The Grass Crown

by Colleen McCullough

  "Gaius Marius, I stopped calling you Uncle when I came to you after your stroke because I thought your stroke put us on much the same level. Your dignitas is diminished, mine is enhanced. We are equals. But in some things I am definitely your superior," said the boy fearlessly. "As a favor to my mother—and because I thought I could be of help to a great man—I gave up my free time to keep you company and get you walking again. You declined to lie on your couch and have me read to you, and the mine of stories you had to tell me are all told. I know every flower and every shrub and every weed in this whole garden! And I say to you straight, it has outlived its purpose. Tomorrow we're going out the door into the Clivus Argentarius. I don't care whether we go up it and onto the Campus Martius, or whether we go down it through the Porta Fontinalis. But tomorrow we go out!"

  Fierce brown eyes glared down into rather chilly blue ones; no matter how Marius disciplined himself to ignore it, Young Caesar's eyes always reminded him of Sulla's. Like encountering some huge cat on a hunting expedition, and discovering that the orbs which ought to be yellow were instead a pale blue ringed round with midnight. Such cats were considered visitors from the Underworld; perhaps too were such men?

  The duel of gazes continued unabated.

  "I won't go," said Marius.

  "You will go."

  "The gods rot you, Young Caesar! I cannot give in to a boy! Haven't you some more diplomatic way of putting things?"

  Pure amusement flooded into those unsettling eyes, gave them a life and attractiveness quite alien to Sulla's. "When dealing with you, Gaius Marius, there is no such thing as diplomacy," said Young Caesar. "Diplomatic language is the prerogative of diplomats. You are not a diplomat, which is a mercy. One always knows where one stands with Gaius Marius. And that I like as much as I like you."

  "You're not going to take no for an answer, are you, boy?" Marius asked, feeling his will crumble. First the steel, then the fur mitten. What a technique!

  "You're right, I will not take no for an answer."

  "Well then, sit me down over there, boy. If we are to go out tomorrow, I'm going to need a rest now." A rumble came up through his throat. "How about we go outside with me in a litter, all the way to the Via Recta? Then I could hop out and we could walk to your heart's content."

  "When we get as far as the Via Recta, Gaius Marius, it will be as the result of our own efforts."

  For a while they sat in silence, Young Caesar keeping himself perfectly still; it had not taken him long to realize that Marius detested fidgeting, and when he had said so to his mother, she had simply observed that if such was the case, learning not to fidget would be very good training. He might have discovered how to get the best of Gaius Marius, but he couldn't get the best of his mother!

  What had been required of him was, of course, not what any lad of ten wanted to do, or liked doing. Every single day after lessons with Marcus Antonius Gnipho finished, he had to abandon all his ideas of wandering off with his friend Gaius Matius from the other ground-floor apartment, and go instead to Marius's house to keep him company. There was no time left for himself because his mother refused to allow him to skip a day, an hour, a moment.

  "It is your duty," she would say upon the rare occasions when he would beg to be permitted to go with Gaius Matius to the Campus Martius to witness some very special event— the choosing of the war-horses to run in the October race, or a team of gladiators hired for a funeral on the following day strutting through their paces.

  "But I will never not have duty of some kind!" he would say. "Is there to be no moment when I can forget it?"

  And she would answer, "No, Gaius Julius. Duty is with you in every moment of your life, in every breath you draw, and duty cannot be ignored to pander to yourself.''

  So off he would go to the house of Gaius Marius, no falter in his step, no slowing of his pace, remembering to smile and say hello to this one and that as he hurried through the busy Suburan streets, forcing himself to go a little faster as he passed by the bookshops of the Argiletum in case he succumbed to the lure of going inside. All the product of his mother's cool yet remorseless teaching—never dawdle, never look as if you have time to spare, never indulge yourself even when it comes to books, always smile and say hello to anyone who knows you, and many who don't.

  Sometimes before he knocked on Gaius Marius's door he would run up the steps of the Fontinalis tower and stand atop it to gaze down on the Campus Martius, longing to be there with the other boys—to cut and thrust and parry with a wooden sword, to pound some idiot bully's head into the grass, to steal radishes from the fields along the Via Recta, to be a part of the rough-and-tumble. But then—long before his eyes could grow tired of the scene—he would turn away, lope down the tower steps and be at Gaius Marius's door before anyone could realize he was a few moments late.

