The First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

  Once it got going, the parade hustled. Usually the Senate and all the magistrates except the consuls marched first, and then some musicians, then dancers and clowns aping the famous; then there came the booty and display floats, after which came more dancers and musicians and clowns escorting the sacrificial animals and their priestly attendants; next came the important prisoners, and the triumphing general driving his antique chariot; and, in last place, the general’s legions marched. But Gaius Marius changed the sequence around a bit, preceding his booty and his pageants and his floats, so that he would arrive on the Capitol and sacrifice his beasts in time to be inaugurated afterward as consul, hold the inaugural meeting of the Senate, and then preside at his feast in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

  Jugurtha found himself able to enjoy his first—and last— journey on foot through the streets of Rome. What mattered it how he died? A man had to die sooner or later, and his had been a most satisfying life, even if it had ended in defeat. He’d given them a good run for their money, the Romans. His dead brother, Bomilcar... He too had died in a dungeon, come to think of it. Perhaps fratricide displeased the gods, no matter how valid the reason. Well, only the gods had kept count of the number of his blood kin who had perished at his instigation, if not by his own hands. Did that lack of personal participation make his hands clean?

  Oh, how tall the apartment buildings were! The parade jogged briskly into the Vicus Tuscus of the Velabrum, a part of the city stuffed with insulae, leaning as if they tried to embrace across the narrow alleys by falling on each other’s bricky chests. Every window held faces, every face cheered, and he was amazed that they cheered for him too, urged him on to his death with words of encouragement and best wishes.

  And then the parade skirted the edges of the Meat Market, the Forum Boarium, where the statue of naked Hercules Triumphalis was all decked out for the day in the general’s triumphal regalia—purple-and-gold toga picta, palm-embroidered purple tunica palmata, the laurel branch in one hand and the eagle-topped ivory scepter in the other, and his face painted bright red with minim. The meaty business of the day was clearly suspended, for the magnificent temples on the borders of the huge marketplace were cleared of booths and stalls. There! The temple of Ceres, called the most beautiful in the entire city—and beautiful it was in a garish way, painted in reds and blues and greens and yellows, high on a podium like all Roman temples; it was, Jugurtha knew, the headquarters of the Plebeian Order, and housed their records and their aediles.

  The parade now turned into the interior of the Circus Maximus, a greater structure than he had ever seen; it stretched the whole length of the Palatine, and seated about a hundred and fifty thousand people. Every one of its stepped wooden tiers was packed with cheering onlookers for Gaius Marius’s triumphal parade; from where he walked not far in front of Marius, Jugurtha could hear the cheers swell to screams of adulation for the general. No one minded thehasty pace, for Marius had sent out his clients and agents to whisper to the crowds that he hurried because he cared for Rome; he hurried so he could leave all the quicker for Gaul-across-the-Alps and the Germans.

  The leafy spaces and magnificent mansions of the Palatine were thronged with watchers too, above the level of the herd, safe from assault and robbery, women and nursemaids and girls and boys of good family mostly, he had been told. They turned out of the Circus Maximus into the Via Triumphalis, which skirted the far end of the Palatine and had rocks and parklands above it on the left, and on the right, clustering below the Caelian Hill, yet another district of towering apartment blocks. Then came the Palus Ceroliae—the swamp below the Carinae and the Fagutal—and finally a turn into the Velia and the downhill trip to the Forum Romanum along the worn cobbles of the ancient sacred way, the Via Sacra.

  At last he would see it, the center of the world, just as in olden days the Acropolis had been the center of the world. And then he set eyes on it, the Forum Romanum, and was hugely disappointed. The buildings were little and old, and they didn’t face a logical way, for they were all skewed to the north, where the Forum itself was oriented northwest to southeast; the overall effect was slipshod, and the whole place wore an air of dilapidation. Even the newer buildings—which did at least face the Forum at a proper angle— were not kept up well. In fact, the buildings along the way had been far more imposing, and the temples along the way bigger, richer, grander. The houses of the priests did sport fairly new coats of paint, admittedly, and the little round temple of Vesta was pretty, but only the very lofty temple of Castor and Pollux and the vast Doric austerity of the temple of Saturn were at all eye-catching, admirable examples of their kind. A drab and cheerless place, sunk down in a queer valley, damp and unlovely.

