Roma.The novel of ancient Rome r-1

by Steven Saylor

  There followed a long silence. At last Blossius stepped forward. There were tears in his eyes. “My dear boy! I boast about having been your tutor, but the student has far surpassed his teacher! Always you were clever, always you were serious and disciplined-yet I never imagined that Cornelia’s little boy would grow up to cast such a shadow over us all.”

  Tiberius smiled wanly. “Blossius, I think you’re slightly missing the point. When I say that politicians come and go, while the destiny of the people endures, I mean just that. I have no illusions about my importance or about my permanence, except insofar as I may find a way to channel the power of the people for the benefit of the people, and for the greater glory of Roma.”

  “Of course. Well put!” Blossius dabbed the sleeves of his tunic against his moist eyes. “But you say you came looking for me?”

  “Yes. There are some purely practical matters I want to discuss. Appius Claudius thinks I should propose shortening the term of military service, ahead of the election. He also thinks we should put forward the idea of allowing nonsenators to serve as judges.”

  “This requires serious discussion. Perhaps at your mother’s house?”

  “Of course. Menenia and Lucius have put up with my ramblings long enough.”

  “Nonsense!” said Menenia. “You’re welcome in this house at any time, Tiberius. You know I love to hear you speak! But you must do something about that hoarseness. An infusion of mint and honey in hot water can do wonders.”

  “I’ll try it,” promised Tiberius. “Good day, Menenia. And good day to you, Lucius.” He smiled, but Lucius merely nodded in response. Tiberius and Blossius took their leave.

  The garden suddenly seemed very quiet and still, and somehow empty. Mother and son sat apart, thinking their separate thoughts.

  Tiberius’s story of the placards in the countryside, apparently so heart-felt, left Lucius unmoved. To him it seemed that Tiberius must be either a compulsive politician, unable to stop emoting and speechifying even in a friend’s garden, or else a genuine idealist, blinded by visions of grandeur and indifferent to the terrible dangers ahead of him. In either case, Tiberius’s passionate words made Lucius feel more uneasy than ever.

  Menenia was thinking of her friend Cornelia, and how very differently their sons had turned out. Which was better: to have a son who blazed a trail like a comet, with all the brilliant uncertainty of celestial fire, or to have a son as stolid and predictable as a lump of earth? Menenia had to admit that she envied Cornelia, at least for now. But would she have reason to pity Cornelia in the future?

  “If only the election for tribunes wasn’t held in the middle of the summer,” complained Tiberius. “That’s precisely when my strongest supporters are away from Roma, searching for harvesting work in the countryside. Blossius, do you think you could…?”

  A fold of Tiberius’s toga was refusing to hang correctly across one shoulder. Blossius straightened it. “It’s no accident that the elections take place when they do,” the philosopher observed. “The ruling families of Roma have always arranged every aspect of every election in order to give themselves the greatest advantage and the common people the least. But if the cause is just and the candidate is steadfast, the will of the people will not be thwarted.”

  Cornelia stepped into the room. “Let me have a look at you, Tiberius.” Her son obligingly stood back and struck a pose, clutching the folds of his toga with one hand. “How splendid you look! Your father and grandfather would be very proud. I only wish your little brother were here to see you.” Gaius had been sent to scour the countryside for supporters and persuade them to return to Roma for the election.

  Cornelia gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Come along, then. The augur has arrived. He’s waiting for us in the garden. Stop rolling your eyes, Blossius! I know what you think of religious formalities, but this ritual must be observed for the sake of tradition. Tiberius’s father and grandfather would never have appeared before the voters on an election day without consulting an augur first.”

  In the garden, the augur placed a cage with three chickens on the ground. He circled the cage three times, invoking the gods and the ancestors of Tiberius Gracchus. He scattered grain on the ground, some to the right and some to the left of the cage, then opened the hatch. The auspices would be determined by observing the motion of the birds, whether they moved in a group or as individuals and in which direction; to the right indicated the favor of the gods, to the left indicated their disfavor.

