The First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

  The food equilibrium had been more difficult. Determined not to gain weight, she kept on losing it in spite of her efforts to remain static. And then one day the whole gang of physicians who had over the months paraded through the house of Gaius Julius Caesar, trying vainly to cure her, went to Gaius Julius Caesar and advocated that she be force-fed. But in the way of physicians, they had left it up to her poor family to do their dirty work. So the whole house had gathered up its courage and prepared itself for the effort, from the newest slave to the brothers, Gaius and Sextus, and Marcia, and Caesar himself. It had been an ordeal no one cared to remember afterward—Julilla screaming as if she were being murdered rather than resurrected, struggling feebly, vomiting back every mouthful, spitting and gagging and choking. When Caesar finally ordered the horror abandoned, the family had gone into council and agreed without one dissenting voice that no matter what might happen to Julilla in the future, force-fed she was not going to be.

  But the racket Julilla had made during the attempt to force-feed her had let the cat out of the Caesar bag; the whole neighborhood now knew of the Caesar troubles. Not that the family had concealed its troubles from shame, only that Gaius Julius Caesar loathed gossip, and tried never to be a cause of it.

  To the rescue came none other than Clitumna from next door, armed with a food she guaranteed Julilla would voluntarily ingest, and which would stay down once it was ingested. Caesar and Marcia welcomed her fervently, and sat listening fervently as she talked.

  “Find a source of cow’s milk,” said Clitumna importantly, enjoying the novel experience of being the center of Caesarean attention. “I know it’s not easy to come by, but I believe there are a couple of fellows out in the Camenarum Valley who do milk cows. Then for each cup of milk you break in one hen’s egg and three spoons of honey. You beat it up until there’s a froth on top, and add half a cup of strong wine right at the end. If you put the. wine in before you beat it up, you won’t get a nice froth on top. If you have a glass goblet, give it to her in that, because the drink’s very pretty to look at—quite a rich pink, with a nice yellow top of froth. Provided she can keep it down, it will certainly keep her alive and fairly healthy,” said Clitumna, who vividly remembered her sister’s period of starvation after she had been prevented from marrying a most unsuitable fellow from Alba Fucentia—a snake charmer, no less!

  “We’ll try it,” said Marcia, eyes full of tears.

  “It worked for my sister,” said Clitumna, and sighed. “When she got over the snake charmer, she married my dear, dear Stichus’s father.”

  Caesar got up. “I’ll send someone out to the Camenarum at once,” he said, disappearing. Then his head came round the door. “What about the hen’s egg? Ought it to be a tenth egg, or will an ordinary one do?” he asked.

  “Oh, we just used ordinary ones,” said Clitumna comfortably, relaxing in her chair. “The extra-large variety might upset the balance of the drink.”

  “And the honey?” Caesar persisted. “Ordinary Latin honey, or should we try to get Hymettan, or at any rate smokeless?”

  “Ordinary Latin honey is quite good enough,” said Clitumna firmly. “Who knows? Maybe it was the smoke in the ordinary honey that did the trick. Let us not depart from the original recipe, Gaius Julius.”

  “Quite right.” Caesar disappeared again.

  “Oh, if only she can tolerate it!” said Marcia, her voice shaking. “Neighbor, we are at our wits’ end!”

  “I imagine you are. But don’t make such a fuss about it, at least not in Julilla’s hearing,” advised Clitumna, who could be sensible when her heart wasn’t involved, and would cheerfully have let Julilla die had she only known of those letters piling up in Sulla’s room. Her face puckered. “We don’t want a second death in these two houses,” she said, and sniffled dolefully.

  “We most certainly don’t!” cried Marcia. Her sense of social fitness coming to the fore, she said delicately, “I do hope you’re over the loss of your nephew a little, Clitumna? It’s very difficult, I know.”

  “Oh, I manage,” said Clitumna, who did grieve for Stichus on many levels, but upon one vital level had found her life a great deal easier without the friction between the deceased Stichus and her dear, darling Sulla. She heaved a huge sigh—sounding much like Julilla, had she only known it.