  Opposite the temple of Saturn—from the podium of which the senior Treasury officials watched the parade— Jugurtha and his sons and those among his barons and his wives who had been captured were led out of the procession and put to one side; they stood to watch the lictors of the general, his dancers and musicians and censer bearers, his drummers and trumpeters, his legates, and then the chariot-borne general himself, remote and unrecognizable in all his regalia and with his minim-painted red face, pass by. They all went up the hill to where the great temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus presented its pillared side to the Forum, for it too was skewed north-south. Its front looked south. South to Numidia.

  Jugurtha looked at his sons. “Live long and live well,” he said to them; they were going into custody in remote Roman towns, but his barons and his wives were going home to Numidia.

  The guard of lictors who surrounded the King nudged his chains a little, and he walked across the crowded flags of the lower Forum, beneath the trees around the Pool of Curtius and the statue of the satyr Marsyas blowing his oboe, around the edge of the vast tiered well which saw meetings of the Tribes, and up to the start of the Clivus Argentarius. Above was the Arx of the Capitol and the temple of Juno Moneta, where the mint was housed. And there was the ancient shabby Senate House across the far side of the Comitia, and beyond it the small shabby Basilica Porcia, built by Cato the Censor.

  But that was as far as his walk through Rome took him. The Tullianum stood in the lap of the Arx hill just beyond the Steps of Gemortia, a very tiny grey edifice built of the huge unmortared stones men all over the world called Cyclopean; it was only one storey high and had only one opening, a doorless rectangular gap in the stones. Fancying himself too tall, Jugurtha ducked his head as he came to it, but passed inside with ease, for it turned out to be taller than any mortal man.

  His lictors stripped him of his robes, his jewels, his diadem, and handed them to the Treasury clerks waiting to receive them; a docket changed hands, officially acknowledging that this State property was being properly disposed of. Jugurtha was left only the loincloth Metellus Numidicus had advised him to wear, for Metellus Numidicus knew the rite. The fountainhead of his physical being decently covered, a man could go to his death decently.

  The only illumination came from the aperture behind him, but by its light Jugurtha could see the round hole in the middle of the roundish floor. Down there was where they would put him. Had he been scheduled for the noose, the strangler would have accompanied him into the lower regions with sufficient helpers to restrain him, and when the deed was done, and his body tossed down into one of the drain openings, those who still lived would have climbed up a ladder to Rome and their world.

  But Sulla must have found time to countermand the normal procedure, for no strangler was present. Someone produced a ladder, but Jugurtha waved it aside. He stepped up to the edge of the hole, then stepped into space without a sound issuing from his lips; what words were there to mark this event? The thud of his landing was almost immediate, for the lower cell was not deep. Having heard it, the escort turned in silence and left the place. No one lidded the hole; no one barred the entrance. For no one ever climbed out of the awful pit beneath the Tullianum.

  Two white oxen and one white bull were Marius’s share of the
sacrifices that day, but only the oxen belonged to his triumph. He left his four-horse chariot at the foot of the steps up to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and ascended them alone. Inside the main room of the temple he laid his laurel branch and his laurel wreaths at the foot of the statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, after which his lictors filed inside and their laurel wreaths too were offered to the god.

  It was just noon. No triumphal parade had ever gone so quickly; but the rest of it—which was the bulk of it—was proceeding at a more leisurely pace, so the people would have plenty of time to see the pageants, floats, booty, trophies, soldiers. Now came the real business of Marius’s day. Down the steps to the assembled senators came Gaius Marius, face painted red, toga purple and gold, tunic embroidered with palm fronds, and in his right hand the ivory scepter. He walked briskly, his mind bent upon getting the inauguration over, his costume a minor inconvenience he could endure.

  “Well, let’s get on with it!” he said impatiently.

