The First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

  Sulla picked him up out of the chair by clamping the fingers of his right hand on one side of Stichus’s jaw and his right thumb on the other side, a hold so exquisitely painful that its victim couldn’t even scream; by the time he recovered enough breath to do so, he had seen Sulla’s face, and didn’t, just stood as mute and graven as his aunt and her boon companion had at dawn that morning.

  “My ancestry,” said Sulla pleasantly, “is no business of yours. Now get out of my room.”

  “It won’t be your room forever!” gasped Stichus, scuttling to the door and almost colliding with the returning slave, now bearing a bowl of water and a cloth.

  “Don’t count on it” was Sulla’s parting shot.

  The expensive slave sidled into the room trying to look demure. Sulla eyed him up and down sourly.

  “Clean it up, you mincing flower,” he said, and went to find the women.

  Stichus had beaten Sulla to Clitumna, who was closeted with her precious nephew and was not to be disturbed, said the steward apologetically. So Sulla walked down the colonnade surrounding the peristyle-garden to the suite of rooms where his mistress Nicopolis lived. There were savory smells coming from the cookhouse at the far end of the garden, a site it shared with the bathroom and the latrine; like most houses on the Palatine, Clitumna’s was connected to the water supply and the sewers, thus relieving the staff of the burden of fetching water from a public fountain and toting the contents of the chamber pots to the nearest public latrine or drain opening in the gutter.

  “You know, Lucius Cornelius,” said Nicopolis, abandoning her fancy work, “if you would only come down out of your aristocratic high-flies occasionally, you’d do a lot better.”

  He sat on a comfortable couch with a sigh, rugging himself up a little more warmly in his toga because the room was cold, and let the servant girl nicknamed Bithy remove his winter boots. She was a nice cheerful lass with an unpronounceable name, from the backwoods of Bithynia; Clitumna had picked her up cheap from her nephew and inadvertently acquired a treasure. When the girl finished unlacing the boots she bustled out of the room purposefully; in a moment she returned bearing a pair of thick warm socks which she smoothed carefully over Sulla’s perfect, snow-white feet.

  “Thank you, Bithy,” he said, smiling at her and reaching out a careless hand to ruffle her hair.

  She absolutely glowed. Funny little thing, he thought with a tenderness that surprised him, until he realized that she reminded him of the girl next door. Julilla...

  “How do you mean?” he asked Nicopolis, who seemed as usual impervious to the cold.

  “Why should that greedy little crawler Stichus inherit everything when Clitumna goes to join her dubious ancestors? If you would only change your tactics a fraction, Lucius Cornelius my very dear friend, she’d leave the lot to you. And she’s got a lot, believe me!”

  “What’s he doing, bleating that I hurt him?” asked Sulla, taking a bowl of nuts from Bithy with another special smile.

  “Of course he is! And lavishly embroidering it, I’m sure. I don’t blame you in the least, he’s detestable, but he is her only blood kin—and she loves him, so she’s blind to his faults. But she loves you more, haughty wretch that you are! So when you see her next, don’t go all icy and proud and refuse to justify yourself—spin her a story about Sticky Stichy even better than the one he’ s spinning about you

  Half-intrigued, half-skeptical, he stared at her. “Go on, she’d never be stupid enough to fall for it,” he said.

  “Oh, darling Lucius! When you want, you can make any woman fall for any line you care to toss them. Try it! Just this once? For my sake?” wheedled Nicopolis.

  “No. I’d end up the fool, Nicky.”

  “You wouldn’t, you know,” Nicopolis persevered.

  “There isn’t enough money in the world to make me grovel to the likes of Clitumna!”

  “She doesn’t have all the money in the world, but she does have more than enough to see you into the Senate,” whispered the temptress beguilingly.

  “No! You’re wrong, you really are. There’s this house, admittedly, but she spends every penny she gets—and what she doesn’t spend, Sticky Stichy does.”

  “Not so. Why do you think her bankers hang on her every word as if she were Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi? She’s got a very tidy fortune invested with them, and she doesn’t spend half of her income. Besides which, give Sticky Stichy his due, he’s not short of a sestertius either. As long as his late father’s accountant and manager are capable of working, that business of Stichy’s will continue to do very nicely.”

