fight the Carthaginians in Spain. Here for five years he did brilliantly, winning for Rome her two Spanish provinces. Consul at the early age of thirty-one, he ignored senatorial opposition and invaded Africa via Sicily. Both Sicily and Africa eventually fell, and Scipio was invited to assume the cognomen Africanus. He was elected censor and appointed Princeps Senatus in 199 B.C., and was consul again in 194 B.C. As farsighted as he was brilliant, Scipio Africanus warned Rome that Antiochus the Great of Syria would invade Greece; when it happened he went as his brother Lucius’s legate to fight the invader. But Cato the Censor, a rigid moralist, had always condemned the Scipiones for running a morally loose army, and embarked upon a persecution of Africanus and his brother which seems to have caused Africanus’s early death. Scipio Africanus was married to Aemilia Paulla, the sister of the conqueror of Macedonia. One of his two daughters was Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi. His two sons failed to prosper.

  Scythians A nomadic, horse—mounted people of probable Germanic stock who lived in the Asian steppelands to the east of the Tanais River (the Don), and extended as far south as the Caucasus. They were socially well organized enough to have kings, and were famous goldsmiths.

  secret name of Rome Rome, presumably in the guise of goddess Roma, had a secret name. This secret name was apparently guarded by a special goddess, Diva Angerona, whose statue (located on the altar in the shrine of Volupia) had a bandage across its mouth. There were arcane rites celebrated in which the name was uttered, but the taboo was strictly enforced and the danger of uttering the secret name was believed in even by the most sophisticated people. It seems most thought the secret name was Amor, which is Roma spelled backward. Amor means “love.”

  sedan chair An open chair on a frame designed to be carried by two to four men. A sedan chair could probably be hired like a taxi.

  Seleucid The adjective of lineage attached to the royal house of Syria, whose sovereigns were descended from Seleucus Nicator, one of Alexander the Great’s companions, though not one of his known generals. After Alexander’s death he cemented a kingdom which eventually extended from Syria and Cilicia to Media and Babylonia, and had two capitals, Antioch and Seleuceia—on—Tigris, and two wives, the Macedonian Stratonice and the Bactrian Apama. By the last century B.C. the Kingdom of the Parthians had usurped the eastern lands, and Rome most of Cilicia; the kingdom of the Seleucids was then purely Syria.

  Senate Properly, senatus. This was originally a patricians—only body which first contained one hundred members and then three hundred. Because of its antiquity the legal definitions of its rights, powers and duties were mostly nonexistent. Membership in the Senate was for life (unless a man was expelled by the censors for inappropriate behavior or impoverishment), which predisposed it to the oligarchical form it acquired. Throughout its history, its members fought strenuously to preserve their pre-eminence in government. Until Sulla prevented access to the Senate save by the quaestorship, appointment was in the purlieus of the censors, though from the middle Republic down the quaestorship if held before admission to the Senate was soon followed by admission to the Senate; the lex Atinia provided that tribunes of the plebs should automatically enter the Senate upon election. There was a means test of entirely unofficial nature; a senator was supposed to enjoy an income of a million sesterces. Senators alone were entitled to wear the latus clavus on their tunics; this was a broad purple stripe down the right shoulder. They wore closed shoes of maroon leather, and a ring which had originally been made of iron, but later came to be gold. Senatorial mourning consisted of wearing the knight’s narrow stripe on the tunic. Only men who had held a curule magistracy wore a purple-bordered toga; ordinary senators wore plain white. Meetings of the Senate had to be held in properly inaugurated premises; the Senate had its own curia or meetinghouse, the Curia Hostilia, but was prone also to meet elsewhere at the whim of the man convening the meeting—presumably he always had well-founded reasons for choosing a venue other than the Senate House, like a necessity to meet outside the pomerium. The ceremonies and meeting and feast on New Year’s Day were always held in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Sessions could go on only between sunrise and sunset, and could not take place on days when any of the Assemblies met, though were permissible on comitial days if no Assembly did meet. Until Sulla reorganized this as he did so much else, the rigid hierarchy of who spoke in what turn had always placed the Princeps Senatus and consulars ahead of men already elected to office but not yet in office, whereas after Sulla consuls—elect and praetors—elect spoke ahead of these men; under both systems a patrician always preceded a plebeian of exactly equal rank in the speaking hierarchy. Not all members of the house were accorded the privilege of speaking. The senatores pedarii (I have used a British parliamentary term, backbenchers, to describe them, as they sat behind the men allowed to speak) could vote, but were not called upon in debate. No restrictions were placed upon the time limit or content of a man’s speech, so filibustering was common. If an issue was unimportant or everyone was obviously in favor of it, voting might be by voice or a show of hands, but a formal
vote took place by the division of the House, meaning that the senators left their stations and grouped themselves to either side of the curule dais according to their yea or nay, and were then physically counted. Always an advisory rather than a true legislating body, the Senate issued its consulta or decrees as requests to the various Assemblies. If the issue was serious, a quorum had to be present before a vote could be taken, though we do not know what precise number constituted a quorum. Certainly most meetings were not heavily attended, as there was no rule which said a man appointed to the Senate had to attend meetings, even on an irregular basis. In some areas the Senate reigned supreme, despite its lack of legislating power: the fiscus was controlled by the Senate, as it controlled the Treasury; foreign affairs were left to the Senate; and the appointment of provincial governors, the regulation of provincial affairs, and the conduct of wars were left for the sole attention of the Senate.

  senatus consultant de re publica defendenda The Senate’s Ultimate Decree, so known because Cicero shortened its proper title to senatus consultum ultimum. Dating from 121 B.C., when Gaius Gracchus resorted to violence to prevent the overthrow of his laws, in civil emergencies the Senate overrode all other governmental bodies by passing the senatus consultum de re publica defendenda. This Ultimate Decree proclaimed the Senate’s sovereignty and established what was, in effect, martial law. It was really a way to sidestep appointing a dictator.

  Servian Walls Mums Servii Tullii. Republican Romans believed that the formidable walls enclosing the city of Rome had been erected in the time of King Servius Tullius. However, evidence suggests that they were not built until after Rome was sacked by the Gauls in 390 B.C. Down to the time of Caesar the Dictator they were scrupulously kept up.