The Grass Crown

by Colleen McCullough

  Looking on the naked Sulla now provoked no sexual desire in her, just a winded amazement at his beauty and virility and a winded realization that the difference between Sulla and Scaurus was minimal after all. Beauty. Virility. They were the real differences. Sulla wasn't going to kneel at her feet and weep for love of her! She had not conquered him! He was going to conquer her. With his ram battering down her gates.

  "Take that thing off, Dalmatica," he said.

  She took her nightgown off with the alacrity of a child caught out in some sin, while he smiled and nodded.

  "You're lovely," he said, a purr in his voice, stepped up to her, slid his erection between her legs, and gathered her close. Then he kissed her, and Dalmatica found herself in the midst of more sensations than she had ever known existed—the feel of his skin, his lips, his penis, his hands— the smell of him clean and sweet, like her children after their baths.

  And so, waking up, growing up, she discovered dimensions which had nothing to do with dreams or fantasies and everything to do with living, conjoined bodies. And from love she fell into adoration, physical enslavement.

  To Sulla she manifested the bewitchment he had first known with Julilla, yet magically mixed with echoes of Metrobius; he soared into an ecstatic delirium he hadn't experienced in almost twenty years. I am starved too, he thought in wonder, and I didn't even know it! This is so important, so vital to me! And I had lost all sight of it.

  Little wonder then that nothing from that first incredible day of marriage to Dalmatica had the power to wound him deeply—not the boos and hisses he still experienced from those in the Forum who deplored his treatment of Aelia, not the malicious innuendo of men like Philippus who only saw Dalmatica's money, not the crippled form of Gaius Marius leaning on his boy, not the nudges and winks of Lucius Decumius nor the sniggers of those who deemed Sulla a satyr and Scaurus's widow an innocent, not even the bitter little note of congratulations Metrobius sent round with a bouquet of pansies.

  Less than two weeks after the marriage they moved into a huge mansion on the Palatine overlooking the Circus Maximus and not far from the temple of Magna Mater. It had frescoes better than those in the house of Marcus Livius Drusus, pillars of solid marble, the best mosaic floors in Rome, and furniture of an opulence more suited to an eastern king than a Roman senator. Sulla and Dalmatica even boasted a citrus-wood table, its priceless peacock-grained surface supported by a gold-inlaid ivory pedestal in the form of interlocked dolphins; a wedding gift from Metellus Pius the Piglet.

  Leaving the house in which he had lived for twenty-five years was another much-needed emancipation. Gone the memories of awful old Clitumna and her even more awful nephew, Stichus; gone the memories of Nicopolis, Julilla, Marcia, Aelia. And if the memories of his son were not gone, he had at least removed himself from the pain of seeing and feeling things his son had seen and felt, could no longer look in through the vacant nursery door and have an image of a laughing, naked little boy leap at him from nowhere. With Dalmatica he would start anew.

  It was Rome's good fortune that Sulla lingered in the city far longer than he would have did Dalmatica not exist; he was there to supervise his program of debt relief and think of ways to put money in the Treasury. Shifting mightily and snatching income at every conceivable opportunity, he managed to pay the legions (Pompey Strabo kept his word and sent in a very light wages bill) and even a little of the debt to Italian Gaul, and saw with satisfaction that business in the city seemed on the verge of a slight recovery.

  In March, however, he had seriously to think of tearing himself away from his wife's body. Metellus Pius was already in the south with Mamercus; Cinna and Cornutus were scouring the lands of the Marsi; and Pompey Strabo—complete with son but without the letter-writing prodigy Cicero—skulked somewhere in Umbria.

  But there was one thing left to do. Sulla did it on the day before his departure, as it did not require the passage of a law. It lay in the province of the censors. This pair had been dilatory in the matter of the census, even though Piso Frugi's law had confined the new citizens to eight of the rural tribes and two new tribes, a distribution which could not destroy the tribal electoral status quo. They had provided themselves with a technical illegality in case the temperature of censorial waters grew too hot for their thin skins to bear and discretion dictated that they should resign their office; when directed by the augurs to conduct a very small and obscure ceremony, they had deliberately neglected to do so.

