Money. How to get it? How to get enough of it to enter the Senate? Dreams, Lucius Cornelius Sulla! Dreams!
When Caesar’s women turned right onto the Clivus Victoriae, Sulla knew where they were going. To the area Flacciana, the site of Flaccus’s house. By the time he halted on the street above its steep slope of tired winter grass, the Julian ladies were settling themselves upon campstools, and a sturdy Thracian-looking fellow who had led their slave escort was busy erecting an open-fronted tent of hide to shelter his mistress from the rain, marginally heavier. The two Julias, Sulla noted, spent a very brief time sitting demurely alongside their mother; when she began to speak to Titus Pomponius’s very pregnant wife, they picked up their folding stools and scampered down to where four Claudius Pulcher girls were sitting a considerable distance away from their mothers. Their mothers? Ah! Licinia and Domitia. Both women he knew quite well, since he had managed to sleep with each of them. Looking neither left nor right, he walked down the slope to where the two women sat.
“Ladies,” he said, inclining his head. “Miserable day.”
Every woman on the hill knew who he was—a painfully interesting aspect of Sulla’s predicament. His friends among the canaille always assumed he was one of them, but the Roman nobility didn’t make that mistake. They knew he was the genuine article! They knew his history and his ancestry. Some were moved to pity him; a few like Licinia and Domitia would amuse themselves with him sexually; but none would help him.
The wind was blowing from the northeast, and it brought upon its breath a sour reek of dead fire, a smell compounded of wet charcoal, burned lime, buried rotted bodies in the high thousands. Last summer all of the Viminal and the upper Esquiline had gone up in flames, the worst fire anyone in Rome could remember. Perhaps a fifth of the city had burned before the united populace had managed to demolish a sufficiently wide swath of buildings to cut the conflagration off from the jam-packed tenement insulae of the Subura and the lower Esquiline; the wind and the width of the Vicus Longus had prevented its spreading to the sparsely settled outer Quirinal, the northernmost of the hills within the Servian Walls.
Even though half a year had elapsed since the fire, from where Sulla stood now on Flaccus’s empty house site its terrible scar covered the heights beyond the Macellum market for a thousand paces, a full square mile of blackened ground, half-fallen buildings, desolation. How many people had died, no one knew. Sufficient anyway for there to have been no real housing shortage afterward. So the rebuilding was slow; only here and there did wooden scaffolds rear up a hundred and more feet, the sign of a new multistoreyed insula going up to fatten the purse of some city landlord.
Highly amused, Sulla sensed the tension in Licinia and Domitia the moment they realized who was greeting them; not for anything would he be merciful and leave them in peace. Let them suffer, silly sows! I wonder, does each of them know I’ve slept with both of them? he asked himself, and decided they did not. Which added a deliciously piquant tang to the encounter. Eyes dancing, he watched their covert glances toward each other and toward the few women like Marcia who shared the place with them. Oh, not Marcia! Pillar of rectitude! Monument of virtue!
“That was an awful week,” said Licinia, voice pitched too high, her eyes fixed unswervingly upon the burned hills.
“Yes,” said Domitia, clearing her throat.
“I was terrified!” babbled Licinia. “We lived on the Carinae then, Lucius Cornelius, and the fire kept rolling closer and closer. Naturally the moment it was out, I persuaded Appius Claudius to move over to this side of the city. Nowhere is safe from fire, but there can be no doubt it’s better to have the Forum and the Swamp between oneself and the Subura!”
“It was beautiful,” said Sulla, remembering how he had stood every night of that week at the top of the Vestal Steps to watch, pretending that what he saw in all its monstrous glory was an enemy city after a sack, and he the general of Rome who had ordered it. “Beautiful!” he repeated.
The gloating way in which he said the word made Licinia glance up at his face in spite of herself, and what she saw there made her glance away again very quickly, and bitterly regret ever placing herself in this man’s power. Sulla was too dangerous, and not quite right in the head.