  That encounter had proved to be the first of many, for when the drink actually worked, the Caesar household lay under a massive obligation to their vulgar neighbor.

  “Gratitude,” said Gaius Julius Caesar, who took to hiding in his study whenever he heard Clitumna’s shrill voice in the atrium, “can be a wretched nuisance!”

  “Oh, Gaius Julius, don’t be such a curmudgeon!” said Marcia defensively. “Clitumna is really very kind, and we can’t possibly hurt her feelings—which is what you’re in danger of doing when you avoid her so persistently.”

  “I know she’s terribly kind!” exclaimed the head of the household, goaded. “That’s what I’m complaining about!”

  *

  Julilla’s master plan had complicated Sulla’s life to a degree which would have afforded her great satisfaction, had she only known. But she did not, for he concealed his torment from everyone save himself, and feigned an indifference to her plight which completely fooled Clitumna, always full of news about the situation next door now that she had donned the mantle of lifesaving miracle worker.

  “I do wish you’d pop in and say hello to the poor girl,” Clitumna said fretfully about the time that Marcus Junius Silanus led his seven magnificent legions north up the Via Flaminia. “She often asks after you, Lucius Cornelius.”

  “I’ve got better things to do than dance attendance on a female Caesar,” said Sulla harshly.

  “What arrant nonsense!” said Nicopolis vigorously. “You’re as idle as any man could possibly be.”

  “And is that my fault?” he demanded, swinging round on his mistress with a sudden savagery that made her draw back in fright. “I could be busy! I could be marching with Silanus to fight the Germans.”

  “Well, and why didn’t you go?” Nicopolis asked. “They’ve dropped the property qualifications so drastically that I’m sure with your name you could have managed to enlist.”

  His lips drew back from his teeth, revealing the overlong and sharply pointed canines which gave his smile a feral nastiness. “I, a patrician Cornelius, to march as a ranker in a legion?” he asked. “I’d sooner be sold into slavery by the Germans!”

  “You might well be, if the Germans aren’t stopped. Truly, Lucius Cornelius, there are times when you demonstrate only too well that you yourself are your own worst enemy! Here you are, when all Clitumna asked of you was a miserable little favor for a dying girl, grizzling that you have neither the time nor the interest—really, you do exasperate me!” A sly gleam crept into her eyes. “After all, Lucius Cornelius, you must admit your life here is vastly more comfortable since Lucius Gavius so conveniently expired.” And she hummed the tune of a popular ditty under her breath, a song with words to the effect that the singer

  had murdered his rival in love and got away with it. “Con-veeeeeeniently ex-piiiiiiired!” she warbled.

  His face became flinty, yet oddly expressionless. “My dear Nicopolis, why don’t you stroll down to the Tiber and do me the enormous favor of jumping in?”

  The subject of Julilla was prudently dropped. But it was a subject which seemed to crop up perpetually, and secretly Sulla writhed, aware of his vulnerability, unable to display concern. Any day that fool girl of Julilla’s could be caught out carrying one of the letters, or Julilla herself caught in the deed of writing one—and then where would he be? Who would believe that he, with his history, was innocent of any kind of intrigue? It was one thing to have an unsavory past, but if the censors deemed him guilty of corrupting the morals of a patrician senator’s daughter—he would never, never be considered for membership of the Senate. And he was determined he was going to reach the Senate.

  What he year
ned to do was to leave Rome, yet he didn’t dare—what might the girl do in his absence? And, much though he hated having to admit it, he couldn’t bring himself to abandon her while she was so ill. Self-induced her illness might be, but it was nonetheless a serious illness. His mind circled inside itself like a disorientated animal, unable to settle, unable to discipline itself to a sensible or logical path. He would drag the withered grass crown out from its hiding place in one of his ancestral cupboards and sit holding it between his hands, almost weeping in a frenzy of anxiety; for he knew where he was going and what he intended to do, and that wretched girl was an unbearable complication, and yet that wretched girl was the start of it all, with her grass crown—what to do, what to do? Bad enough to have to pick his way unerringly through the morass of his coming intentions, without the additional strain of Julilla.

