The First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

  “The second aspect,’’ he went on, “is an army six legions strong—composed of the Head Count, admittedly!—but superbly well trained, and valiant, and brilliantly officered from the most junior centurion and cadet-tribune clear through to its legates. With it is a cavalry force two thousand strong, of equally experienced and valorous men.”

  Rutilius Rufus stopped, rocked on his heels, grinned all around him wolfishly. “The third aspect, Conscript Fathers, is a man. One single man. I refer of course to the proconsul Gaius Marius, commander-in-chief of the African army, and sole engineer of a victory so complete it ranks with the victories of Scipio Aemilianus. Numidia will not rise again. The threat in Africa to Rome’s citizens, property, province, and grain supply is now nonexistent. In fact, Gaius Marius is bequeathing us an Africa so subjugated and pacified that it is not even necessary to put a garrison legion there.”

  He left the dais on which stood the curule chairs, stepped down onto the black-and-white flagging of the ancient floor, and walked toward the doors, standing so that the main volume of his voice went outside into the Forum.

  “Rome’s need for a general is even greater than her need for soldiers or centurions. As Gaius Marius once said in this very House, thousands upon thousands of Rome’s soldiers have perished in the few years since the death of Gaius Gracchus—due solely to the incompetence of the men who led them and their centurions! And at the time Gaius Marius spoke, Italy was still the richer by a hundred thousand men than Italy is right at this moment. But how many soldiers, centurions, and noncombatants has Gaius Marius himself lost? Why, Conscript Fathers, virtually none! Three years ago he took six legions with him to Africa, and he still has those legions alive and well. Six veteran legions, six legions with centurions’.”

  He paused, then roared at the top of his voice, “Gaius Marius is the answer to Rome’s need for an army—and a competent general!”

  His small spare figure showed briefly against the press of listeners outside on the porch when he turned to walk back up the length of the House to his dais. There he stopped.

  “You have heard Marcus Aurelius Cotta say that there has been a quarrel among the Germans, and that at the moment they seem to have abandoned their intention of migrating through our province of Gaul-across-the-Alps. But we cannot possibly let ourselves relax because of this report. We must be skeptical of it, not emboldened by it to indulge in further stupidity. However, one fact seems fairly sure. That we do have the coming winter to prepare. And the first phase of preparation must be to appoint Gaius Marius proconsul in Gaul, with an imperium that cannot be rescinded until the Germans are beaten.”

  There was a general murmur, a harbinger of coming protest. Then came the voice of Metellus Numidicus.

  “Give Gaius Marius the governorship of Gaul-across-the-Alps with a proconsular imperium for anything up to year*?” he asked incredulously. “Over my dead body!”

  Rutilius Rufus stamped his foot, shook his fist. “Oh, ye gods, there you go!” he cried. “Quintus Caecilius, Quintus Caecilius, do you not yet understand the magnitude of our plight? We need a general of Gaius Marius’s caliber!”

  “We need his troops,” said Scaurus Princeps Senatus loudly. “We do not need Gaius Marius! There are others here as good.”

  “Meaning your friend Quintus Caecilius Piggle-wiggle, Marcus Aemilius?” Rutilius Rufus blew a rude noise. “Rubbish! For two years Quintus Caecilius fiddled about in Africa—I know, because I was there! I worked with Quintus Caecilius, and Piggle-wiggle is an apt name for that gentleman, because he’s as turgidly calculating as any woman’s piggle-wiggle! I have also worked with Gaius Marius. And perhaps it is not too much to hope that some of the members of this House remember about me that I am no mean Military Man myself! I should have been given the command in Gaul-across-the-Alps, not Gnaeus Maximus! But that is past, and 1 do not have the time to waste in recriminations.

  “I say to you now, Conscript Fathers, that Rome’s plight is too huge and urgent to pander to a few individuals at the top of our noble tree! I say to you now, Conscript Fathers— all you who sit on the middle tiers of both sides of the House, and all you who sit on the back tiers of both sides of this House!—that there is only one man with the ability to lead us out of our peril! And that one man is Gaius Marius! What matter, that he isn’t in the studbook? What matter, that he isn’t a Roman of Rome? Quintus Servilius Caepio is a Roman of Rome, and look where he’s put us! Do you know where he’s put us? Right in the middle of the shit!”