“Still, it’s an ill wind blows nobody any good,” she labored on brightly. “My cousins Publius and Lucius Licinius bought up a lot of the vacant land afterward. They say its value is bound to soar in years to come.”
She was a Licinius Crassus, one of the millionaires many times over. Now why couldn’t he find himself a rich bride, as her particular Appius Claudius Pulcher had done? Simple, Sulla! Because no father or brother or guardian of a rich noble girl would ever consent to such a match.
His delight in playing with the women vanished; without a word he turned on his heel and stalked up the slope toward the Clivus Victoriae. The two Julias, he noticed as he passed, had been called to order, and sat again beside their mother under the lee of the hide shelter. His strange eyes flicked over them, dismissing Julia Big Sister, but dwelling appreciatively on Julia Little Sister. Ye gods, she was lovely! A honey cake soaked in nectar, a dish fit for an Olympian. He had a pain in his chest, and rubbed himself under his toga to force it away. But he was aware nonetheless that Julia Little Sister had turned on her campstool to watch him until he disappeared.
He descended the Vestal Steps to the Forum Romanum and walked up the Clivus Capitolinus until he came to the back of the crowd in front of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. One of his peculiar talents was his ability to set up shivers of disquiet in people who surrounded him, so that they moved away from his vicinity; mostly he employed it to gain himself a good seat in the theater, but now he put his talent to opening up access to the front of the crowd of knights, where he stood with a perfect view of the place of sacrifice. Though he had no right to be there, he knew no one would ever evict him. Few of the knights knew who he was, and even among the senators were faces unfamiliar to him, but there were enough men present who did know him to ensure that his presence would be tolerated.
Some things no amount of isolation from the mainstream of noble public life could eradicate; perhaps they were, after so many generations—a thousand years of generations— actually inside the blood, little warning bells sounding knells of doom or disaster. Of choice he had never bothered to follow the political goings-on in the Forum Romanum, having concluded it was better to be ignorant than to chafe to participate in a life he could not have. And yet, standing at the front of the ranks of knights, he knew it was going to be a bad year. His blood told him this was to be another in what had proven to be a long line of bad years, ever since Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus had been murdered, and then, ten years later, his brother Gaius Gracchus forced to take his own life. Knives had flashed in the Forum, and Rome’s luck was broken.
It was almost as if Rome was dwindling away, running out of political puff. A gathering, he thought, eyes sweeping over the assembled ranks, of mediocrities and nonentities. Men stood there, half-asleep on their feet despite the chilly drizzle, who had been responsible for the deaths of more than thirty thousand precious Roman and Italian soldiers in less than ten years, most in the name of personal greed. Money again. Money, money, money. Though power entered into it too. One should never forget or underestimate power. Which drove which? Which was the means, which the end? That probably depended upon the individual. But where in this sorry lot were the great ones, the ones who would enhance rather than diminish Rome?
The white bull was behaving badly. Little wonder, looking at the consuls of the year. I for one, he thought, would not willingly put my white neck under the chopper for the likes of Spurius Postumius Albinus, patrician though he might be. And where did they get their money from, anyway? Then he remembered. The Postumius Albinuses always married money. Curse their eyes.
Blood began to flow. There was a great deal of blood in a fully grown bull. What a waste. Potency, power, pile-driver force. But what a beau
tiful color, richly crimsoned, slick yet thick, coursing downhill among the feet. It fascinated him; he couldn’t tear his gaze away. Was everything crammed with energy always some shade of red? Fire. Blood. Hair—his hair. Penises. Senatorial shoes. Muscle. Molten metal. Lava.
Time to go. Go where? Still full of the vision of so much blood, his eyes lifted, encountered the steady fierce stare of a tall senator in the toga praetexta of a senior magistrate.
Amazing! Now that was a man! But who? He didn’t have the look of any of the Famous Families; isolated from his kind though he was, Sulla yet knew their distinctive physical features unerringly.
