The Grass Crown

by Colleen McCullough

  Lucius Tiddlypuss See Tiddlypuss, Lucius.

  ludi Romani See games.

  Lusitani The people of the southwestern and western areas of the Iberian peninsula; they lay beyond the frontiers of the Roman province of Further Spain, and strenuously resisted all Roman attempts to penetrate their lands. They also regularly invaded Further Spain to annoy the Roman occupiers.

  lustrum This word came to mean two things, both connected with the office of censor. It meant the entire five-year term the censors served, but also meant the ceremony with which the censors concluded the census of the ordinary Roman People on the Campus Martius.

  magistrates The elected executives of the Senate and People of Rome. By the middle Republic, all the men who held magistracies were members of the Senate (elected quaestors, if not already senators, were normally approved as senators by the next pair of censors). This gave the Senate a distinct advantage over the People, until the People (in the person of the Plebs) took over the lawmaking. The magistrates represented the executive arm of government. In order of seniority, the most junior magistrate was the elected tribune of the soldiers, who was not old enough to be admitted to the Senate under the lex Villia annalis, yet was nonetheless a true magistrate. Then; in ascending order came the quaestor, the tribune of the plebs, the plebeian aedile, the curule aedile, the praetor, the consul, and the censor. Only the curule aedile, the praetor, and the consul held imperium. Only the quaestorship, praetorship, and consulship constituted the cursus honorum. Tribunes of the soldiers, quaestors, and curule aediles were elected by the Assembly of the People; tribunes of the plebs and plebeian aediles were elected by the Plebeian Assembly; and praetors, consuls, and censors were elected by the Centuriate Assembly. In times of emergency, the Senate was empowered to create an extraordinary magistrate, the dictator, who served for six months only, and was indemnified against answering for his dictatorial actions after his term as dictator was over. The dictator himself appointed a Master of the Horse to function as his war leader and second-in-command. On the death or incapacitation of a consul, the Senate was also empowered to appoint a suffect consul without holding an election. Save for the censors, all magistrates served for one year only. maiestas Treason. After Lucius Appuleius Saturninus first put maiestas minuta ("little treason") on the law tablets as a criminal charge, the old-style treason charge of perduellio (high treason) was virtually abandoned. Saturninus set up a special court or quaestio to hear charges of maiestas minuta during his first term as tribune of the plebs in 103 b.c.; it was staffed entirely by knights, though the men tried in it were usually senators.

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  manumission The act of freeing a slave (manumit, manumitted). When the slave's master was a Roman citizen, manumission automatically endowed the slave with the Roman citizenship, However, the freed slave, or freedman, had little opportunity to exercise his franchise, as he was placed in one of two of the four urban tribes—Esquilina or Suburana—and therefore found his vote worthless in tribal elections; his economic lowliness (though slaves occasionally did manage to make a lot of money) meant he was not made a member of one of the Five Classes, so he could not vote in the Centuriate Assembly either. The manumitted slave took the name of his old master as his new name, adding to it his original slave name as a cognomen. A slave might be manumitted in any one of several ways: by buying his freedom out of his earnings; as a special gesture of the master's on some great occasion like a coming-of-age birthday; after an agreed number of years in service; in a will. Though technically the freedman was the equal of his master, in actual fact he was obliged to remain in his old master's clientship, unless this was formally dispensed with. Despite this, most slaves found the Roman citizenship highly desirable, not so much for themselves as for their freeborn descendants. The freedman was obliged for the rest of his life to wear a slightly conical skullcap on the back of his head; this was the Cap of Liberty.

  Marsi One of the most important of the Italian peoples. The Marsi lived around the shores of the Fucine Lake, which belonged to them; their territory extended into the high Apennines. Their history indicates that they were always loyal to Rome until came the time of the Marsic War. They were affluent, martial, and populous, and had adopted Latin as their language fairly early. Their chief town was Marruvium; the larger and more important town of Alba Fucens was a Latin Rights colony seeded on Marsic territory by Rome. The Marsi worshipped snakes, and were famous snake charmers.