  Utter silence greeted this directive. No one moved, no one betrayed what he was thinking by an expression on his face. Even Marius’s colleague Gaius Flavius Fimbria and the outgoing consul Publius Rutilius Rufus (Gnaeus Mallius Maximus had sent word that he was ill) just stood there.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Marius asked testily.

  Out of the crowd stepped Sulla, no longer martial in his silver parade armor, but properly togate. He was smiling broadly, his hand outstretched, every inch of him the helpful and attentive quaestor.

  “Gaius Marius, Gaius Marius, you’ve forgotten!” he cried loudly, reaching Marius and swinging him round with unexpected strength in his grip. “Get home and change, man!” he whispered.

  Marius opened his mouth to argue, then he caught a secret look of glee on Metellus Numidicus’s face, and with superb timing he put his hand up to his face, brought it down to look at its reddened palm. “Ye gods!” he exclaimed, face comical. “I do apologize, Conscript Fathers,” he said as he moved toward them again. “I know I’m in a hurry to get to the Germans, but this is ridiculous! Please excuse me. I’ll be back as soon as I possibly can. The general’s regalia—even triumphal!—cannot be worn to a meeting of the Senate within the pomerium.” And as he marched away across the Asylum toward the Arx, he called over his shoulder, “I thank you, Lucius Cornelius!”

  Sulla broke away from the silent spectators and ran after him, not something every man could do in a toga; but he did it well, even made it look natural.

  “I do thank you,” said Marius to him when Sulla caught up. “But what on earth does it really matter? Now they’ve all got to stand around in the freezing wind for an hour while I wash this stuff off and put on my toga praetexta!”

  “It matters to them,” said Sulla, “and I do believe it matters to me too.” His shorter legs were moving faster than Marius’s. “You’re going to need the senators, Gaius Marius, so please don’t antagonize them any further today! They weren’t impressed at being obliged to share their inauguration with your triumph, to start with. So don’t rub their noses in it!”

  “All right, all right!” Marius sounded resigned. He took the steps that led from the Arx to the back door of his house three at a time, and charged through the door so violently that its custodian fell flat on his face and started to shriek in terror. “Shut up, man, I’m not the Gauls and this is now, not three hundred years ago!” he said, and started to yell for his valet, and his wife, and his bath servant.

  “It’s all laid out ready,” said that queen among women, Julia, smiling peacefully. “I thought you’d arrive in your usual hurry. Your bath is hot, everyone is waiting to help, so off you go, Gaius Marius.” She turned to Sulla with her lovely smile. “Welcome, my brother. It’s turned cold, hasn’t it? Do come into my sitting room and warm yourself by the brazier while I find you some mulled wine.”

  “You were right, it is freezing,” said Sulla, taking the beaker from his sister-in-law when she came back bearing it. “I’ve got used to Africa. Chasing after the Great Man, I thought I was hot, but now I’m perished.”

  She sat down opposite him, head cocked inquisitively. “What went wrong?” she asked.

  “Oh, you are a wife,” he said, betraying his bitterness.

  “Later, Lucius Cornelius,” she said. “Tell me what went wrong first.”

  He smiled wryly, shaking his head. “You know, Julia, I do love that man as much as I can love any man,” he said, “but at times I could toss him to the Tullianum strangler as easily as I could an enemy!”

  Julia chuckled. “So could I,” she said soothingly. “It is quite normal, you know. He’s a Great Man, and they’re very hard to live with. What did he do?”

  “He tried to participate in the inauguration wearing his full triumphal dress,” said Sulla.

  “Oh, my dear brother! I suppose he made a fuss about the waste of time, and antagonized them all?” asked the Great Man’s loyal but lucid wife.

  “Luckily I saw what he was going to do even through all that red paint on his face.” Sulla grinned. “It’s his eyebrows. After three years with Gaius Marius, anyone except a fool reads his mind from the antics of his eyebrows. They wriggle and bounce in code—well, you’d know, you’re certainly no fool!”

  “Yes, I do know,” she said with an answering grin.