  He even contemplated suicide, he who was the last person in the world likely to do that deed—a fantasy, a delicious way out of everything, the sleep which has no end. And then back his thoughts would go to Julilla, always back to Julilla—why? He didn’t love her, he wasn’t capable of loving. Yet there were times when he hungered for her, craved to bite her and kiss her and impale her until she screamed in ecstatic pain; and there were other times, especially when he lay wakeful between his mistress and his stepmother, that he actively loathed her, wanting the feel of her skinny throat between his hands, wanting to see her empurpled face and goggling eyes as he squeezed the last vestige of her life out of her starving lungs. Then would come another letter—why didn’t he just throw them away, or carry them to her father with a fierce look on his face and a demand that this harassment cease? He never did. He read them, those passionate and despairing pleas her girl kept slipping into the sinus of his toga in places too public to draw attention to her action; he read each one a dozen times, then put it away in his ancestral cupboards with the others.

  But he never broke down in his resolve not to see her.

  And spring turned into summer, and summer into the dog days of Sextilis, when Sirius the Dog Star shimmered sullenly over a heat-paralyzed Rome. Then, as Silanus was marching confidently up the Rhodanus toward the churning masses of the Germans, it began to rain in central Italy. And kept on raining. To the denizens of sunny Rome, a worse fate than the Sextilian dog days. Depressing, highly inconvenient, a worry in case of flood, a nuisance on all fronts. The marketplaces couldn’t hope to open, political life was impossible, trials had to be postponed, and the crime rate soared. Men discovered their wives in flagrante delicto and murdered them, the granaries leaked and wetted the wheat stored therein, the Tiber rose just enough to ensure that some of the public latrines backfilled and floated excrement out of their doors, a vegetable shortage developed when the Campus Martius and the Campus Vaticanus were covered with a few inches of water, and shoddily built high-rise insulae began to crumble into total collapse or suddenly manifested huge cracks in walls and foundations. Everyone caught cold; the aged and infirm began to die of pneumonia, the young of croup and quinsy, all ages of that mysterious disease which paralyzed the body and, if survived, left an arm or a leg shriveled, wasted.

  Clitumna and Nicopolis began to fight every day, and every day Nicopolis would remark to Sulla in a whisper how very convenient Stichus’s death had been for him.

  Then, after two full weeks of remorseless rain, the low clouds hauled their last tatters over the eastern horizon, and the sun came out. Rome steamed. Tendrils of vapor curled off the paving stones and roof tiles; the air was thick with it. Every balcony, loggia, peristyle-garden, and window in the city burgeoned with mouldy washing, contributing to the general fug, and houses where small babies dwelled— like the one of the merchant banker Titus Pomponius— suddenly found their peristyle-gardens filled with line upon line of drying diapers. Shoes had to be divested of mildew, every book in every literate house unrolled and inspected minutely for insidious fungus, the clothes chests and cupboards aired.

  But there was one cheering aspect to this foetid dampness; mushroom season arrived with a phenomenal surplus. Always avid for the fragrant umbrellas after the normal summer dry, the whole city gobbled mushrooms, rich and poor alike.

  And Sulla was once again loaded down with Julilla’s letters, after a wonderful wet two weeks which had prevented Julilla’s girl from finding him to drop them into his toga. His craving to quit Rome escalated until he knew if he didn’t shake Rome’s vaporous miasma off himself for the space of one little day, he would truly go mad at last. Metrobius and his protector, Scylax, were vacationing in Cumae, and Sulla didn’t want to spend that day of respite alone. So he resolved that he would take Clitumna and Nicopolis on a picnic to his favorite spot outside the city.

  “Come on, girls,” he said to them on the third fine dawn in a row, “put on your glad rags, and I’ll take you on a picnic!”

  The girls—neither feeling at all girlish—looked at him with the sour derision of those in no mood to be jollied out of their doldrums, and declined to budge from the communal bed, though the humid night had left it sweatily soaked.