  Rutilius Rufus was roaring, angry and afraid, sure now that they wouldn’t see the reason of his proposal. “Honorable members of this House—Good Men all—fellow senators! I beseech you to put aside your prejudices just this once! We must give Gaius Marius proconsular power in Gaul-across-the-Alps for however long it is going to take to shove the Germans back to Germania!”

  And this last passionate plea worked. He had them. Scaurus knew it; Metellus Numidicus knew it.

  The praetor Manius Aquillius rose to his feet; a man noble enough, but coming from a family whose history was checkered with more deeds of cupidity than deeds of glory; his father it was who, in the wars after King Attalus of Pergamum willed his kingdom to Rome, had sold the whole land of Phrygia to the fifth King Mithridates of Pontus for a huge sum of gold, and thereby let the inscrutable Orient into western Asia Minor.

  “Publius Rutilius, I wish to speak,” he said.

  “Speak, then,” said Rutilius Rufus, and sat down, spent.

  “I wish to speak!” said Scaurus Princeps Senatus angrily.

  “After Manius Aquillius,” said Rutilius Rufus sweetly.

  ‘‘ Publius Rutilius, Marcus Aemilius, Conscript Fathers,’’ Aquillius began correctly, “I agree with the consul that there is only one man with the genius to extricate us from our plight, and I agree that man is Gaius Marius. But the answer our esteemed consul has proposed is not the right one. We cannot handicap Gaius Marius with a proconsular imperium limited to Gaul-across-the-Alps. First of all, what happens if the war moves out of Gaul-across-the-Alps? What if its theater shifts to Italian Gaul, or Spain, or even to Italy itself? Why, the command will automatically shift to the appropriate governor, or to the consul of the year! Gaius Marius has many enemies in this House. And I for one am not sure that those enemies will hold Rome dearer than their grudges. The refusal of Quintus Servilius Caepio to collaborate with Gnaeus Mallius Maximus is a perfect example of what happens when a member of the old nobility holds his dignitas more important than Rome’s dignitas.”

  “You are mistaken, Manius Aquillius,” Scaurus interjected. “Quintus Servilius held his dignitas identical to Rome’s!”

  “I thank you for the correction, Princeps Senatus,” said Aquillius smoothly, and with a little bow no one could honestly call ironic. “You are absolutely correct to correct me. The dignitas of Rome and that of Quintus Servilius Caepio are identical! But why do you hold the dignitas of Gaius Marius as so inferior to Quintus Servilius Caepio’s? Surely Gaius Marius’s personal share is quite as high, if not higher, even if his ancestors owned not a scrap! Gaius Marius’s personal career has been illustrious! And does any member of this House seriously believe that Gaius Marius thinks of Arpinum first, Rome second? Does any member of this House seriously believe Gaius Marius thinks of Arpinum in any other way than that it is a part of Rome? All of us have ancestors who were once New Men! Even Aeneas—who came to Latium from far-off Ilium, after all!—was a New Man! Gaius Marius has been praetor and consul. He has therefore ennobled himself, and his descendants to the very end of time will be noble.”

  Aquillius’s eyes roved across the white-clad ranks. “I see several Conscript Fathers here today who bear the name of Porcius Cato. Now their grandfather was a New Man. But do we today think of these Porcii Catones as anything save pillars of this House, noble descendants of a man who in his own day had much the same effect on men with the name of Cornelius Scipio as Gaius Marius has today on men with the name of Caecilius
Metellus?”

  He shrugged, got down from the dais, and emulated Rutilius Rufus by striding down the floor of the House to a position near the open doors.

  “It is Gaius Marius and no other who must retain supreme command against the Germans. No matter where the theater of war might be! Therefore it is not enough to invest Gaius Marius with a proconsular imperium limited to Gaul-across-the-Alps.”

  He turned to face the House, and thundered his words. “As is evident, Gaius Marius is not here to give his personal opinion, and time is galloping away as fast as a bolting horse. Gaius Marius must be consul. That is the only way we can give him the power he is going to need. He must be put up as a candidate for the coming consular elections— a candidate in absentia!”

