Something rustled across the floor behind me. I grabbed the hilt of my knife and turned, just in time to glimpse the long tail of a rat slithering between two rolled carpets stacked against the wall. ‘And then the child was born,’ I said. ‘And then what?’
‘That was the end of them both.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The end of Elena. The end of the child.’
‘What happened?’
‘It was the night she went into her labour. Everyone in the household knew her time had come. The women seemed to know without being told; the male slaves were nervous and testy. That was the same night that the steward told Felix and me that Capito was sending us back to Rome. To Magnus, we thought; he was in the city then, along with Mallius Glaucia. But the steward said no, that we were being sent to a new master altogether.
‘The next morning they herded us out bright and early and loaded us into an ox cart with a few other objects that were headed for Chrysogonus’s house – furniture, crates, that sort of thing. And just before we were to leave, they brought out Elena.
‘She could hardly stand, she was so weak. Thin and wasted, pasty, damp with sweat – she must have given birth only hours before. There was no place for her to lie in the cart; the best we could do was to make our clothes into padding and help her sit against the crates. She was groggy and feverish, she hardly knew where she was, but she kept asking for the baby.
‘Finally the midwife came running out of the house. She was breathless, weeping, hysterical. “For the gods’ sake,” I whispered to her, “where is the child?” She stared at Elena, afraid to speak. But Elena hardly seemed conscious; she was lying against Felix’s shoulder, muttering, shivering, her eyelids flickering. “A boy,” the midwife whispered, “it was a boy.”
‘ “Yes, yes,” I said, “but where is it? We’ll be going any minute!” You can imagine how confused and angry I was, wondering how we would ever manage to take care of a frail mother and a newborn infant. “Dead,” the midwife whispered, so low that I could barely hear. “I tried to stop him, but I couldn’t – he tore the boy away from me. I followed him all the way to the quarry and watched him throw the child onto the rocks.”
‘Then the driver came, with Capito behind him, yelling at him to start right away. Capito was as white as chalk. Oh, how strange! I remember it all in this very instant, as if I were there now! The crack of the driver’s whip. The cart beginning to roll, the house receding. Everything loose and jostling. Elena suddenly awake, whimpering for her baby, too weak to cry out. Capito staring after us, as stiff as a pillar, ashen-faced, like a column of ash! And the midwife dropping to her knees, clutching Capito about the thighs, crying, “Master, mercy!” And just as we were driving onto the road, a man came running around the corner of the house, breathing hard, then stepping back into the shade of the trees – Sextus Roscius. The last I saw or heard was the midwife clutching at Capito and crying out louder and louder, “Master, mercy!”’
He took a shuddering breath and turned his face to the wall. Felix laid his hand on Chrestus’s shoulder and continued the story. ‘What a journey that was! Three days – no, four – in a jolting ox cart. Enough to splinter your bones and make your jaw come unhinged. We walked as much of the way as we could, but one of us had to stay in the cart with Elena. She could eat nothing. She never slept, but she never seemed awake, either. At least we were spared from having to tell her about the baby. On the third day she started bleeding between her legs. The driver wouldn’t stop until sundown. We found a midwife who could staunch the bleeding, but Elena was as hot as a coal. The next day she died in our arms, within sight of the Fontinal Gate.’
The lamp sputtered and the room became dim. Felix calmly stooped and picked up the lamp, took it to a bench in the corner of the room, and added more oil. In the flaring light I saw Tiro staring at the two slaves, his eyes wide and moist.
‘Then it was Capito who killed the child?’ I said, without conviction, like an actor speaking the wrong line.
Felix stood with his hands tightly laced, his knuckles bone white. Chrestus looked up at me, blinking like a man awakened from a dream. ‘Capito?’ he said quietly. ‘Well, I suppose. I told you, Magnus and Glaucia were far away in Rome. Who else could it have been?’
XXVI
Chrysogonus’s house was large, but not sprawling after the manner of Caecilia’s mansion; yet somehow, without the girl Aufilia to guide us, Tiro and I took a wrong turn in search of the slaves’ stairway. After a failed attempt to trace our steps backwards, we found ourselves in a narrow gallery that opened onto the empty balcony that overlooked our hiding place by the cypress trees outside the pantry door.
