1. First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

  4

  The spring rains didn't fall in Sicily or Sardinia, and in Africa they were scanty. Then when what wheat had come up started to form ears, the rains came in torrents; floods and blights utterly destroyed the crop. Only from Africa would a tiny harvest find its way to Puteoli and Ostia. Which meant that Rome faced her fourth year of high grain prices, and a shortage in quantity spelling famine. The junior consul and flamen Martialis, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, found himself with empty granaries beneath the cliffs of the Aventine adjacent to the Port of Rome, and the private granaries along the Vicus Tuscus held very little. This very little, the grain merchants informed Flaccus and his aediles, would sell for upward of fifty sesterces per modius, a mere thirteen pounds in weight. Few if any Head Count families could afford to pay a quarter so much. There were other and cheaper foods available, but a shortage of wheat sent all foodstuffs up in price because of increased consumption and limited production. And bellies used to good bread found no satisfaction in thin gruel and turnips, which became the staples of the lowly in times of famine; the strong and healthy survived, but the old, the weak, the very young, and the sickly all too often died. By October the Head Count was growing restive; thrills of fear began to run through the ordinary residents of the city. For the Head Count of Rome deprived of food was a prospect no one living cheek by jowl with them could face without a thrill of fear. Many of the Third and Fourth Class citizens, who would find it difficult anyway to buy such costly grain, began to lay in weapons to defend their larders from the depredations of those owning even less. Lucius Valerius Flaccus conferred with the curule aediles responsible for grain purchases on behalf of the State as well as for the storage and sale of State grain and applied to the Senate for additional funds to buy in grain from anywhere it could be obtained, and of any kind barley, millet, emmer wheat as well as bread wheat. However, few in the Senate were really worried; too many years and too much insulation from the lower classes of citizens separated them from the last Head Count famine riots. To make matters worse, the two young men serving as Rome's Treasury quaestors were of the most exclusive and unpitying kind of senator, and thought little of the Head Count at the best of times. Both when elected quaestor had asked for duty inside Rome, declaring that they intended to “arrest the unwarranted drains upon Rome's Treasury" an impressive way of saying that they had no intention of releasing money for Head Count armies or Head Count grain. The urban quaestor more senior of the two was none other than Caepio Junior, son of the consul who had stolen the Gold of Tolosa and lost the battle of Arausio; the other was Metellus Piglet, the son of the exiled Metellus Numidicus. Both had scores to settle with Gaius Marius. It was not senatorial practice to run counter to the recommendations of the Treasury quaestors. Questioned in the House as to the state of fiscal affairs, both Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet said flatly there was no money for grain. Thanks to the massive outlays it had been called upon to make for a number of years outfitting and paying and feeding Head Count armies, the State was broke. Neither the war against Jugurtha nor the war against the Germans had brought in anything like enough money in spoils and tributes to rectify the State's negative financial balance, said the two Treasury quaestors. And produced their tribunes of the Treasury and their account books to prove their point. Rome was broke. Those without the money to pay the going price for grain would have to starve. Sorry, but that was the reality of the situation. By the beginning of November the word had reached all of Rome that there would be no reasonably priced State grain, for the Senate had refused to vote funds for its purchase. Couched in the form of rumor, the word didn't mention crop failures or cantankerous Treasury quaestors; it simply stated that there would be no cheap grain. The Forum Romanum immediately began to fill up with crowds of a nature not usually seen there, while the normal Forum frequenters melted away or tacked themselves onto the back of the newcomers. These crowds were Head Count and the Fifth Class, and their mood was ugly. Senators and other togate men found themselves hissed by thousands of tongues as they walked what they regarded as their traditional territory, but at first were not easily cowed; then the hissing became showers of pelted filth faeces, manure, stinking Tiber mud, rotten garbage. Whereupon the Senate extricated itself from these difficulties by suspending all meetings, leaving unfortunates like bankers, knight merchants, advocates, and tribunes of the Treasury to suffer the besmirching of their persons without senatorial support. Not strong enough to take the initiative, the junior consul, Flaccus, let matters drift, while Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet congratulated themselves upon a job well done. If the winter saw a few thousand Head Count Romans die, that meant there would be fewer mouths to feed. At which point the tribune of