  "Princeps Senatus, Conscript Fathers, the Senate is facing its own crisis," said Sulla, remaining without moving beside his own chair, as was his habit. He held out his right hand, in which reposed a scroll of paper. "I have here a list of those senators who will never attend this House again. They are dead. Just a little over one hundred of them. Now the largest part of the one hundred names on this list belongs to the pedarii, backbenchers who craved no special distinction in this House, did not speak, knew no more law than any senator must. However, there are other names— names of men we already miss acutely, for they were the stuff of court presidents, special judges and adjudicators and arbitrators, legal draftsmen, legislators, magistrates. And they have not been replaced! Nor do I see a move to replace them!

  "I mention: the censor-and Princeps Senatus, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus; the censor and Pontifex Maximus, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus; the consular Sextus Julius Caesar; the consular Titus Didius; the consul Lucius Porcius Cato Licinianus; the consul Publius Rutilius Lupus; the consular Aulus Postumius Albinus; the praetor Quintus Servilius Caepio; the praetor Lucius Postumius; the praetor Gaius Cosconius; the praetor Quintus Servilius; the praetor Publius Gabinius; the praetor Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus; the praetor Aulus Sempronius Asellio; the aedile Marcus Claudius Marcellus; the tribune of the plebs Marcus Livius Drusus; the tribune of the plebs Marcus Fonteius; the tribune of the plebs Quintus Varius Severus Hybrida Sucronensis; the legate Publius Licinius Crassus Junior; the legate Marcus Valerius Messala."

  Sulla paused, satisfied; every face was shocked.

  "Yes, I know," he said gently. "Not until the list is read out can we fully appreciate how many of the great or the promising are gone. Seven consuls and seven praetors. Fourteen men eminently qualified to sit in judgment, comment upon laws and customs, guard the mos maiorum. Not to mention the six other names of men who would have led in time or joined the ranks of the leaders very soon. There are other names besides—names I have not read out, but which include tribunes of the plebs who made lesser reputations during their terms, yet were nonetheless experienced men."

  "Oh, Lucius Cornelius, it is a tragedy!" said Flaccus Princeps Senatus, a catch in his voice.

  "Yes, Lucius Valerius, it is that," Sulla agreed. "There are many names not on this list because they are not dead, but who are absent from this House for various reasons— on duty overseas, on duty elsewhere in Italy than Rome. Even in the winter hiatus of this war I have not managed to count more than one hundred men assembled in this body politic, though no senators resident in Rome are absent in this time of need. There is also a considerable list of senators at present in exile due to the activities of the Varian Commission or the Plautian Commission. And men like Publius Rutilius Rufus.

  "Therefore, honored censors Publius Licinius and Lucius Julius, I ask you most earnestly to do everything in your power to fill our seats. Give the opportunity to men of substance and ambition in the city to join the disastrously thinned ranks of the Senate of Rome. And also appoint from among the pedarii those men who should be advanced to give their opinions and urged to take on more senior office. All too often there are not enough men present to make a quorum. How can the Senate of Rome purport to be the senior body in government if it cannot make a quorum?"

  And that, concluded Sulla, was that. He had done what he could to keep Rome going, and given an inert pair of censors a public kick up the backside to do their duty. Now it was time to finish the war against the Italians.

  VIII (88 B.C.)

 
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  1

  The one aspect or government Sulla had completely overlooked had been invisible to everybody since the death of the much-missed Marcus Aemilius Scaurus; his successor, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, had made a halfhearted attempt to draw it to Sulla's attention, but quite lacked the forceful personality to do so. Nor could Sulla be blamed for his oversight. Italy had become the focus of the entire Roman world, and those physically embroiled in the mess could see no further than it.

  One of the last duties Scaurus had attended to concerned the two dethroned kings, Nicomedes of Bithynia and Ariobarzanes of Cappadocia; the doughty old Princeps Senatus had sent a commission to Asia Minor to investigate the situation anent King Mithridates of Pontus. The delegation's leader was Manius Aquillius, he who had been Gaius Marius's valued legate at the battle of Aquae Sextiae, Marius's colleague in the fifth of his consulships, and victor of the Sicilian slave war. With Aquillius went two other commissioners, Titus Manlius Mancinus and Gaius Mallius Maltinus—and the two kings, Nicomedes and Ariobarzanes. The duty of the commission had been clearly delineated by Scaurus: it was to reinstate both sovereigns and warn Mithridates to remain behind his own borders.