  Sulla sat up with a jerk, loosening the folds of toga. “Nicky, you wouldn’t spin me a tale, would you?”

  “I would, but not about this,” she said, threading her needle with purple wool intertwined with gold bullion.

  “She’ll live to be a hundred,” he said then, subsiding onto the couch and handing back the bowl of nuts to Bithy, no longer hungry.

  “I agree, she might live to be a hundred,” said Nicopolis, plunging her needle into the tapestry and drawing her glittering thread through very, very carefully. Her big dark eyes surveyed Sulla tranquilly. “But then again, she may not. Hers isn’t a long-lived family, you know.”

  There were noises outside; Lucius Gavius Stichus was evidently taking his leave of his Aunt Clitumna.

  Sulla stood up, let the servant girl slip backless Greek slippers onto his feet. The massive length and breadth of the toga slumped to the floor, but he seemed not to notice.

  “All right, Nicky, just this once I’ll try it,” he said, and grinned. “Wish me luck!”

  But before she could, he was gone.

  *

  The interview with Clitumna didn’t go well; Stichus had done his work with cunning, and Sulla couldn’t make himself humble his pride to plead, as Nicopolis had wanted.

  “It’s all your fault, Lucius Cornelius,” said Clitumna fretfully, twisting the expensive fringe of her shawl between beringed fingers. “You won’t make the slightest effort to be nice to my poor boy, where he always tries to meet you more than halfway!”

  “He’s a grubby little “would-be-if-he-could-be,” said Sulla between his teeth.

  At which moment Nicopolis, listening outside the door, drifted gracefully through it and curled herself up on the couch beside Clitumna; she stared up at Sulla in resignation.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, all innocence.

  “It’s both my Luciuses,” said Clitumna. “They won’t get on together, and I want them to so much!”

  Nicopolis disentangled fringe from fingers, then unhooked a few threads which had caught on the roughnesses of gem settings, and lifted Clitumna’s hand to rest its back against her cheek. “Oh, my poor girl!” she crooned. “Your Luciuses are a couple of roosters, that’s the trouble.”

  “Well, they’re going to have to learn to get on,” said Clitumna, “because my darling Lucius Gavius is giving up his apartment and moving in with us next week.”

  “Then I’m moving out,” said Sulla.

  Both women began to squeal, Clitumna shrilly, Nicopolis like a small trapped kitten.

  “Oh, be your age!” Sulla whispered, thrusting his face down until it was only inches from Clitumna’s. “He knows the situation here more or less, but how do you think he’s going to stomach living in the same house with a man who sleeps between two women, and one of them his aunt?”

  Clitumna began to weep. “But he wants to come! How can I say no to my nephew?”

  “Don’t bother! I’ll remove the cause of all his complaints by moving out,” said Sulla.

  As he began to withdraw Nicopolis stretched out her hand and clutched his arm. “Sulla, darling Sulla, don’t!” she cried. “Look, you can sleep with me, and then whenever Stichus is out, Clitumna can come down and join us.”

  “Oh, very crafty!” said Clitumna, stiffening. “You want him all to yourself, you greedy sow!”

  Nicopolis went white. “W
ell, what else do you suggest? It’s your stupidity’s got us into this mess!”

  “Shut up, both of you!” snarled Sulla in the whisper all who knew him well had learned to dread more than any other man’s shout. “You’ve been going to mimes so long you’re beginning to live them. Grow up, don’t be so vulgarly crass! I detest the whole wretched situation, I’m tired of being half a man!”

  “Well, you’re not half a man! You’re two halves—half mine, and half Nicky’s!” said Clitumna nastily.

  There was no telling which hurt worse, the rage or the grief; perfectly poised on the very edge of madness, Sulla glared at his tormentors, unable to think, unable to see.

  “I can’t go on!” he said, wonder in his voice.

  “Nonsense! Of course you can,” said Nicopolis with the smugness of one who knew beyond any shadow of doubt that she had her man right where she wanted him—under her foot. “Now run away and do something constructive. You’ll feel better tomorrow. You always do.”