From somewhere within the house rose the sound of a warbling voice – a man singing unnaturally high, or else a woman singing very low. It grew louder as I pulled Tiro closer to the inner wall. The sound seemed to come from behind a thin tapestry. I pressed my ear next to a lecherous Priapus surrounded by equally lecherous wood nymphs, and could almost make out the words.
‘Quietly, Tiro,’ I whispered, gesturing for him to help me lift the tapestry’s bottom edge and roll it upward, revealing a narrow, horizontal slit cut through the stone wall.
The aperture was wide enough so that two could comfortably stand abreast and share the view it afforded down onto Chrysogonus and his company. The lofty room in which he entertained rose from the marble floor to the domed roof without interruption. The window through which we peered was cut at a sharp downward angle, so that no edge obscured our view – a spy hole, plain and simple.
Like everything else in Chrysogonus’s house, the dinner was sumptuous and overblown. Four low tables, each surrounded by a semicircle of nine couches, were gathered around an open space at the room’s centre. Cicero or even Caecilia Metella would no doubt have balked at the idea of entertaining more than eight visitors at a time – few unwritten laws of Roman manners are more unyielding than that which holds that a host should never gather more visitors at his table than he can comfortably converse with at once. Chrysogonus had gathered four times that number at four tables piled high with delicacies – olives slitted and stuffed with fish eggs, bowls of noodles flecked with the first tender asparagus sprouts of the season, figs and pears suspended in a yellow syrup, the carcasses of tiny fowl. The mingled smells rose on the warm air. My stomach growled.
Most of the guests were men; the few women among them stood out on account of their obvious voluptuousness – not wives or lovers, but courtesans. The younger men were uniformly slender and good-looking; the older men had that indolent, well-groomed look of the very rich at play. I looked from face to face, ready to dart from the window until I realized there was not much chance that any of them would look upward. All eyes were turned on the singer who stood in the centre of the room, or else cast fleeting, sly glances at Sulla or in the direction of a young man who sat fidgeting and chewing his fingers at the table of least distinction.
The singer was dressed in a flowing purple gown embroidered in red and grey. Masses of black hair streaked with white rose in great waves and ringlets in a coiffure so architecturally complex it was almost comic. When he turned in our direction I saw his painted face, made up in shades of chalk and umber to cover his wrinkled eyes and heavy jowls, and I recognized at once the famous female impersonator Metrobius. I had seen him a few times before, never in public and never performing, only in glimpses on the street and once at the house of Hortensius when the great lawyer had deigned to let me past his door. Sulla had taken a fancy to Metrobius long ago in their youth, when Sulla was a poor nobody and Metrobius was (so they say) a beautiful and bewitching entertainer. Despite the ravages of time and all the vagaries of Fortune, Sulla had never abandoned him. Indeed, after five marriages, dozens of love affairs, and countless liaisons, it was Sulla’s relationship with Metrobius that had endured longer than any other.
If Metrobius had once been slender and beautiful, I suppose at one time he must have been a fine si
nger, too. He was wise now to restrict his performances to private affairs among those who loved him, and to limit his repertoire to comic effects and parodies. Yet despite the hoarse voice and the strained notes, there was something in his florid mannerisms and the subtle gestures of his hands and eyebrows that made it impossible not to watch his every move. His performance was something between singing and orating, like a poem chanted to the accompaniment of a single lyre. Occasionally a drum joined in when the theme became martial. He pretended to take every word with utmost seriousness, which only enhanced the comic effect. He must have already begun changing the lyrics before we chanced on the scene, because the young poet and aspiring sycophant who had ostensibly authored the paean was suffering a visible agony of embarrassment.
Who recalls the days when Sulla was a lad,
Homeless and shoeless with not a coin to be had?
And how did he pull himself up from this hole?
How did he rise to his fate, to his role?
Through a hole! Through a hole!
Through the gaping cavern of well-worn size
That yawned between Nicopolis’s thighs!