  He loved his Aunt Julia, who usually answered the door to him in person; she always had a special smile for him, and a kiss too. How wonderful to be kissed! His mother did not approve of the habit, she said it had a corrupting influence, it was too Greek to be moral. Luckily his Aunt Julia didn't feel the same. When she leaned forward to plant that kiss upon his lips—she never, never turned her head aside to aim for cheek or chin—he would lower his lids and breathe in as deeply as he could, just to catch every last morsel of her essence in his nostrils. For years after she had passed from the world, the aging Gaius Julius Caesar would scent a faint tendril of her perfume stealing off some woman's skin, and the tears would spring to his eyes before he could control them.

  She always gave him the day's report then and there: "He's very cross today," or, "He's had a visit from a friend and it's put him in an excellent mood," or, "He thinks the paralysis is becoming worse, so he's very down.''

  The routine was that she fed him his dinner in the midafternoon, sending him off to snatch a respite from his duties with Gaius Marius while she fed Gaius Marius his dinner herself. He would curl up on the couch in her workroom and read a book as he ate—something he would never have been allowed to do at home—and bury himself in the doings of heroes, or the verses of a poet. Words enchanted him. They could make his heart soar or stumble or gallop; there were times when, as with Homer, they painted for him a world more real than the one he lived in.

  "Death can find nothing to expose in him that is not beautiful," he would say over and over to himself, picturing the young warrior dead—so brave, so noble, so perfect that, be he Achilles or Hector or Patroclus, he triumphed even over his own passing.

  But then he would hear his aunt calling, or a servant would come to knock on the workroom door and tell him he was wanted again, and down would go the book immediately, his burden shouldered once more. Without resentment or frustration.

  Gaius Marius was a heavy burden. Old—thin and fat and then thin again—his skin hanging in sloppy folds and wattles—that frightful fleshly landslide down the left side of his face—and the look in those terrible eyes. He drooled from the left side of his mouth without seeming to know he drooled, so that the gobbet hung until it made contact with his tunic and soaked into a permanently wet patch. Sometimes he ranted, mostly at his hapless watch-pup, the only person who was tethered to him for long enough to use as a verbal vent for all that ire; sometimes he would weep until tears joined the spittle, and his nose ran disgustingly too; sometimes he would laugh at some private joke until the very rafters shook and Aunt Julia would come drifting in with her smile plastered in place, and gently shoo Young Caesar home.

  At first the child felt helpless, not knowing what to do or how to do it. But he was a creature of infinite resource, so in time he found out how to handle Gaius Marius. It was either that, or fail in the task his mother had given him—a thought so unthinkable he could not begin to imagine the consequences. He also discovered the flaws in his own nature. He lacked patience, for one thing, though his mother's training enabled him to conceal this shortcoming under mountains of what genuinely seemed like patience, and in the end he came not to
know the difference between real patience and assumed patience. Being of strong stomach he came not to notice the drooling, and being of strong mind he came to know what must be done. No one ever told him, for no one ever understood save he; even the physicians. Gaius Marius must be made to move. Gaius Marius must be made to exercise. Gaius Marius must be made to see that he would live again as a normal man.

  "And what else have you learned from Lucius Decumius, or some other Suburan ruffian?" Marius asked.

  The lad jumped, so sudden was the question, so aimless and faraway his own thoughts. "Well, I've pieced something together—if I'm right. I think I am."

  "What?"

  "The reason behind Cato the Consul's decision to leave Samnium and Campania to Lucius Cornelius and transfer himself to your old command against the Marsi."

  "Oho! Tell me your theory, Young Caesar."

  "It's about the kind of man I think Lucius Cornelius has to be," said Young Caesar seriously.

  "What kind of man is that?"

  "A man who can make other men very afraid."

  "He can that!"