  But the chickens did not leave the cage. They clucked and bumped against one another, ignoring the open hatch. The augur stamped his foot. He made shooing motions. Eventually, he gripped the top of the cage and gave it a good shaking. Finally, one of the chickens emerged. The bird ignored both scatterings of grain. It lifted its left wing, then turned around and scurried back into the cage.

  The augur looked acutely embarrassed. “The auspices…are inconclusive,” he said.

  Cornelia frowned. “The left wing,” she whispered. She felt a premonition of dread.

  “Unfortunately” said Tiberius, “the science of augury is not as exact as we might wish. A veil lies across the future. The future shall arrive anyway.”

  Mother and son exchanged a long look. Cornelia could see that Tiberius was as uneasy as herself, but she said nothing.

  Tiberius proceeded to the vestibule. He paused to gaze at the images of his ancestors. He touched the brow of the great Africanus, then nodded to the slave to open the door.

  Outside, in the street, a throng of supporters awaited him. Many had spent the night in front of the house, taking turns sleeping and guarding the door. In the final days of the campaign, the rhetoric on both sides had grown so heated, and the street scuffles between the factions so violent, that many feared for Tiberius’s safety. There was a rumor that his enemies were conspiring to murder him before the election; his opponents claimed that Tiberius himself had started the rumor, to whip up his supporters. Whatever the truth, a great crowd awaited him in the street, and when they saw him, they erupted into cheering.

  Smiling broadly, Tiberius stepped forward. He stumbled on the threshold and lost his balance. Staggering forward, he stubbed the big toe of his left foot against a paving stone with such force that he thought he heard a bone crack. At the very least, the nail of the toe had been broken. Blood seeped through the front of his shoe and darkened the leather. He felt faint and nauseated. He reached for support, found Blossius’s arm, and gripped it tightly.

  “You’ve hurt yourself!” whispered Blossius.

  “Did they see?” Tiberius kept his face down and spoke through clenched teeth.

  Blossius scanned the cheering crowd. “No one seems to have noticed.”

  “Good. Then we shall go ahead as if it never happened.”

  “But can you walk?”

  “If I hold fast to your arm. But first I’ll say a few words. These men have been here all night, waiting for this moment.”

  Tiberius looked at the crowd and managed to smile. He raised his hands for silence.

  “Loyal supporters, dear friends, fellow Romans: The long night has passed, and, whatever mischief our enemies might have been planning, we are all still alive!”

  This was met with a great deal of cheering and laughter.

  “You watched over me all through the night. For that, I thank you. And in return, in the second year of my tribunate, I promise to do my very best to watch over all of you-to restore to you the lands that are rightfully yours, to protect you from the greedy land-grabbers and their vicious gangs, and to make the Roma of your children a fairer, richer, better place for all hardworking citizens.

  “To do all that, I must win today’s election. And to win the election, first and foremost, I must stay alive. The threat from our enemies is very real. At any place and at any time, I might be assaulted. I don’t fear a fight; I’ve done my share of fighting! I was the first to scale the walls of Carthage, and was awarded the mural crown. I also fought in Spa
in, alongside many of you brave men. But here in Roma, I am no longer a soldier, but a private citizen. I carry no weapons. You must be my guardians. Without your protection, I am defenseless.”

  “We’ll defend you!” cried a man in the front of the crowd. “If we have to, we’ll die for you, Tiberius Gracchus!” He was joined by many others.

  “It will never come to that, I pray to Jupiter. But if I should perceive an immediate threat, and require a ring of brave men around me, I may not be able to cry out to you. My voice is hoarse, and the din may be too great. So, this will be my signal.” Tiberius raised both arms skyward, then bent his elbows so that he pointed at his head with both hands. The sign was unmistakable: rally to the head.

  The crowd began to clap and chant his name. Tiberius gripped Blossius’s arm with one hand and waved with the other. He walked forward, trying not to wince at the pain. “Perhaps it’s a good thing, that I stumbled,” he whispered to Blossius. “The auspices indicated a bad start. Now the bad start is behind me!”