  Martha The Syrian prophetess who predicted that Gaius Marius would be consul of Rome seven times, and did this before he had been consul at all. She extracted a promise from Marius that he would bring her from Africa to Rome, where she lived in his house as his guest until she died, and regularly scandalized Rome's populace by appearing in a purple litter. My own novelist's license added the second part to her prophecy—that Marius would be eclipsed in greatness by his wife's nephew; I did this to make later events more logical.

  mentula Plural, mentulae. The Latin obscenity for the penis.

  mentulam caco "I shit on your prick!"

  merda A Latin obscenity referring more to the droppings of animals than to human excrement.

  Metrobius Plutarch attests to the existence of this beloved boyfriend of Sulla's, and gives us his name—Metrobius.

  Middle Sea The name I have given the Mediterranean Sea, which had not at the time of Marius and Sulla acquired its later name of Mare Nostrum—"Our Sea." Properly, at the time of Marius and Sulla it was called Mare Internum.

  Military Man Vir militaris. He was a man whose whole career revolved around the army, and who continued to serve in the army after his obligatory number of campaigns or years had expired. He entered the political arena relying upon his military reputation to recommend him to the electors. Many Military Men never bothered to enter the political arena at all, but if such a one wanted to general an army, he had to attain the rank of praetor, and that meant a political career. Gaius Marius, Quintus Sertorius, Titus Didius, Gaius Pomptinus, and Publius Ventidius were all Military Men; but Caesar the Dictator, the greatest military man of them all, was never a Military Man.

  military tribune See tribune, military.

  modius Plural, modii. The measure of grain in Rome. One modius weighed thirteen pounds, or six kilograms.

  Mormolyce Also known as Mormo. A children's bogey, she appears to have been an historical figure, at least in myth. The queen of a race of cannibal giants, she lost her children, and ever afterward preyed upon the children of humankind.

  mos maiorum The established order of things. Perhaps the best definition is to say that the mos maiorum was Rome's unwritten constitution. Mos meant established customs; maiores meant ancestors or forebears in this context. The mos maiorum was how things had always been done.

  Nearer Spain Hispania Citerior. The territory of this Roman province embraced the Mediterranean coastal plain and the mountainous foothills beyond it all the way from the Pyrenees to just south of the seaport of New Carthage. The southern boundary splitting the Further province off from it was fairly tenuous, but seems to have run between the range of mountains called the Orospeda and the taller range behind Abdera called the Solorius. In the time of Marius and Sulla the largest settlement was New Carthage (modern Cartagena) because the Orospeda ranges behind this seaport were honeycombed with productive silver mines the Romans had taken over when Carthage fell. Only one other part of the province was of much interest to its Roman owners; the valley of the Iberus River (modern Ebro) and its tributaries, this area being very rich. The governor had two seats: New Carthage in the south and Tarraco in the north. Nearer Spain was never as economically important to Rome as the Further province; it was, however, the only land route to Further Spain, and therefore had to be kept subdued.

  nefas Sacrilege.

  nobleman Nobilis. A man and his descendants were described as noble once he had achieved his consulship. This was an artificial aristocracy invented by the plebeians in order to cut the patricians dow
n to size, since more plebeians reached the consulship than did patricians once the first century of the Republic was over. By the time of Marius and Sulla, nobility mattered greatly. Some modern authorities extend the term nobilis to cover those men who reached the status of praetor without ever attaining the consulship. However, my feeling is that to have admitted praetors into the plebeian nobility would have demeaned the exclusivity of nobility too much. Therefore I have reserved the term nobleman for those men of proven consular family.

  nomen The family, clan, or gentilicial name—the title of the gens. Cornelius, Julius, Domitius, Livius, Marius, Marcius, Junius, Sulpicius, et cetera, are all nomina (plural), gentilicial names. I have not used the word gens very much in this book, as it takes a feminine ending—gens Julia, gens Aurelia, et cetera—too confusing for non-Latinate readers.