  The House was growling, murmuring, but Manius Aquillius carried on, and carried their attention. “Can anyone here deny that the men of the Centuries are the finest flower of the People? So I say to you, let the men of the Centuries decide! By either electing Gaius Marius consul in absentia, or not electing him! For this decision of the supreme command is too big for this House to make. And it is also too big for the Assembly of the Plebs or even of the Whole People to make. I say to you, Conscript Fathers, that the decision of the supreme command against the Germans must be handed to that section of the Roman People who matter the most—the men of the First and the Second Classes of citizens, voting in their centuries in their own Assembly, the Comitia Centuriata!”

  Oh, here is Ulysses! thought Rutilius Rufus. I would never have thought of this! Nor do I approve. But he’s got the Scaurus faction by the balls just the same. No, it would never have worked to take the vexed question of Gaius Marius’s imperium to the People in their tribes, have the whole thing conducted by the tribunes of the plebs in an atmosphere of shouting, yelling, even rioting crowds! To men like Scaurus, the Plebeian Assembly is an excuse for the rabble to run Rome. But the men of the First and Second Classes? Oh, they’re a very different breed of Roman! Clever, clever Manius Aquillius!

  First you do something unheard of, by proposing that a man be elected consul when he isn’t even here to stand for office, and then you let the Scaurus faction know that you are willing to have the whole question decided by Rome’s finest! If Rome’s finest don’t want Gaius Marius, then all they have to do is organize the First and Second Classes of the Centuries to vote for two other men. If they do want Gaius Marius, then all they have to do is vote for him and one other man. And I’d be willing to bet that the Third Class doesn’t even get a chance to vote! Exclusivity is satisfied.

  The real legal quibble is the in absentia proviso. Manius Aquillius will have to go to the Plebeian Assembly for that, though, because the Senate won’t give it to him. Look at the tribunes of the plebs wriggling with glee on their bench! There won’t be a veto among them—they’ll take the in absentia dispensation to the Plebs, and the Plebs, dazzled by the vision of ten tribunes of the plebs in accord, will pass a special law enabling Gaius Marius to be elected consul in absentia. Of course Scaurus and Metellus Numidicus and the others will argue the binding power of the lex Villia annalis, which says that no man can stand a second time for the consulship until ten years have elapsed. And Scaurus and Metellus Numidicus and the others will lose.

  This Manius Aquillius needs watching, thought Rutilius Rufus, turning in his chair to watch. Amazing! he thought. They can sit there for years as demure and tractable as a new little Vestal Virgin, and then all of a sudden the opportunity presents itself, and off comes the sheep’s disguise, forth stands the wolf. You, Manius Aquillius, are a wolf.

  5

  Tidying up Africa was a pleasure, not only for Gaius Marius, but for Lucius Cornelius Sulla too. Military duties were exchanged for administrative, admittedly, yet neither man disliked the challenge of organizing a brand-new Africa Province, and two kingdoms around it.

  Gauda was now King of Numidia; not much of a man himself, he had a good son in Prince Hiempsal—who would be king, Marius thought, fairly quickly. Reinstated as an official Friend and Ally of the Roman People, Bocchus of Mauretania found his realm enormously enlarged by the gift of most of western Numidia; where once the river Muluchath had been his eastern boundary, this now lay only fifty miles to the west of Cirta and Rusicade. Most of eastern Numidia went into a much bigger Africa Province to be governed by Rome, so that Marius could dower all the knights and landowners in his clientele with the rich coastal lands of the Lesser Syrtis, including the old and still powerful Punic town of Leptis Magna, as well as Lake Tritonis and the port of Tacape. For his own uses, Marius kept the big, fertile islands of the Lesser Syrtis; he had plans for them, particularly for Meninx and Cercina.

  “When we get round to discharging the army,” Marius said to Sulla, “there comes the problem of what to do with them. They’re all Head Count, which means they have no farms or businesses to go back to. They’ll be able to enlist in other armies, and I suspect a lot of them will want to do that, but some won’t. However, the State owns their equipment, which means they won’t be allowed to keep it, and that means the only armies they’ll be able to enlist in will be Head Count armies. With Scaurus and Piggle-wiggle opposing financing of Head Count armies in the House, there’s a distinct possibility Head Count armies of the future will be rare birds, at least after the Germans are dealt with—oh, Lucius Cornelius, wouldn’t it be grand to be in that campaign? But they’ll never agree to it, alas.”