  *

  Out of the house, off to anywhere—anywhere constructive. Sulla’s feet blundered up the alley rather than down, took him unaware across from the Germalus to the Palatium, that part of the Palatine which looked down toward the end of the Circus Maximus and the Capena Gate.

  The houses were thinner here and there were many park-like spaces; the Palatium wasn’t terribly fashionable, it lay too far from the Forum Romanum. Uncaring that it was very cold and he clad only in his house tunic, he sat upon a stone and looked at the view; not at the vacant bleachers of the Circus Maximus nor the lovely temples of the Aventine, but at the vista of himself stretched endlessly into a terrible future, a warped roadway of skin and bone that had absolutely no purpose. The pain was like a colic without the release of purgation; he shook with it until he could hear the grinding of his teeth, and did not know he groaned aloud.

  “Are you ill?” asked the voice, small and timid.

  At first when he looked up he saw nothing, his agony took the power from his eyes, but then they cleared, and so she swam slowly into focus from pointed chin to golden hairline, a heart-shaped face that was all eyes, huge and honey-colored, very afraid for him.

  She knelt in front of him, wrapped in her homespun cocoon, just as he had seen her at the site of Flaccus’s house.

  “Julia,” he said with a shudder.

  “No, Julia’s my older sister. They call me Julilla,” she said, smiling at him. “Are you ill, Lucius Cornelius?”

  “Not with anything a physician can heal.” Sanity and memory were returning; he understood the galling truth of Nicopolis’s last remark, he would feel better tomorrow. And hated that more than anything. “I would like so much—so very, very much!—to go mad,” he said, “but it seems I can’t.”

  Julilla remained where she was. “If you can’t, then the Furies don’t want you yet.”

  “Are you here on your own?” he asked, disapproving. “What are your parents about, to let you wander abroad at this hour?”

  “My girl is with me,” she said tranquilly, sinking back on her heels. A sudden light of mischief darted through her eyes, turned up the delicious corners of her mouth. “She’s a good girl. The most loyal and discreet person.”

  “You mean she lets you go wherever you like and doesn’t tell on you. But one day,” said the man who was perpetually caught, “you’ll be caught.”

  “Until I am, what’s the use of worrying?”

  Lapsing into silence, she studied his face with unself-conscious curiosity, clearly enjoying what she saw.

  “Go home, Julilla,” he said, sighing. “If you must get caught, don’t let it be with me.”

  “Because you’re a bad lot?” she asked.

  That brought a faint smile. “If you like.”

  “I don’t think you are!”

  Oh, what god had sent her? Thank you, unknown god! His muscles were untwining themselves; he felt suddenly light, as if indeed some god had brushed by him, benign and good. A strange feeling for one who knew no good.

  “I am a bad lot, Julilla,” he said.

  “Nonsense!” Her voice was firm and positive.

  No novice, he recognized the symptoms of a girlish crush, and knew an impulse to dispel it by some coarse or frightening action. But he couldn’t. Not to her, she didn’t deserve it. For her, he would reach into his grab bag of tricks and produce the best Lucius Cornelius Sulla of them all, free from artifice, innocent of smut and smirch and smarm.

  “Well, I thank you for your faith, young Julilla,” he said a little lamely, unsure what she wanted to hear, anxious that it should reflect the best in him.

  “I have some time,” she said gravely. “Might we talk?”

  He moved over on his rock. “All right. But sit here, the ground’s too damp.”

  “They say,” she said, “that you’re a disgrace to your name. But I don’t see how that’s possible, when you haven’t had a chance to prove different.”

  “I daresay your father’s the author of that remark.”

  “Which remark?”

  “That I’m a disgrace to my name.”

  She was shocked. “Oh, no! Not tata! He’s the wisest man in the world.”

  “Where mine was the most foolish. We’re at the opposite ends of Rome’s spectrum, young Julilla.”

  She was plucking at the long grass around the base of the rock, pulling it out in long rhizomes, then wove with her nimble fingers until she had made a wreath of it. “Here,” she said, and held it out to him.