  "He must have known he would never be given the southern command. It belongs to the consul. So he didn't bother to argue. He just waited for Lucius Cato the Consul to arrive in Capua, and then he cast a spell that frightened Cato the Consul so badly that Cato the Consul decided to put as big a distance between himself and Campania as he possibly could."

  "How did you piece that hypothesis together?"

  "From Lucius Decumius. And from my mother."

  "She'd know," said Marius cryptically.

  Frowning, Young Caesar glanced sideways at him, then shrugged. "Once Lucius Cornelius has the top command and no one stupid to hamper him, he has to do well. I think he's a very good general."

  "Not as good as me." Marius sighed, half a sob.

  The boy pounced immediately. "Now don't you start to feel sorry for yourself, Gaius Marius! You'll be fit to command again, especially once we get out of this silly garden.''

  Not up to this attack, Marius changed the subject. "And has your Suburan grapevine told you how Cato the Consul is doing against the Marsi?" he asked, and snorted. "No one ever tells me what's going on—they think it might upset me! What upsets me, however, is not knowing what goes on. If I didn't hear from you, I'd explode!"

  Young Caesar grinned. "My grapevine has it that the consul got into trouble the moment he arrived in Tibur. Pompey Strabo took your old troops—he's very good at that!—so Lucius Cato the Consul is left with none save raw recruits—farm boys newly enfranchised, from Umbria and Etruria. Not only is he at a loss how to train them, but his legates don't know either. So he commenced his training program by calling an assembly of the whole army. He harangued them without pity. You know the sort of thing— they were idiots and yokels, cretins and barbarians, a miserable lot of worms, he was used to far better, they'd all be dead if they didn't smarten up, and so forth."

  "Shades of Lupus and Caepio!" cried Marius incredulously.

  "Anyway, one of the men assembled at Tibur to hear all this rubbish is a friend of Lucius Decumius's. Name of Titus Titinius. By profession Titus Titinius is a retired veteran centurion whom you gave a bit of your Etrurian land to after Vercellae. He says he did you a good turn once."

  "Yes, I remember him very well," said Marius, trying to smile and dribbling copiously.

  Out came Young Caesar's "Marius handkerchief" as he called it; the saliva was wiped neatly away. "He comes to Rome to stay with Lucius Decumius regularly because he likes to hear the goings-on in the Forum. But when the war broke out he enlisted as a training centurion. He was based in Capua for a long time, but he was sent to help Cato the Consul at the beginning of this year.''

  "I presume Titus Titinius and the other training centurions hadn't had a chance to begin to train when Cato the Consul delivered his harangue at Tibur?"

  "Exactly. But he didn't exclude them from the harangue.

  And that was how he got into trouble. Titus Titinius became so angry as he listened to Cato the Consul abuse everybody that he finally bent down and picked up a big clod of earth. And he threw it at Cato the Consul! The next thing, everyone was bombarding Cato the Consul with clods of earth! He ended knee-deep in them, with his army on the verge of mutiny." Finding inspiration, the boy chuckled. "Marred, mired, muzzled!"

  "Stop fiddling around with words and get on with it!"

  "Sorry, Gaius Marius."

  "So?"

  "He wasn't hurt at all, but Cato the Consul felt that his dignitas and auctoritas had suffered intolerably. Instead of just forgetting the incident, he clapped Titus Titinius in chains and sent him to Rome with a letter asking that the Senate try him for inciting a mutiny. He arrived this morning, and he's sitting in the Lautumiae cells."

  Marius began to struggle to his feet. "Well, that settles our destination tomorrow morning, Young Caesar!" he said, sounding quite lighthearted.

  "We're going to see what will happen to Titus Titinius?"

  "If it's in the Senate, boy, I am, anyway. You can wait in the vestibule."

  Young Caesar hauled Marius up and moved automatically to his left side to take the weight of the useless limbs. "I won't need to do that, Gaius Marius. He's being brought before the Plebeian Assembly. The Senate wants nothing to do with it."

  "You're a patrician, you can't stand in the Comitia when the Plebs are meeting. But in my state, I can't either. So we will find a good spot on top of the Senate steps and watch the circus from there," said Marius. "Oh, I needed this! A Forum circus is far better than anything the aediles can ever think to put in the games!"