  “I’d give my eyeteeth,” said Sulla.

  “You could spare them,” said Marius.

  “Go on with what you were saying about the men who will want their discharges,” Sulla prompted.

  “I think the State owes Head Count soldiers a little more than their share of the booty at the end of a campaign. I think the State should gift each man with a plot of land to settle on when he elects to retire. Make decent, modestly affluent citizens of them, in other words.”

  “A military version of the land settlements the Brothers Gracchi tried to introduce?” asked Sulla, frowning slightly.

  “Precisely. You don’t approve?”

  “I was thinking of the opposition in the House.”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking that the opposition would be much less if the land involved wasn’t ager publicus—in Rome’s public domain. Start even talking about giving away the ager publicus, and you’re asking for trouble. Too many powerful men are leasing it. No, what I plan to do is secure permission from the House—or the People, if the House won’t do it—hopefully, it won’t come to that—to settle Head Count soldiers on nice big plots of land on Cercina and Meninx, right here in the African Lesser Syrtis. Give each man, say, a hundred iugera, and he will do two things for Rome. First of all, he and his companions will form the nucleus of a trained body of men who can be called up for duty in the event of any future war in Africa. And secondly, he and his companions will bring Rome to the provinces—Rome’s thoughts, customs, language, way of life.”

  But Sulla frowned. “I don’t know, Gaius Marius—it seems wrong to me to want to do the second thing. Rome’s thoughts, customs, language, way of life—those things belong to Rome. To graft them onto Punic Africa, with its Berbers and Moors beneath that again—well, to me it seems a betrayal of Rome.”

  Marius rolled his eyes toward the roof. “There is no doubt, Lucius Cornelius, that you are an aristocrat! Live a low life you might have done, but think low you don’t.” He reverted to the task at hand. “Have you got those lists of all the odds and ends of booty? The gods help us if we forget to itemize the last gold-headed nail—and in quintuplicate!”

  “Treasury clerks, Gaius Marius, are the dregs of the Roman wine flagon,” said Sulla, hunting through papers.

  “Of anybody’s wine flagon, Lucius Cornelius.”

  *

  On the Ides of November a letter came to Utica from the consul Publius Rutilius Rufus. Marius had got into the habit of sharing these letters with Sulla, who enjoyed Rutilius Rufus’s racy style even more than Marius did,
being better with words than Marius was. However, Marius was alone when the letter was brought to his office, which fact pleased him; for he liked the opportunity to go through it first to familiarize himself with the text, and when Sulla sat listening to him mutter his way across the endless squiggles trying to divide them up into separate words, it tended to put him off.

  But he had hardly begun to read it aloud to himself when he jumped, shivered, leaped to his feet. ”Jupiter!’’ he cried, and ran for Sulla’s office.

  He burst in, white-faced, brandishing the scroll. “Lucius Cornelius! A letter from Publius Rutilius!”

  “What? What is it?”

  “A hundred thousand Roman dead,” Marius began, reading out important snatches of what he had already read himself. “Eighty thousand of the dead are soldiers... The Germans annihilated us.... That fool Caepio refused to join camps with Mallius Maximus... insisted on staying twenty miles to the north... Young Sextus Caesar was badly wounded, so was young Sertorius... Only three of the twenty-four tribunes of the soldiers survived... No centurions left... The soldiers who did survive were the greenest, and have deserted... A whole legion of propertied Marsi dead, and the nation of the Marsi has already lodged a protest with the Senate... claiming huge damages, in court if necessary... The Samnites are furious too...”

  “Jupiter!” breathed Sulla, flopping back into his chair.

  Marius read on to himself for a moment, murmuring a little too softly for Sulla to hear; then he made a most peculiar noise. Thinking Marius was about to have some sort of seizure, Sulla got quickly to his feet, but didn’t have time to get around his desk before the reason came out.

  “I—am—consul!” gasped Gaius Marius.

  Sulla stopped in his tracks, face slack. “Jupiter!” he said again, could think of nothing else to say.