  “Anyway, I got to him first, and yelled out something or other to the effect that he’d forgotten. Phew! I held my breath for a moment or two, though, because it was on the tip of his tongue to tell me to take a running jump into the Tiber. Then he saw Quintus Caecilius Numidicus just waiting, and he changed his mind. What an actor! I imagine everyone except Publius Rutilius was fooled into thinking he had genuinely forgotten what he was wearing.”

  “Oh, thank you, Lucius Cornelius!” said Julia.

  “It was my pleasure,” he said, and meant it.

  “More hot wine?”

  “Thank you, yes.”

  When she returned, she bore a plate of steaming buns as well. “Here, these just came out of the pot. Yeasty and filled with sausage. They’re awfully good! Our cook makes them for Young Marius all the time. He’s going through that dreadful stage where he won’t eat anything he should.”

  “My two eat anything that’s put in front of them,” Sulla said, face lighting up. “Oh, Julia, they’re lovely! I never realized anything living could be so—so—perfect*”

  “I’m rather fond of them myself,” said their aunt.

  “I wish Julilla was,” he said, face darkening.

  “I know,” said Julilla’s sister softly.

  “What is the matter with her? Do you know?”

  “I think we spoiled her too much. Father and Mother didn’t want a fourth child, you know. They’d had two boys, and when I came along they didn’t mind a girl to round the family out. But Julilla was a shock. And we were too poor. So then when she grew up a little, everyone felt sorry for her, I think. Especially Mother and Father, because they hadn’t wanted her. Whatever she did, we found an excuse for. If there was a spare sestertius or two, she got them to fritter away, and was never chided for frittering them away. I suppose the flaw was there all along, but we didn’t help her to cope with it—where we should have taught her patience and forbearance, we didn’t. Julilla grew up fancying herself the most important person in the world, so she grew up selfish and self-centered and self-excusing. We are largely to blame. But poor Julilla is the one who must suffer.’’

  “She drinks too much,” said Sulla.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And she hardly ever bothers with the children.”

  The tears came to Julia’s eyes. “Yes, I know.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Well, you could divorce her,” said Julia, the tears now trickling down her face.

  Out went Sulla’s hands, smeared with the contents of a bun. “How can I do that when I’m going to be away from Rome myself for however long it takes to defeat the Germans? And she’s the mother of my
children. I did love her as much as I can love anyone.”

  “You keep saying that, Lucius Cornelius. If you love— you love! Why should you love any less than other men?”

  But that was too near the bone. He closed up. “I didn’t grow up with any love, so I never learned how,” he said, trotting out his conventional excuse. “I don’t love her anymore. In fact, I think I hate her. But she’s the mother of my daughter and my son, and until the Germans are a thing of the past at least, Julilla is all they have. If I divorced her, she’d do something theatrical—go mad, or kill herself, or triple the amount of wine she drinks—or some other equally desperate and thoughtless alternative.”

  “Yes, you’re right, divorce isn’t the answer. She would definitely damage the children more than she can at present.” Julia sighed, wiped her eyes. “Actually there are two troubled women in our family at the moment. May I suggest a different solution?”

  “Anything, please!” cried Sulla.

  “Well, my mother’s the second troubled woman, you see. She isn’t happy living with Brother Sextus and his wife and their son. Most of the trouble between her and my Claudian sister-in-law is because my mother still regards herself as the mistress of the house. They fight constantly. Claudians are headstrong and domineering, and all the women of that family are brought up to rather despise the old female virtues, where my mother is the exact opposite,” Julia explained, shaking her head sadly.

  Sulla tried to look intelligent and at ease with all this female logic, but said nothing.

  Julia struggled on. “Mama changed after my father’s death. I don’t suppose any of us ever realized how strong the bond was between them, or how heavily she relied on his wisdom and his direction. So she’s become crotchety and fidgety and fault finding—oh, sometimes intolerably critical! Gaius Marius saw how unhappy the situation was at home, and offered to buy Mama a villa on the sea somewhere so poor Sextus could have peace. But she flew at him like a spitting cat, and said she knew when she wasn’t wanted, and may she be treated like an oath breaker if she gave up residence in her house. Oh, dear!”