  Limping slightly despite Blossius’s support, Tiberius set out for the Capitoline, where the voting would take place. As he descended the Palatine, more supporters joined his retinue. Many more were waiting in the Forum. They opened a path for him, cheering and reaching out to touch him as he passed by, then joined the throng that followed behind him.

  On the steps leading up to the Capitoline, Tiberius paused before the Arch of Scipio Africanus. The monument was decorated with images of his grandfather’s triumphs in both Africa and Asia. Scipio had survived the battle of Cannae and shamed his fellow officers by his fortitude, had lost the father whose life he had saved in battle, and had matched wits with Hannibal and beaten him. Tiberius laughed aloud at the absurdity that a stubbed toe should give him a moment’s pause. He made a silent vow to ascend to the voting place without limping or leaning on Blossius, and to show no sign of pain.

  He had passed under the arch and proceeded a short distance when he heard a noise from above. Screeching and beating their wings, two ravens were fighting on the roof of a building next to the pathway, to his left. Their altercation dislodged a roof tile. The tile fell directly in front of Tiberius and shattered with a loud noise. Tiberius flinched.

  “The augury, the stumble…and now this!” he whispered. “One bad omen after another-”

  “Nonsense!” said Blossius in his ear. “Chickens behave like chickens. People stub their toes every day. Ravens squabble. Tiberius, if you start to see omens in every accident and happenstance, you will indeed be putting on the airs of a king; only a tyrant imagines the universe revolves around himself. A raven dislodged a loose bit of tile-nothing more!”

  Tiberius nodded, straightened his toga, and continued the ascent.

  The large open space before the Temple of Jupiter was already crowded when Tiberius arrived with his retinue. Only plebeians could vote for the tribunes, and they did so by first gathering into voting blocks called tribes. Even on the most peaceful of election days, the polling officials were hard-pressed to maintain order; for their own protection and to hold back the unruly crowd they were allowed to carry spear-shafts without metal points. News of Tiberius’s arrival was met with a tremendous uproar of mingled acclamation and jeering. Jostled this way and that, some in the crowd retaliated by shoving back. Fistfights broke out. The election officials scrambled to maintain order by brandishing their shafts.

  Over the centuries, the assembly area had become so congested with shrines and statues, and the number of voters had so increased, that the simple procedure of assembling into tribes had become a logistical challenge. Elections could be won or lost depending on whether a candidate’s supporters were able to assemble when called on. Tiberius’s supporters had arrived early and in great numbers to claim the best spots for addressing the crowd and to maintain open pathways. If the supporters of opposition candidates could be kept at the periphery of the voting area or excluded altogether, Tiberius’s chances would be increased.

  With Blossius at his side and surrounded by a cadre of his most ardent supporters, Tiberius was ushered through the crowd and escorted onto the steps of the Temple of Jupiter. At the sight of him, more cheering erupted from the center of the crowd and catcalls from the edges.

  He had hoped to address the crowd, but the unceasing din made doing so impossible. He had never seen such a raucous election assembly. The participants seemed to be in continuous motion, shouting and gesturing. Scattered here and there, especially around the periphery or in the tight spots where a statue or shrine made movement difficult, skirmishes appeared to be taking place. It was not unlike watching a battlefield.

  Some of the election officials, growing exasperated, were banging their shafts against the ground, calling for order and demanding that the gathering of the tribes begin. The voters were either unwilling to cooperate, or unable to hear them. The scene was chaotic.

  A pathway opened in the crowd and one of Tiberius’s supporters in the Senate, Fulvius Flaccus, rushed toward him, breathless with alarm.