The audience howled with laughter. Sulla shook his head disdainfully andpretended to glower. On the couch next to him, Chrysogonus practically glowed with delight. At the same table Hortensius was whispering in the ear of the young dancer Sorex, while Rufus looked bored and disgusted. Across the room the rewritten poet blanched fish-belly white.
With each succeeding verse the song grew increasingly ribald and the crowd laughed more and more freely. Soon Sulla himself was laughing out loud. Meanwhile the poet chewed his lip and squirmed, changing colours like a coal in the wind, blanching white at each impiety and blushing scarlet at each tortured rhyme. Having finally caught the joke, he seemed at first relieved – no one would blame him for the travesty, after all, and even Sulla was amused. He managed a timid smile, but then he withdrew into a sulk, no doubt offended at the wreckage that had been made of his patriotic homage. The other young men at his table, having failed to tease him to laughter, turned their backs on him and laughed all the louder. Romans love the strong man who can laugh at himself, and despise the weak man who cannot.
The song continued.
It is not true that Lucius Cornelius Sulla was homeless as a boy. Neither, I imagine, was he ever without shoes, but in every account of his origins, his early poverty is stressed.
The patrician Cornelii were once a family of some influence and prestige, generations ago. One of them, a certain Rufinus, held the consulship, back in the days when the office actually denoted a man of integrity and character. His career ended in scandal – imagine those righteous days when it was illegal for a citizen to own more than ten pounds of silver plate! Rufinus was expelled from the Senate. The family declined and dwindled into obscurity.
Until Sulla. His own childhood was blighted by poverty. His father died young, leaving him nothing, and in his younger days Sulla lived in tenements among exslaves and widows. His enemies have charged that his rise to power and wealth, after such humble beginnings, was a sure sign of corruption and depravity. His allies and Sulla himself like to dwell on the mystique of what they call his good fortune, as if some divine will, rather than Sulla’s own purpose and character, propelled him to so many triumphs and so much bloodshed.
His youth gave no sign of the great career to come. His education was haphazard. He moved among theatre people – acrobats, comedians, costumers, poets, dancers, actors, singers. Metrobius was among his first lovers, but far from the only one. It was among the vagabonds of the stage that his lifelong reputation for promiscuity began.
They say that young Sulla was quite charming. He was a big-boned, square-jawed lad with a stocky frame, his wide soft middle compensated by muscular shoulders. His golden hair made him stand out in a crowd. His eyes, so I have heard contemporaries recount, were as extraordinary then as now – piercing and pale blue, dominating all in their gaze and confounding those who gazed back, appearing merely mischievous while he perpetrated the most atrocious crimes, looking terrible and severe when he was merely intent on pleasure.
Among his first conquests was the wealthy widow Nicopolis. Her favours were notoriously accessible to virtually any young man who wanted them; it was said that she had resolved to give her body to all men but her heart to none. By all accounts, Sulla fell genuinely and deeply in love with her. At first she scoffed at his devotion, but ultimately his persistence and charm undid her resolve, and she found herself in love at the age of fifty with a youth less than half her age. When she died of a fever she left everything to Sulla. His good fortune had begun.
Another legacy came from his stepmother, his father’s second wife, who in her widowhood had inherited a considerable sum from her own family. She died leaving Sulla her only heir, thus establishing him with a moderate fortune.
Having conquered the mysteries of flesh and gold, Sulla decided to enter politics through military service. Marius had just been elected to the first of his seven consulships; Sulla got himself appointed quaestor and became the great populist’s protégé. In Africa to fight Jugurtha, Sulla engaged in marital derring-do, espionage, and the diplomacy of the perfectly timed double cross. The tortuously complicated details are all in his Memoirs, the first volumes of which are already circulating around Rome in purloined copies. The vanquished Jugurtha was brought to the city naked and chained and died shortly after in his dungeon cell, half-crazy from torture and humiliation. Marius had overseen the campaign, but it was Sulla, at the risk of his own life, who had persuaded the King of Numidia to betray his doomed son-in-law. Marius was afforded a triumphal parade, but many whispered that it was Sulla who deserved the credit.