the plebs Lucius Appuleius Saturninus convoked the Plebeian Assembly, and proposed a grain law to it. The State was to buy immediately every ounce of wheat, barley, and millet in Italy and Italian Gaul and sell it for the ridiculously cheap price of one sestertius per modius. Of course Saturninus made no reference to the impossible logistics of shipping anything from Italian Gaul to regions south of the Apennines, nor the fact that there was almost no grain to buy anywhere south of the Apennines. What he wanted was the crowd, and that meant placing himself in the eyes of the crowd as its sole savior. Opposition was almost nonexistent in the absence of a convened Senate, for the grain shortage affected everyone in Rome below the level of the rich. The entire food chain and its participants were on Saturninus's side. So were the Third and Fourth Classes, and even many of the centuries of the Second Class. As November edged over the hump of its middle and down the slope toward December, all Rome was on Saturninus's side. "If people can't afford to buy wheat, we can't afford to make bread!" cried the Guild of Millers and Bakers. "If people are hungry, they don't work well!" cried the Guild of Builders. “If people can't afford to feed their children, what's going to happen to their slaves?" cried the Guild of Freedmen. "If people have to spend their money on food, they won't be able to pay rent!" cried the Guild of Landlords. "If people are so hungry they start pillaging shops and overturning market stalls, what will happen to us?" cried the Guild of Merchants. "If people descend on our allotments in search of food, we won't have any produce to sell!" cried the Guild of Market Gardeners. For it was not the simple matter of a famine killing off a few thousand of the Head Count; the moment Rome's middle and poorer citizens could not afford to eat, a hundred and one kinds of businesses and trades suffered in their turn. A famine, in short, was an economic disaster. But the Senate wasn't coming together, even in temples off the beaten track, so it was left to Saturninus to propose a solution, and his solution was based upon a false premise; that there was grain for the State to buy. He himself genuinely thought there was, deeming every aspect of the crisis a manufactured one, and the culprits an alliance between the Policy Makers of the Senate and the upper echelons of the grain barons. Every one of the thousands of faces in the Forum turned to him as heliotropes to the sun; working himself into a passion through the force of his oratory, he began to believe every single word he shouted, he began to believe every single face his eyes encountered in the crowd, he began to believe in a new way to govern Rome. What did the consulship really matter? What did the Senate really matter, when crowds like these made it shove its tail between its legs and slink home? When the bets were on the table and the moment to throw the dice arrived, they were all that mattered, these faces in this enormous crowd. They held the real power; those who thought they held it did so only as long as the faces in the crowd permitted it. So what did the consulship really matter? What did the Senate really matter? Talk, hot air, a nothing! There were no armies in Rome, no armies nearer to Rome than the recruit training centers around Capua. Consuls and Senate held their power without force of arms or numbers to back them up. But here in the Forum was true power, here were the numbers to back that true power. Why did a man have to be consul to be the First Man in Rome? It wasn't necessary! Had Gaius Gracchus too realized that? Or was he forced to kill himself before he could r
ealize it? I, thought Saturninus, gobbling up the vision of the faces in his mighty crowd, shall be the First Man in Rome! But not as consul. As tribune of the plebs. Genuine power lay with the tribunes of the plebs, not with the consuls. And if Gaius Marius could get himself elected consul in what promised to be perpetuity, what was to stop Lucius Appuleius Saturninus's getting himself elected tribune of the plebs in perpetuity? However, Saturninus chose a quiet day to pass his grain bill into law, chiefly because he retained the wisdom to see that senatorial opposition to providing cheap grain must continue to appear high-handed and elitist; therefore no enormous crowd must be present in the Forum to give the Senate an opportunity to accuse the Plebeian Assembly of disorder, riot, violence, and denounce the law as invalid. He was still simmering about the second agrarian bill, Gaius Marius's treachery, Metellus Numidicus's exile; that in fact the law was still engraved on the tablets was his doing, not Gaius Marius's. Which made him the real author of land grants for the Head Count veterans. November was short on holidays, especially holidays on which the Comitia could meet. But his opportunity to find a quiet day came when a fabulously wealthy knight died, and his sons staged elaborate funeral gladiatorial games in their father's honor; the site chosen for the games normally the Forum Romanum was the Circus Flaminius, in order to avoid the crowds gathering every day in the Forum Romanum. It was Caepio Junior who spoiled Saturninus's plans. The Plebeian Assembly was convoked; the omens were auspicious; the Forum was inhabited by its normal frequenters