  “Tiberius, I’ve just come from an emergency meeting of the Senate. All morning your enemies have been demanding that the consul Scaevola declare today’s election an illegal assembly-”

  “Illegal? The people have the right to elect tribunes-”

  “They claim the disorder is too great, a menace to public safety-or worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “Your cousin Scipio Nasica says you’re mustering a mob to bring down the state. After you massacre your opponents in the Senate, you’ll declare yourself king-”

  “Nasica!” Tiberius spat the word. The two cousins, both heirs to the bloodline of Africanus, despised each other. There was no greater reactionary in the Senate than Nasica. While Tiberius had made himself the champion of the common people, Nasica made no secret of despising them. Even when he campaigned for their votes, he could not resist insulting them. “I know better than you lot what is good for the state,” he had once shouted at an unruly crowd; opponents joked that this was his idea of a campaign slogan. And once, shaking the horny palm of a farm laborer, Nasica had snidely commented, “How does one get such calluses? Do you walk on your hands?”

  Blossius spoke up. “The consul Scaevola is a good man.”

  “Indeed he is,” said Flaccus. “He’s refused to sanction any attempt to cancel the election. But that hasn’t stopped Nasica. ‘If the consul won’t act to save the state, then private citizens must do so’-that’s what Nasica said. He and a number of other senators gathered outside, and then they were joined by a gang of cutthroats-the roughest sort of men you can imagine, armed with clubs.”

  “They planned this ahead of time,” said Blossius.

  “Obviously!” said Flaccus. “And now they’re coming this way, with Nasica leading them. They mean to kill you, Tiberius! They think they’re on a sacred mission-the senators have wrapped the red hem of their togas across their foreheads, like priests about to carry out a sacrifice!”

  Tiberius’s blood ran cold. He stared at the unsuspecting crowd.

  “The signal!” cried Blossius. “Give the signal!”

  Tiberius raised his arms in the air. The movement drew the attention of the crowd. With all eyes on him, Tiberius pointed to his head.

  His supporters understood at once. They seized the shafts carried by the election officials, broke them in pieces, and passed the fragments among themselves; the longer sections could serve as cudgels and the splintered ends as daggers. There were a number of benches throughout the assembly area. They began to smash these as well, to use the fragments as weapons.

  Tiberius’s opponents in the crowd took the signal to mean something else. “He points at his head-he’s demanding a crown!” men cried. “Look at his followers, gathering weapons-they mean to take the Capitoline by force. They’ll declare Tiberius king!”

  Amid the mounting chaos, there was an even greater commotion at the entry to the assembly area. Nasica and his fellow senators, with their gang
of cutthroats, had arrived.

  A violent free-for-all followed. On the Palatine and down in the Forum, and even on the far side of the Tiber men could hear the sounds of combat atop the Capitoline.

  Several of Tiberius’s supporters ran to his side and offered him their weapons, but he refused to take them. Instead he turned his back on the melee, faced the Temple of Jupiter, and raised his arms in prayer.

  “Jupiter, greatest of gods, protector of my grandfather in battle-”

  Blossius seized the folds of his toga and shouted at him. “Go inside the temple! Run! When they come for you, claim Jupiter’s protection-”

  Blossius was struck across the belly by a club. With the breath knocked out of him, he fell to his knees.

  Hands converged on Tiberius. They grabbed his toga and pulled it off him. Wearing only his under-tunic, Tiberius bolted up the steps of the temple, limping because of his injured toe; he tripped on a step and fell forward. Before he could get to his feet, a cudgel struck his head and sent him reeling. He blindly struggled to his feet and stood swaying for a moment. Another club, swung with tremendous force, struck his head and shattered his skull with a sickening crack.

  Blossius had just managed to get to his feet. Red gore and pale bits of brain spattered his robes. He stood aghast and gaping at the bloody remains that lay crumpled on the steps.

  One of the killers recognized him. “It’s the Greek philosopher-the would-be king’s adviser!”

  “Toss him from the Tarpeian Rock!”

  Whooping and laughing, they seized Blossius by his hands and feet and carried him down the steps. They headed toward the rock, dodging clubs and hopping over corpses that littered the way.

  They reached the precipice, but instead of shoving him over, they made sport of swinging him back and forth, back and forth, gaining momentum.