Whoever the fellow was, he certainly didn’t belong to a Famous Family. For one thing, his nose said he had a dollop of Celt in him; it was too short and straight to belong to a pure Roman. Picenum, then? And look at those gigantic eyebrows! Celt again. His face bore two battle scars, neither disfiguring. Yes, a formidable customer, fierce and proud and intelligent. A real eagle. Who? Not a consular, them Sulla knew down to the oldest one living. A praetor then. Not one of this year’s praetors, however, for they were clotted together behind the consuls looking tremendously dignified and about as promising as an old queen with a bad dose of piles.
Aaaaaaah! Sulla turned abruptly and stalked away from all of it, including the ex-praetor with the mien of an eagle. Time to go. Go where? Where else was there to go save the only refuge he had, between the moistly ageing bodies of his stepmother and his mistress? He shrugged, sneered. There were worse fates, worse places. But not, said a voice at the back of his mind, for a man who should be entering the Senate today.
4
The trouble with being an anointed sovereign visiting the city of Rome was that one could not cross its pomerium, its sacred boundary. So Jugurtha, King of Numidia, was forced to spend his New Year’s Day kicking his heels in the outrageously expensive villa he was renting on the higher slopes of the Pincian Hill, overlooking the huge bend in the Tiber which enclosed the Campus Martius. The agent who had secured the villa for him had raved about its outlook, the view into the distance of the Janiculum and the Vatican Hill, the green sward of both the little Tiber-bounded plains, Martius and Vaticanus, the broad blue band of the big river. Bet there were no rivers the size of dear old Father Tiber in Numidia! the presumptuous little agent had burbled, all the while concealing the fact that he was acting for a senator who professed undying loyalty to Jugurtha’s cause, yet was mighty anxious to close a deal for his villa that would keep him well supplied with the most costly of freshwater eels for months to come. Why did they think any man—let alone a king!—who was not a Roman was automatically a fool and a dupe? Jugurtha was well aware of who owned the villa, well aware too that he was being swindled in the matter of its rent; but there were times and places for frankness, and Rome at the moment when he closed the deal for the villa was not a place or a time for frankness.
From where he sat on the loggia in front of the vast peristyle-garden, his view was unimpeded. But to Jugurtha it was a small view, and when the wind was right the stench of the nightsoil fertilizing the market gardens of the outer Campus Martius around the Via Recta was strong enough to make him wish he had elected to live further out, somewhere around Bovillae or Tusculum. Used to the enormous distances of Numidia, he thought the fifteen-mile ride from Bovillae or Tusculum into Rome a mere trifle. And—since it turned out he could not enter the city anyway—what was the point in being housed close enough to spit over their accursed sacred boundary?
If he turned ninety degrees he could, of course, see the back cliffs of the Capitol and the wrong end of the mighty temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus—in which, at this very moment, his agents assured him, the new consuls were holding the first senatorial meeting of their year in office.
How did one deal with the Romans? If he only knew that, he wouldn’t be the worried man he admitted to himself he was.
*
In the beginning it had seemed simple enough. His grandfather had been the great Masinissa, who had forged the Kingdom of Numidia out of the wreckage left strewn up and down two thousand miles of North African coast by Rome’s defeat of Punic Carthage. At first Masinissa’s gathering of power to himself had been with the open connivance of Rome; though later, when he had grown uncomfortably powerful and the Punic flavor of his organization gave Rome flutters of disquiet about the rise of a new Carthage, Rome turned somewhat against him. Luckily for Numidia, Masinissa had died at the right moment, and, understanding only too well that a strong king is always succeeded by a weakling, he left Numidia to be divided by Scipio Aemilianus among his three sons. Clever Scipio Aemilianus! He didn’t carve up Numidia’s territory into thirds; he carved up the kingly duties instead. The eldest got custody of the treasury and the palaces; the middle son was appointed Numidia’s war leader; and the youngest inherited all the functions of law and justice. Which meant the son with the army didn’t have the money to foment rebellion, the son with the money didn’t have the army to foment rebellion, and the son with the law on his side had neither money nor army to foment rebellion.