  His breath caught; the future spasmed, opened up to show him something, closed again with the glimpse too painfully short. “A crown of grass!” he said, wondering. “No! Not for me!”

  “Of course it’s for you,” she insisted, and when he still made no move to take it, she leaned forward and put it on his head. “It should be flowers, but not at this time of year.”

  She didn’t understand! Well, he wouldn’t tell her. “You give a wreath of flowers only to a loved one,” he said instead.

  “You are my loved one,” she said softly.

  “Only for a little while, girl. It will pass.”

  “Never!”

  He got up, laughed down at her. “Go on! You can’t be more than fifteen,” he said.

  “Sixteen!” she said quickly.

  “Fifteen, sixteen, what’s the difference? You’re a baby.”

  Flushed with indignation, her face grew set, sharp. “I am not a baby!” she cried.

  “Of course you are.” He laughed again. “Look at you, all swaddled up, a little roly-poly puppy.” There! That was better! That ought to put her in her place.

  It did, but more than that She was blighted, withered, killed. The light died in her. “I’m not pretty?” she said. “I always thought I was.”

  “Growing up is a cruel business,” said Sulla harshly. “I suppose almost all families tell their girl-children they’re pretty. But the world judges by different standards. You’ll be passable when you’re older, you won’t lack a husband.”

  “I only want you,” she whispered.

  “That’s now. Anyway, disabuse yourself, my fat puppy. Run away before I pull your tail. Go on, shoo!”

  She ran, her servant girl left far behind, calling after her vainly. Sulla stood watching until they both disappeared over the brow of the slope behind.

  The grass crown was still on his head, its tawny color a subtle contrast to his fiery curls; he reached up and plucked it off, but didn’t throw it away, stood holding it between his hands and staring at it. Then he tucked it in his tunic, and turned to go.

  Poor little thing. He had hurt her after all. Still, she had to be discouraged; the last complication he needed in his life was Clitumna’s next-door neighbor’s daughter mooning over the wall, and she a senator’s daughter.

  With every step he took as he walked away the grass crown tickled his skin, reminding him. Corona Graminea. Grass crown. Given to him here on the Palatine, where hundreds of years before the original
city of Romulus had stood, a bevy of oval thatched huts like the one still lovingly cared for near the Steps of Cacus. A grass crown given to him by a personification of Venus—truly one of Venus’s girls, a Julia. An omen.

  “If it comes to pass, I will build you a temple, Venus Victorious,” he said aloud.

  For he saw his way clear at last. Dangerous. Desperate. But for one with nothing to lose and everything to gain, possible nonetheless.

  *

  Winter twilight lay heavy when he was admitted back into Clitumna’s house and asked where the ladies were. In the dining room, heads together, waiting for him before summoning the meal. That he had been the subject of their talk was obvious; they sprang apart on the couch, tried to look idly innocent.

  “I want some money,” he said baldly.

  “Now, Lucius Cornelius—” Clitumna began, looking wary.

  “Shut up, you pathetic old drab! I want money.”

  “But Lucius Cornelius!”

  “I’m going away for a holiday,” he said, making no move to join them. “It’s up to you. If you want me back— if you want more of what I’ve got—then give me a thousand denarii. Otherwise, I’m quitting Rome forever.”

  “We’ll give you half each,” said Nicopolis unexpectedly, dark eyes fixed on his face.

  “Now,” he said.

  “There may not be so much in the house,” Nicopolis said.

  “You’d better hope there is, because I’m not waiting.”

  When Nicopolis went to his room fifteen minutes later, she found him packing. Perching herself on his bed, she watched in silence until he should deign to notice her.

  But it was she who broke down first. “You’ll have your money, Clitumna’s sent the steward to her banker’s house,” she said. “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care. Just so long as it’s away from here.” He folded socks together, thrust them into closed-toe boots, every movement as economical as it was efficient.

  “You pack like a soldier.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Oh, I was the mistress of a military tribune once. I followed the drum, would you believe it? The things one does for love when one is young! I adored him. So I went with him to Spain, and then to Asia.” She sighed.