Praise for Sulla rankled the old populist, and though Marius continued to use Sulla, elevating his rank with each campaign, soon the old man’s jealousy drove Sulla to seek other patrons. Taking command of the troops of the consul Catulus, Sulla subdued the wild tribes of the Alps. When premature winter storms trapped the legions in the foothills without adequate food, Sulla did an expert job of rerouting and supplying fresh provisions – not only to his own troops, but also to those of Marius, who became livid with indignation. The long, withering rivalry between Sulla and Marius, which was ultimately to cause so much grief and chaos in Rome, began with such incidents of petty jealousy.
Sulla travelled east, where Fortune led him to further victories in Cappadocia. On diplomatic business he ventured as far as the Euphrates, and became the first Roman official ever to hold friendly discourse with that kingdom that owns the rest of the world, the Parthians. His charm (or else his blind arrogance) must have worked a wicked spell upon the Parthian ambassador, who actually allowed himself to be seated on a lower dais than Sulla, as if he were a suppliant of a Roman overlord. Afterwards the King of Parthia put the ambassador to death – having lost face, the man subsequently lost his head, a joke Sulla never tired of repeating.
Every powerful man must have omens of greatness attached to his legend – stars fell from the firmament at the birth of Alexander, Hercules strangled a snake in his cradle, eagles battled overhead when Romulus and Remus were torn from their mother’s womb. It was while entertaining the Parthian retinue that Sulla’s career begins to take on the patina of legend. Truth or fiction, only Sulla now knows for certain, but the story goes that a Chaldean savant attached to the Parthian retinue performed a study of Sulla’s face, plumbing his character by using principles of science unknown in the West. Probably he was searching for weaknesses he could report to his Parthian masters, but instead the wise man drew back in astonishment. Sulla, never guilty of false modesty, recounts the old Chaldean’s reaction word for word in his Memoirs: ‘Can a man be so great and not be the greatest of all men on earth? It astounds me – not his greatness, but the fact that even now he abstains from taking his place as first in all things above his fellow men!’
When Sulla returned to Rome, Marius was not happy to see him.
The bone of contention snapped when a statue arrived from the friendly King of Numidia, commemorating the end of the African war and Jugurtha’s downfall. Beneath the outstretched wings of Victory the gilded figures depicted the King handing over the chained Jugurtha to the King’s great friend, Sulla. Marius was nowhere depicted. Marius nearly went out of his mind in a jealous rage at the idea of Sulla stealing his glory, and threatened to destroy the statue with his own hands unless the Senate passed legislation to remove it from the Capitol. The rhetoric on either side escalated until the breach between the two men was irreparable. Violence would surely have followed, but at that moment all private feuds were abruptly postponed by the eruption of the Social War between Rome and her Italian allies.
The scale of the Social War was unprecedented on Italian soil, as was the suffering and disruption it caused. But finally compromises were reached, intransigent rebels were mercilessly punished, and Rome endured, but not all Roman politicians fared equally well. Marius, well over sixty, his military powers faded and his health erratic, accomplished practically nothing in the war. Sulla, in the prime of his manhood and riding the crest of good fortune, was everywhere at once, making his reputation as hero, saviour, destroyer, currying the favour of the legions and amassing political prestige.
When it was over, Sulla had his first consulship at the respectable age of fifty. Rome, like a patient in violent throes, having just survived one great spasm, was about to undergo another.
Marius’s populist movement reached its peak. His right-hand man was the radical tribune and demagogue Sulpicius, the elected representative of the masses, whose every move mocked the power and prestige of the noble establishment. Under Sulpicius, Roman citizenships were sold at auction to exslaves and aliens in the Forum, an act of impiety that drove the old nobility to apoplexy. More insidiously, Sulpicius gathered a private army of three thousand swordsmen from the equestrian class, ambitious and ruthless young men ready for anything. From these he culled an elite bodyguard of six hundred who milled constantly about the Forum. Sulpicius called them his Anti-Senate.
Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) Page 38