  If Gaius Marius had ever doubted the depth of the love the people of Rome bore him, those fears would have been laid to rest the following morning when he emerged from his house and turned to negotiate the steep slope of the Clivus Argentarius as it plunged down through the Fontinalis Gate to end in the lower Forum. In his right hand he had a stick, on his left side he had the boy Gaius Julius Caesar—and soon, to right and to left of him, in front and behind him, he had every man and woman in the vicinity. He was cheered, he was wept over; with every grotesque step, the out-thrust of his right leg and the terrible dragging of his left leg twisting his hip, those who clustered around urged him on. Soon the word was going on ahead of him, so glad, so uplifted:

  "Gaius Marius! Gaius Marius!"

  When he entered the lower Forum the cheers were deafening. Sweat standing on his brow, leaning more heavily on Young Caesar than anyone there knew save he and Young Caesar, he hauled himself around the lip of the Comitia. Two dozen senators rushed to lift him to the top of the Curia Hostilia podium, but he held them at bay and struggled, step by dreadful step, all the way up. A curule chair was brought, he got himself down onto it with no help from anyone except the boy.

  "Left leg," he said, chest heaving.

  Young Caesar understood at once, got down on his knees and pulled the useless member forward until it rested ahead of the right in the classic pose, then took the inanimate left arm and laid it across Marius's lap, hiding the stiff clumped fingers of the hand beneath a fold of toga.

  Gaius Marius sat then more regally than any king, bowing his head to acknowledge the cheers while the sweat rolled down his face and his chest labored like a gigantic bellows. The Plebs were already convoked, but every last man in the well of the Comitia turned to face the Senate steps and cheered, after which the ten tribunes of the plebs on the rostra called for three vast hurrahs.

  The boy stood beside the curule chair and looked down at the crowd, this his first experience of the extraordinary euphoria so many united people could generate, feeling the adulation brush his cheek because he stood so close to its source, and understanding what it must be like to be the First Man in Rome. And as the cheers eventually died down his sharp ears caught the murmured whispers,

  "Who is that beautiful child?"

  He was well aware of his beauty, and aware too of the effect it had on others; since he liked to
be liked, he also liked being beautiful. If he forgot what he was there for, however, his mother would be angry, and he hated vexing her. A bead of drool was forming in the flaccid corner of Marius's mouth, it must be wiped away. He took the Marius handkerchief from the sinus of his purple-bordered child's toga, and while the whole crowd sighed in tender admiration, he dabbed the sweat from Marius's face and at the same time whisked the gobbet away before anyone could notice it.

  "Conduct your meeting, tribunes!" Marius cried loudly when he could find the breath.

  "Bring the prisoner Titus Titinius!" ordered Piso Frugi, the President of the College. "Members of the Plebs gathered here in your tribes, we meet to decide the fate of one Titus Titinius, pilus prior centurion in the legions of the consul Lucius Porcius Cato Licinianus. His case has been referred to us, his peers, by the Senate of Rome after due consideration. The consul Lucius Porcius Cato Licinianus alleges that Titus Titinius did strive to incite a mutiny, and demands that we deal with him as severely as the law allows. As mutiny is treason, we are here to decide if Titus Titinius should live or die."

  Piso Frugi paused while the prisoner, a big man in his early fifties clad only in a tunic, chains attached to manacles about his wrists and ankles, was led onto the rostra and made to stand at the front, to one side of Piso Frugi.

  "Members of the Plebs, the consul Lucius Porcius Cato Licinianus states in a letter that he did call an assembly of all the legions of his army, and that while he was addressing this legally convoked assembly, Titus Titinius, the prisoner here on display, did strike him with a missile thrown from the shoulder, and that Titus Titinius did then incite all the men around him to do the same. The letter bears the consul's seal."

  Piso Frugi turned to the prisoner. "Titus Titinius, how answer you?"

  "That it's true, tribune. I did indeed strike the consul with a missile thrown from the shoulder." The centurion paused, then said, "A clod of soft earth, tribune, that was my missile. And when I threw it, everyone around me did the same."