  Numidia A kingdom in ancient middle North Africa which always surrounded the limited lands owned by Carthage (lands which became the Roman African province). The original inhabitants were Berbers, and lived a semi-nomadic life. After the defeat of Carthage, Rome encouraged the establishment of a regal dynasty, the first member of which was King Masinissa. The capital of Numidia was Cirta.

  October Horse On the Ides of October (this was about the time the old campaigning season used to finish), the best war-horses of that year were picked out and harnessed in pairs to chariots. They then raced on the sward of the Campus Martius, rather than in one of the circuses. The right-hand horse of the winning team was sacrificed to Mars on an altar specially erected to Mars adjacent to the course of the race. The animal was killed with a spear, after which its head was severed and piled over with little cakes, while its tail and genitals were rushed to the Regia in the Forum Romanum, and the blood dripped onto the Regia's altar. Once the ceremonies over the cake-decorated horse's head were ended, it was thrown at two crowds of people, one comprising the residents of the Subura, the other residents of the Via Sacra; they fought for possession of it. If the people of the Via Sacra won, they nailed the head to the outside wall of the Regia; if the people of the Subura won, they nailed it to the outside wall of the Turris Mamilia (the most conspicuous building in the Subura). What was the reason behind all this is not known; modern scholars tend to think it was concerned with the closing of the campaign season in much earlier times than the day of Marius and Sulla, by which era the Romans themselves may not have been sure of its origins. We do not know whether the war-horses involved in the race were Public Horses or not; one might presume they were Public Horses. Odysseus To Romans, he was Ulysses. King of Ithaca in days of legend. One of the main characters in Homer's Iliad, he was the hero of Homer's Odyssey. By nature crafty, brilliant, and deceitful (deceit was not necessarily odious to the ancient Greeks), he was also a great warrior, strong enough to own a bow no other man could bend and string; physically he was red-haired, left-handed, grey-eyed, and so short in the legs that he looked "taller sitting than he did standing." Having fought for the whole ten years at Troy (Ilium) and survived, Odysseus set out for home when the war was over, bearing as his special prize old Queen Hekabe (Hecuba), widow of King Priam of Troy. But he soon abandoned her, disgusted at her weeping and wailing, and then became embroiled in a decade of amazing adventures which took him all over the Mediterranean. At the end of ten years (having been away for twenty) he arrived home in Ithaca, where his wife, Penelope, and his son, Telemachus, and his dog, Argus, had all waited for him faithfully. The first thing he did was to string his bow and shoot an arrow through the hollows in a series of axe heads, after which he turned his mighty weapon upon his wife's importunate suitors, and killed them all, his son helping. After that, he settled down with Penelope and lived happily ever after.

  Ordo Equester See knights.

  Oxyntas A son of King Jugurtha of Numidia, he walked with his brother Iampsas in Gaius Marius's triumphal parade of 104 b.c. His father was put to death immediately afterward, but Oxyntas was sent to the town of Venusia, where he remained until 89 b.c. What happened to him after the Marsic War is not known.

  Parthia See Kingdom of the Parthians.

  paterfamilias The head of the family unit. His right to do as he pleased with his family was rigidly protected at law.

  patricians The original Roman aristocracy. Patricians were distinguished citizens before there were kings of Rome, and after the establishment of the Republic they kept the title of patrician, as well as a prestige unattainable by any plebeian—and this in spite of the nobility, the "new aristocracy" ennobled above mere plebeian status by having consuls in the family. However, as the Republic grew older and the power of the plebeians grew in pace with their wealth, the special rights and entitlements of the patricians were inexorably stripped from them, until by the time of Marius and Sulla they tended to be relatively impoverished compared to those of the plebeian nobility. Not all patrician clans were of equal antiquity; the Julii and the Fabii were some centuries older in their tenure of patrician status than the Claudii. Patricians married in a form called confarreatio which was virtually for life, and patrician women never were allowed the relative emancipation of their plebeian sisters. Certain priesthoods could be held only by patricians—the Rex Sacrorum and the flamen Dialis—and certain senatorial positions could only be held by patricians— head of a decury, interrex, Princeps Senatus. At the time of Marius and Sulla the following patrician families were still regularly producing senators (if not praetors and consuls): Aemilius, Claudius, Cornelius, Fabius (but through adoption only), Julius, Manlius, Pinarius, Postumius, Sergius, Servilius, Sulpicius, and Valerius.