  “You both need some fresh air,” Sulla persisted.

  “We are living on the Palatine because there is nothing wrong with the air up here,” said Clitumna, turning her back.

  “At the moment the air on the Palatine is no better than any other air in Rome—it’s full of the stink of drains and washing,” he said. “Come on, do! I’ve hired a carriage and we’ll head off in the direction of Tibur—lunch in the woods—see if we can catch a fish or two—or buy a fish or two, and a good fat rabbit straight out of the trap—and come home before dark feeling a lot happier.”

  “No,” said Clitumna querulously.

  Nicopolis wavered. “Well...”

  That was enough for Sulla. “Get ready, I’ll be back in a few moments,” he said, and stretched luxuriantly. “Oh, I am so tired of being cooped up inside this house!”

  “So am I,” said Nicopolis, and got out of bed.

  Clitumna continued to lie with her face to the wall, while Sulla went off to the kitchen to command a picnic lunch.

  “Do come,” he said to Clitumna as he donned a clean tunic and laced on open boots.

  She refused to answer.

  “Have it your own way, then,” he said as he went to the door. “Nicopolis and I will see you this evening.”

  She refused to answer.

  Thus the picnic party consisted only of Nicopolis and Sulla and a big hamper of goodies the cook had thrown together at late notice, wishing he could go along himself. At the foot of the Steps of Cacus an open two-wheeled gig was waiting; Sulla helped Nicopolis up into the passenger’s seat, then hoisted himself into the driver’s seat.

  “Away we go,” he said happily, gathering in the reins and experiencing an extraordinary spurt of lightheartedness, a rare sense of freedom. He confessed to himself that he wasn’t sorry Clitumna had declined to come. Nicopolis was company enough. “Gee up, you mules!” he cried.

  The mules geed up nicely; the gig rattled down the Valley of Murcia in which the Circus Maximus lay, and left the city through the Capena Gate. Alas, the view at first was neither interesting nor cheering, for the ring road Sulla took in heading east crossed the great cemeteries of Rome. Tombstones and more tombstones—not the imposing mausolea and sepulchra of the rich and noble which flanked every arterial road out of the city, but the gravestones of simpler souls. Every Roman and Greek, even the poorest, even the slaves, dreamed that after his going he would be able to afford a princely monument to testify that he had onceexisted. For that reason, both poor and slaves belonged to burial clubs, and contributed every tiny mite they could afford to the club funds, carefully managed and invested; embezzlement was rife in Rome as in any place of human habitation, but the burial clubs were so jealously policed by their members that their executives had no choice save to be honest. A good funeral and a lovely monument mattered.

  A crossroads formed the central point of the huge necropolis sprawled
over the whole Campus Esquilinus, and there at the crossroads stood the massive temple of Venus Libitina, in the midst of a leafy grove of sacred trees. Inside the temple’s podium lay the registers in which the names of Rome’s dead citizens were inscribed, and there too lay chest after chest of money paid in over the centuries to register each citizen death. In consequence the temple was enormously rich, the funds belonging to the State, yet never touched. The Venus was that Venus who ruled the dead, not the living, that Venus who presided over the extinction of the procreative force. And her temple grove was the headquarters of Rome’s guild of undertakers. Behind the precinct of Venus Libitina was an area of open space on which the funeral pyres were built, and beyond that was the paupers’ cemetery, a constantly changing network of pits filled with bodies, lime, soil. Few, citizens or noncitizens, elected to be inhumed, apart from the Jews, who were buried in one section of the necropolis, and the aristocrats of the Famous Family Cornelius, who were buried along the Via Appia; thus most of the monuments transforming the Campus Esquilinus into a crowded little stone city housed urns of ashes rather than decomposing bodies. No one could be buried within Rome’s sacred boundary, not even the greatest.

  However, once the gig passed beneath the arches of the two aqueducts which brought water to the teeming northeastern hills of the city, the vista changed. Farmlands stretched in all directions, market gardens at first, then grass pastures and wheat fields.