  Manius Aquillius had courted Scaurus strenuously to get the commission, as his finances were in desperate straits due to bad losses he had taken when the war against Italia had broken out. His governorship in Sicily ten years earlier had yielded him nothing but a prosecution upon his return; though acquitted, his reputation had rather undeservedly suffered. The gold his father had received from the fifth King Mithridates in return for the cession of most of Phrygia to Pontus had long gone, yet the odium of that deed continued to cling leechlike to the son. Scaurus, a firm adherent to the custom of hereditary posts—and understanding that the father would have talked about the area to the son— deemed it good sense to give Manius Aquillius the job of reinstating the two kings, and allowed him the additional privilege of choosing his own colleagues.

  The result was a deputation dedicated more to avarice than to justice, the acquisition of money than the welfare of foreign peoples. Before the first travel arrangements were made to get the commission to Asia Minor, Manius Aquillius had already concluded a highly satisfactory bargain with the seventy-year-old King Nicomedes, and a hundred talents of Bithynian gold had magically appeared at Manius Aquillius's bank. Had it not, so distressed were Aquillius's finances that he would have found himself under an injunction not to leave Rome, as all senators were obliged to seek formal permission to leave Italy. No chance to slip off undetected by banks and bankers, who kept a stern eye on the lists posted at rostra and Regia.

  Having elected to sail rather than go overland on the Via Egnatia, the commission arrived at Pergamum in June of the previous year. It was received in some state by the governor of Asia Province, Gaius Cassius Longinus.

  In Gaius Cassius the commissioner Manius Aquillius met his match when it came to greed and unscrupulousness; as each quickly discerned with considerable pleasure. Thus a plot was hatched that hot and sunny June in Pergamum at about the same time as Titus Didius was killed attacking Herculaneum. The object of the plot was to see how much gold the commissioners and the governor could squeeze out of the situation, and in particular squeeze out of territories bordering Pontus but not actually under the authority of Rome—namely Paphlagonia and Phrygia.

  The Senate's letters to Mithridates of Pontus and Tigranes of Armenia commanding that they withdraw from Bithynia and Cappadocia were sent off from Pergamum by courier. No sooner had the bearers of the letters disappeared than Gaius Cassius ordered extra training and discipline for his one legion of auxiliaries, and called up the militia from one end of Asia Province to the other. Then, escorted by a small detachment of soldiers, the commissioners Aquillius, Manlius, and Mallius went off to Bithynia with King Nicomedes, while King Ariobarzanes remained in Pergamum with a suddenly very busy governor.

  The power of Rome still worked. King Socrates found himself without a throne and took himself back to Pontus, King Nicomedes ascended that same throne, and King Ariobarzanes was bidden return to rule in Cappadocia. The three commissioners stayed in Nicomedia to while away the rest of the summer and firm their plan for an invasion of Paphlagonia, that strip of territory which separated Bithynia from Pontus along the shores of the Euxine Sea. The temples in Paphlagonia were rich in gold—which the disappointed commissioners had discovered Nicomedes was not. When the old man had fled to Rome the year before he had taken most of the contents of his treasury with him; it had all ended in the bank accounts of various Romans, from Marcus Aemilius Scaurus (not above accepting a little gift) to Man-ius Aquillius, with plenty of other greedy hands in between.

  The discovery that Nicomedes lacked gold had led to some rancor among the three commissioners, Manlius and Mallius feeling they had been cheated, and Aquillius feeling he must bestir himself to find enough extra gold to satisfy them without breaking into his nest egg in Rome. Of course it was King Nicomedes who suffered. Three Roman noblemen badgered him incessantly to invade Paphlagonia, and threatened him with the loss of his throne if he failed to obey orders. Messages from Gaius Cassius in Pergamum reinforced the commission's stand, with the result that Nicomedes gave in and mobilized his modest but well-equipped army.