Before time and accumulating resentment might have fomented rebellion anyway, the two younger sons died, leaving the oldest son, Micipsa, to rule on alone. However, both his dead brothers had left children to complicate the future: two legitimate sons, and a bastard named Jugurtha. One of these young men would ascend the throne when Micipsa died—but which one? Then late in his life the hitherto childless Micipsa produced two sons of his own, Adherbal and Hiempsal. Thus did the court seethe with rivalries, for the ages of all these potential heirs were skewed exactly the wrong way around. Jugurtha the bastard was the oldest of them all, and the sons of the reigning King were mere babies.
His grandfather Masinissa had despised Jugurtha, not so much because he was a bastard as because his mother was of the humblest stock in the kingdom: she was a nomad Berber girl. Micipsa inherited Masinissa’s dislike of Jugurtha, and when he saw what a fine-looking and intelligent fellow Jugurtha had grown into, he found a way to eliminate this oldest potential contender for the throne. Scipio Aemilianus had demanded that Numidia send auxiliary troops to assist him at the siege of Numantia, so Micipsa dispatched his military levy under the command of Jugurtha, thinking Jugurtha would die in Spain.
It didn’t turn out that way. Jugurtha took to war as born warriors do; besides which, he made immediate friends among the Romans, two of whom he was to prize as his best and dearest friends. They were junior military tribunes attached to the staff of Scipio Aemilianus, and their names were Gaius Marius and Publius Rutilius Rufus. All three were the same age, twenty-three.
At the close of the campaign, when Scipio Aemilianus summoned Jugurtha into his command tent to deliver a homily on the subject of dealing honorably with Rome rather than with any particular Romans, Jugurtha managed to keep a straight face. For if his exposure to Romans during the siege of Numantia had taught him anything about them, it was that almost all Romans who aspired to high public office were chronically short of money. In other words, they could be bought.
On his return to Numidia, Jugurtha carried a letter from Scipio Aemilianus to King Micipsa. It extolled the bravery, good sense, and superior intelligence of Jugurtha so much that old Micipsa put away the dislike he had inherited from his father. And about the time that Gaius Sempronius Gracchus died in the Grove of Furrina beneath the Janiculan Hill, King Micipsa formally adopted Jugurtha and raised him to senior status among the heirs to the Numidian throne. However, he was careful to indicate that Jugurtha must never become king; his role was to assume the guardianship of Micipsa’s own sons, now entering their early adolescence.
Almost as soon as he had set this situation up, King Micipsa died, leaving two underage heirs to his throne and Jugurtha as regent. Within a year Micipsa’s younger son, Hiempsal, was assassinated at Jugurtha’s instigation; the older son, Adherbal, escaped Jugurtha’s net and fled to Rome, where he presented himself to the Senate and demanded that Rome settle the aff
airs of Numidia and strip Jugurtha of all authority.
*
“Why are we so afraid of them?” Jugurtha demanded, turning from his thoughts back to the present moment, the veil of soft rain drifting across the exercise fields and market gardens and obscuring the far bank of the Tiber completely.
There were some twenty men on the loggia, but all save one were bodyguards. These were not gladiatorial hirelings, but Jugurtha’s own men of Numidia—the same men, in fact, who had brought Jugurtha the head of young Prince Hiempsal seven years before, and followed up that gift five years later with the head of Prince Adherbal.
The sole exception—and the man to whom Jugurtha had addressed his question—was a big, Semitic-looking man not far short of Jugurtha in size, sitting in a comfortable chair alongside his king. An outsider might have deemed them closely related by blood, which in actual fact they were; though it was a fact the King preferred to forget. Jugurtha’s despised mother had been a simple nomad girl from a backward tribe of the Gaetuli Berbers, a mere nothing of a girl who by some quirk of fate had owned a face and a body akin to Helen of Troy’s. And the King’s companion on this miserable New Year’s Day was his half brother, son of his humble mother and the court baron to whom Jugurtha’s father had married her for the sake of convenience. The half brother’s name was Bomilcar, and he was very loyal.
The First Man in Rome Page 4