because the crowd had gone off to the Circus Flaminius; the other tribunes of the plebs were busy with the casting of the lots to see which order the tribes were going to vote in; and Saturninus himself stood to the front of the rostra exhorting the groups of tribes forming in the well of the Comitia to vote the way he wanted. In the conspicuous absence of senatorial meetings, it had not occurred to Saturninus that any members of the Senate were keeping an eye on events in the Forum, barring his nine fellow tribunes of the plebs, who simply did as they were told these days. But there were some members of the Senate who felt quite as much contempt for that body's craven conduct as did Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. They were all young, either in their quaestorian year or at most two years beyond that point, and they had allies among the sons of senators and First Class knights as yet too young to enter the Senate or senior posts in their fathers' firms. Meeting in groups at each other's homes, they were led by Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet, and they had a more mature confidant-adviser to give direction and purpose to what might otherwise have ended up merely a series of angry discussions foundering in an excess of wine. Their confidant-adviser was rapidly becoming something of an idol to them, for he possessed all those qualities young men so admire he was daring, intrepid, cool-headed, sophisticated, something of a high liver and womanizer, witty, fashionable, and had an impressive war record. His name was Lucius Cornelius Sulla. With Marius laid low in Cumae for what seemed months, Sulla had taken it upon himself to watch events in Rome in a way that, for instance, Publius Rutilius Rufus would never have dreamed of doing. Sulla's motives were not completely based on loyalty to Marius; after that conversation with Aurelia, he had looked very detachedly at his future prospects in the Senate, and come to the conclusion that Aurelia was right: he would, like Gaius Marius, be what a gardener would call a late bloomer. In which case it was pointless for him to seek friendship and alliance among those senators older than himself. Scaurus, for instance, was a lost cause. And how convenient that particular decision was! It would keep him out of the way of Scaurus's delectable little child-bride, now the mother of baby Aemilia Scaura; when he had heard the news that Scaurus had fathered a girl, Sulla experienced a shaft of pure pleasure. Served the randy old goat right. Thinking to safeguard his own political future while preserving Marius's, Sulla embarked upon the wooing of the senatorial younger generation, choosing as his targets those who were malleable, able to be influenced, not very intelligent, extremely rich, from important families, or so arrogantly sure of themselves they left themselves open to a subtle form of flattery. His primary targets were Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet, Caepio Junior because he was an intellectually dense patrician with access to young men like Marcus Livius Drusus (whom Sulla did not even try to woo), and Metellus Piglet because he knew what was going on among the older Good Men. No one knew better than Sulla how to woo young men, even when his purposes held no kind of sexuality, so it was not long before he was holding court among them, his manner always tinged with amusement at their youthful posturings in a way which suggested to them that there was a hope he would change his mind, take them seriously. Nor were they adolescents; the oldest among them were only some seven or eight years his junior, the youngest fifteen or sixteen years his junior. Old enough to consider themselves fully formed, young enough to be thrown off balance by a Sulla. And the nucleus of a senatorial following which in time would be of enormous importance to a man determined to be consul. At this moment, however, Sulla's chief concern was Saturninus, whom he had been watching very closely since the first crowds began to gather in the Forum, and the harassment of togate dignitaries began. Whether the lex Appuleia frumentaria was actually passed into law or not was far from Sulla's main worry; what Saturninus needed, Sulla thought, was a demonstration that he would not have things all his own way. When some fifty of the young bloods met at the house of Metellus Piglet on the night before Saturninus planned to pass his grain law, Sulla lay back and listened to the talk in an apparent idle amusement until Caepio Junior rounded on him and demanded to know what he thought they ought to do. He looked marvelous, the thick red-gold hair barbered to bring out the best of its waves, his white skin flawless, his brows and lashes dark enough to show up (had they only known it, he touched them with a trace of stibium, otherwise they virtually disappeared), his eyes as glacially compelling as a blue-eyed cat's. "I think you're all hot air," he said. Metellus Piglet had been brought to understand that Sulla was anything but Marius's tame dog; like any other Roman, he didn't hold it against a man that he attached himself to a faction, any more than he assumed that man could not be detached. "No, we're not all hot air," he growled without a single stammer. "It's just that we don't know what's the right tactic." "Do you object to a little