  At the end of September the commissioners and old King Nicomedes marched into Paphlagonia, Aquillius leading the army, the King little better than an unwilling campaign guest. Burning to rub salt into the wounds of King Mithridates, Aquillius forced Nicomedes to issue certain instructions to the naval garrisons and fleets of Bithynia manning the Thracian Bosporus and the Hellespont; no vessel of Pontus was to pass between the Euxine Sea and the Aegean Sea. Defy Rome if you dare, King Mithridates! was the message implicit in this.

  Everything fell out exactly as Manius Aquillius had planned. The Bithynian army marched along the coast of Paphlagonia taking towns and looting temples, the pile of golden artifacts and treasure grew, the big port of Amastris capitulated; and Pylaemenes, the ruler of inland Paphlagonia, joined his forces to those of the Roman invaders. At Amastris the three commissioners decided it was time for them to return to Pergamum, leaving the poor old King and his army to spend the winter somewhere between Amastris and Sinope, dangerously close to the border of Pontus.

  It was in Pergamum halfway through November that the Romans received an embassage from King Mithridates, who so far had said nothing and done nothing. The chief ambassador was one Pelopidas, a cousin of the King's.

  "My cousin King Mithridates humbly beseeches the proconsul Manius Aquillius to order King Nicomedes and his army to return to Bithynia forthwith," said Pelopidas, who was dressed in the attire of a Greek civilian, and had come to Pergamum without any kind of armed escort.

  "That is impossible, Pelopidas," said Manius Aquillius, seated in his curule chair holding his ivory rod of power and surrounded by a dozen crimson-clad lictors bearing the axes in their fasces. "Bithynia is a sovereign state—Friend and Ally of the Roman People, admittedly, but fully in control of its own destiny. I cannot order King Nicomedes to do anything."

  "Then, proconsul, my cousin King Mithridates humbly begs that you give him permission to defend himself and his realm against the depredations of Bithynia," said Pelopidas.

  "Neither King Nicomedes nor the army of Bithynia is within Pontic territory,'' said Manius Aquillius. “I therefore strictly forbid your cousin King Mithridates to lift so much as one finger against King Nicomedes and his army. Under no circumstances—tell your King that, Pelopidas! Under no circumstances whatsoever.''

  Pelopidas sighed, hoisted his shoulders up and spread his hands wide in a gesture not Roman, and said, "Then the last thing I was instructed to tell you, proconsul, is that under the circumstances my cousin King Mithridates says the following: 'Even a man who knows he must lose will fight back!'"

  "If your cousin the King fights back, he will lose," said Aquillius, and nodded to his lictors to show Pelopidas out.

  A
silence fell after the Pontic nobleman left, broken by a frowning Gaius Cassius when he said, "One of the Pontic barons with Pelopidas told me that Mithridates intends to send a letter of protest directly to Rome."

  Aquillius lifted an eyebrow. "What good will that do him?" he asked. "There's no one in Rome with time to listen."

  But those in Pergamum were obliged to listen a month later, when Pelopidas returned.

  "My cousin King Mithridates has sent me to repeat his plea that he be allowed to defend his country," said Pelopidas.

  "His country isn't threatened, Pelopidas; therefore my answer is still no," said Manius Aquillius.

  "Then my cousin the King has no choice except to go over your head, proconsul. He will formally complain to the Senate and People of Rome that Rome's commissioners in Asia Minor are supporting Bithynia in an act of aggression, and are simultaneously denying Pontus the right to fight back," said Pelopidas.

  "Your cousin the precious King had better not, do you hear?" snapped Aquillius nastily. "As far as Pontus and the whole of Asia Minor are concerned, I am the Senate and People of Rome! Now take yourself off and don't come back!"

  Pelopidas lingered in Pergamum for some time to find out what he could about the mysterious troop movements Gaius Cassius had put in train. While he was still there, news came that both Mithridates of Pontus and Tigranes of Armenia had broken the borders of Cappadocia, and that a son of Mithridates named Ariarathes — no one knew which of the several sons named Ariarathes this was — was once more trying to ascend the Cappadocian throne. Manius Aquillius immediately sent for Pelopidas and told him to instruct both Pontus and Armenia to withdraw from Cappadocia.