  patronage Roman Republican society was organized into a system of patronage and clientship (see also client). Though perhaps the smallest businessmen and the ordinary lowly workers of Rome were not always participants in the system, the system was nevertheless very prevalent at all levels of society, and not all patrons were from the uppermost levels of society. The patron undertook to offer protection and favors to those who acknowledged themselves his clients. Freed slaves were in the patronage of their ex-masters. No woman could be a patron. Many patrons were clients of more powerful patrons than themselves, which technically made their clients also the clients of their patron. Though at law the domestic system was not recognized, there was a very strong principle of honor involved, and it was a rare client who ignored or cheated his patron. The patron might do nothing for years to obtain help or support from a client, but one day the client would be called upon to do his patron a favor—vote for him, or lobby for him, or perform some special task. It was customary for the patron to see his clients at dawn on "business" days in the calendar; at these matinees the clients would ask for help or favor, or merely attend to show respect, or offer services. The patron, if he was rich or generous, often bestowed gifts of money upon his clients when they assembled at such times. If a man became the client of another man whom in earlier days he had hated to the point of implacable enmity, that client would thereafter serve his erstwhile enemy, now his patron, with complete fidelity, even to death (vide Caesar the Dictator and Curio the Younger).

  pedagogue Paedagogus. A teacher of young children. He was the man who instilled rudimentary education—reading, writing, arithmetic. His status was usually that of a slave or freedman, he lived within the family unit as a particularly privileged servant, and his nationality was more often than not Greek; he was, however, required to teach in Latin as well as Greek.

  pedarius Plural, pedarii. See Senate.

  Penates The Di Penates, the gods of the storage cupboards. Among the oldest and most numinous of all Roman gods, the Di Penates were worshipped in every Roman house in conjunction with Vesta (spirit of the hearth) and the Lar Familiaris. Like the Lares, the Di Penates eventually acquired a form, shape and sex, and were depicted as two youths, usually bronze statuettes. The Roman State had its own Di Penates, called the Penates Publici—guardians of the State's well-being and solvency.

  Penelope The wife of Odysseus, King of Ithaca (see Odysseus). He
won her in a footrace her father, Icarius, staged among her suitors. When it was prophesied that if Odysseus went to the war against Troy (Ilium), he would be away for twenty years, Penelope and her infant son, Telemachus, settled down to wait for him. The succession to the throne of Ithaca must have been matrilineal, for, presuming Odysseus dead, a large number of suitors for Penelope's hand in marriage moved into the palace and stayed for the duration. She refused to marry anyone until she had finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes; every night she unraveled what she had woven the previous day. According to Homer, this ploy worked until Odysseus returned home and killed the suitors.

  People of Rome This term embraced every single Roman who was not a member of the Senate; it applied to patricians as well as to plebeians, and to the Head Count as well as to the First Class.

  perduellio High treason. Until the later Republic saw the introduction of the lesser form of treason called maiestas (see Saturninus), perduellio was the only form treason had in Roman law. Old enough to be mentioned in the Twelve Tables, it required a trial process in the Centuriate Assembly, cumbersome and glaringly public until the secret ballot was finally extended to trial in the centuries. It was, however, virtually impossible to persuade the centuries to convict a man of perduellio unless he stood there and openly admitted that he had conspired to make war upon Rome— and Roman political miscreants were not so stupid. It carried an automatic death penalty.

  peristyle An enclosed garden or courtyard which was surrounded by a colonnade and formed the outdoor segment of a house.