violence?" Sulla asked. "Not when it's to protect the Senate's right to decide how Rome's public money is to be spent," said Caepio Junior. "And there you have it," said Sulla. "The People have never been accorded the right to spend the city's moneys. Let the People make the laws we don't object to that. But it's the Senate's right to provide any money the People's laws demand and the Senate's right to deny funding. If we're stripped of our right to control the purse-strings, we have no power left at all. Money is the only way we can render the People's laws impotent when we don't agree with them. That's how we dealt with the grain law of Gaius Gracchus." "We won't prevent the Senate's voting the money when this grain law goes through," said Metellus Piglet, still without a stammer; when with his intimates he didn't stammer. "Of course not!" said Sulla. "We won't prevent its being passed, either. But we can show Lucius Appuleius a little of our strength all the same." Thus as Saturninus stood exhorting his voters to do the right thing by the lex Appuleia frumentaria, the crowds no closer than the Circus Flaminius and the meeting as orderly as any consular could demand, Caepio Junior led some two hundred followers into the lower Forum Romanum. Armed with clubs and billets of wood, most of them were beefy muscular fellows with the slack midriffs which suggested they were ex-gladiators now reduced to hiring out their services for any sort of job requiring strength or the capacity to turn nasty. However, all the fifty present at Metellus Piglet's house the night before led the vanguard, Caepio Junior very much the leader of the pack. Lucius Cornelius Sulla was not among them. Saturninus shrugged and watched impassively as the gang marched across the Forum, then turned back to the well of the Comitia and dismissed the meeting. "There'll be no heads broken on my account!" he shouted to the voters, dissolving their tribal clumps in alarm. "Go home, come back to
morrow! We'll pass our law then!" On the following day the Head Count was back in attendance on the Comitia; no gang of senatorial toughs appeared to break up the meeting, and the grain bill passed into law. "All I was trying to do, you thick-headed idiot," said Saturninus to Caepio Junior when they met in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, where Valerius Flaccus had felt the Conscript Fathers would be safe from the crowds while they argued about funding for the lex Appuleia frumentaria, "was pass a lawful law in a lawfully convoked assembly. The crowds weren't there, the atmosphere was peaceful, and the omens were impeccable. And what happens? You and your idiot friends come along to break a few heads!" He turned to the clusters of senators standing about. "Don't blame me that the law had to be passed in the middle of twenty thousand Head Count! Blame this fool!" “This fool is blaming himself for not using force where force would have counted most!" shouted Caepio Junior. "I ought to have killed you, Lucius Appuleius!" "Thank you for saying that in front of all these impartial witnesses," said Saturninus, smiling. "Quintus Servilius Caepio Junior, I hereby formally charge you with minor treason, in that you did attempt to obstruct a tribune of the plebs in the execution of his duty, and that you did threaten to harm the sacrosanct person of a tribune of the plebs." "You're riding a half-mad horse for a fall, Lucius Appuleius," said Sulla. "Get off before it happens, man!" "I have laid a formal charge against Quintus Servilius, Conscript Fathers," said Saturninus, ignoring Sulla as nobody of importance, "but that matter can now be left to the treason court. Today I'm here to demand money." There were fewer than eighty senators present, in spite of the safe location, and none of significance; Saturninus glared at them contemptuously. "I want money to buy grain for the People of Rome," he said. "If you haven't got it in the Treasury, I suggest you go out and borrow it. For money I will have!" Saturninus got his money. Red-faced and protesting, Caepio Junior the urban quaestor was ordered to mint a special coinage from an emergency stockpile of silver bars in the temple of Ops, and pay for the grain without further defiance. "I'll see you in court," said Saturninus sweetly to Caepio Junior as the meeting finished, "because I'm going to take great pleasure in prosecuting you myself." But in this he overstepped himself; the knight jurors took a dislike to Saturninus, and were already favorably disposed toward Caepio Junior when Fortune showed that she too was most favorably disposed toward Caepio Junior. Right in the middle of the defending counsel's address came an urgent letter from Smyrna to inform his son that Quintus Servilius Caepio had died in Smyrna, surrounded by nothing more comforting than his gold. Caepio Junior wept bitterly; the jury was moved, and dismissed the charges. Elections were due, but no one wanted to hold them, for still each day the crowds gathered in the Forum Romanum, and still each day the granaries remained empty. The junior consul, Flaccus, insisted the elections must wait until time proved Gaius Marius incapable of conducting them; priest of Mars though he was, Lucius Valerius Flaccus had too little of Mars in him to risk his person by supervising elections in a climate like this present one.