The First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

  Further investigations convinced Scaurus that he had found his culprit, and he struck his blow for the good name of the Senate at a meeting of that body early in October. Lucius Appuleius Saturninus was the prime mover behind the premature rise in the price of grain which had prevented the Treasury’s acquiring additional stocks for the State granaries at anything like a reasonable price, said Scaurus Princeps Senatus to a hushed House. And the House had found its scapegoat; amid great indignation, the senators voted overwhelmingly to dismiss Lucius Appuleius Saturninus from his post as quaestor, thereby depriving him of his seat in the House, and leaving him open to massive prosecutions for extortion.

  Summoned from Ostia to appear in the House, Saturninus could do little more than deny Scaurus’s charges. Of actual proof there was none—either for or against—and that meant the issue boiled down to which one of the men involved was more worthy of being believed.

  “Give me proof I am implicated!” cried Saturninus.

  “Give me proof you are not implicated!” sneered Scaurus.

  And naturally the House believed its Princeps Senatus, for Scaurus on the trail of wrongdoing was above reproach, everyone knew it. Saturninus was stripped of everything.

  But he was a fighter, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. In age he was exactly right for the job of quaestor and a new senatorial seat, being thirty; which in turn meant that no one really knew much about him, since he had not starred in a great courtroom drama as a youth, and had not shone out luminously during his military apprenticeship, and came from a senatorial family originating in Picenum. Little choice did he have about losing his post as quaestor, or his seat in the Senate; he could not even protest when the House turned around and gave his beloved job in Ostia to none other than Scaurus Princeps Senatus for the rest of the year! But he was a fighter.

  No one in Rome believed him innocent. Wherever he went he was spat upon, jostled, even stoned, and the outside wall of his house was smothered in graffiti—PIG, PEDERAST, ULCER, WOLFSHEAD, MONSTER, PENIS GOBBLER, and other slurs jostled each other for prominence on the plastered surface. His wife and his young daughter were ostracized, and spent most of their days in tears. Even his servants looked askance at him, and were slow to respond whenever he made a request, or—temper tried—barked an order.

  His best friend was a relative nobody, Gaius Servilius Glaucia. Some years older than Saturninus, Glaucia enjoyed mild fame as an advocate in the courts and a brilliant legal draftsman; but he did not enjoy the distinction of being a patrician Servilius, nor even an important plebeian Servilius. Save for his reputation as a lawyer, Glaucia was about on a par with another Gaius Servilius who had made money and scrambled into the Senate on the edge of his patron Ahenobarbus’s toga; this other plebeian Servilius, however, had not yet acquired a cognomen, where “Glaucia” was quite a respectable one, for it referred to the family’s beautiful grey-green eyes.

  They were a good-looking pair, Saturninus and Glaucia, the one very dark indeed, the other very fair, each in the best physical mould of his type. The basis for their friendship was an equal sharpness of mind and depth of intellect, as well as the avowed purpose of reaching the consulship and ennobling their families forever. Politics and lawmaking fascinated them, which meant they were eminently suited to the kind of work their birth made mandatory.

  “I’m not beaten yet,” said Saturninus to Glaucia, mouth set hard. “There’s another way back into the Senate, and I am going to use it.”

  “Not the censors,” said Glaucia.

  “Definitely not the censors! No, I shall stand for election as a tribune of the plebs,” said Saturninus.

  “You’ll never get in.” Glaucia was not being unduly gloomy, just realistic.

  “I will if I can find myself a powerful enough ally.”

  “Gaius Marius.”

  “Who else? He’s got no love for Scaurus or Numidicus or any of the Policy Makers,” Saturninus said. “I’m sailing for Massilia in the morning to explain my case to the only man who might be prepared to listen to me, and to offer him my services.”

  Glaucia nodded. “Yes, it’s a good tactic, Lucius Appuleius. After all, you have nothing to lose.” A thought occurring to him, he grinned. “Think of the fun you can have making old Scaurus’s life a misery when you’re a tribune of the plebs!’’

  “No, he’s not the one I want!” said Saturninus scornfully. “He acted as he saw fit; I can’t quarrel with that. Someone deliberately set me up as a decoy, and that’s the someone I want. And if I’m a tribune of the plebs, I can make his life a misery. That is, if I can find out who it was.”

  “You go to Massilia and see Gaius Marius,” said Glaucia. “In the meantime, I’ll start work on the grain culprit.”

  In the autumn it was possible to sail to the west, and Lucius Appuleius Saturninus had a good passage to Massilia. From there he journeyed on horseback to the Roman camp outside Glanum, and sought an audience with Gaius Marius.

  It had not been a gross exaggeration on Marius’s part to tell his senior staff that he planned to build another Carcasso, though this was a wood-and-earth version of Carcasso’s stone. The hill upon which the vast Roman camp stood bristled with fortifications; Saturninus appreciated at once that a people like the Germans, unskilled in siege, would never be able to take it, even if they stormed it with every man they had at their disposal.

  “ But,” said Gaius Marius as he took his unexpected guest upon a tour of the dispositions, “it isn’t really here to protect my army, you know. It’s here to delude the Germans into thinking it is.”

  This man isn’t supposed to be subtle! thought Saturninus, suddenly appreciating the quality of Gaius Marius’s intellect. If anyone can help me, he can.

  They had taken a spontaneous liking to each other, sensing a kindred ruthlessness and determination, and perhaps a certain un-Roman iconoclasm. Saturninus was profoundly glad to discover that—as he had hoped—he had beaten the news of his disgrace from Rome to Glanum. However, it was difficult to tell how long he might have to wait to unfold his tale of disaster, for Gaius Marius was the commander-in-chief of a mighty enterprise, and his life, including his debatable leisure, was not his own for many moments at a stretch.

  Expecting a crowded dining room, Saturninus was surprised to discover that he and Manius Aquillius were the only two who would share Gaius Marius’s meal.

  “Is Lucius Cornelius in Rome?” he asked.

  Unperturbed, Marius helped himself to a stuffed egg. “No, he’s off on a special job,” he said briefly.

  Understanding that there was no point in concealing his plight from Manius Aquillius, who had conclusively proven himself Marius’s man the previous year—and who would be bound to get letters from Rome with all the tittle-tattle in them—Saturninus embarked upon his story as soon as the meal was over. The two men listened in silence until it was done, not interrupting with even a single question, which made Saturninus feel that he must have outlined events with clarity and logic.

  Then Marius sighed. “I’m very glad you came in person to see me,” he said. “It lends considerable strength to your case, Lucius Appuleius. A guilty man might have resorted to many ploys, but not that of coming to see me in person. I am not deemed a gullible man. Nor is Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, for that matter. But, like you, I think whoever had investigated this tortuous situation would have been led by a series of illusions to you. After all, as quaestor at Ostia, you’re a perfect decoy.”

  “If the case against me falls down anywhere, Gaius Marius, it is in the fact that I don’t have the kind of money to buy grain in bulk,” Saturninus said.

  “True, but it doesn’t automatically exonerate you, either,” Marius said. “You could as easily have done it for a very big bribe, or taken out a loan.”

  “Do you think I did?”

  “No. I think you’re the victim, not the perpetrator.”

  “So do I,” said Manius Aquillius. “It’s too simple.”

  “Then will you help
me secure election as a tribune of the plebs?” asked Saturninus.

  “Oh, certainly,” said Marius without hesitation.

  “I shall reciprocate in whatever way I can.”

  “Good!” said Marius.

  After which things happened in a hurry. Saturninus had no time to waste, as the tribunician elections were scheduled for early November, and he had to get back to Rome in time to have himself declared a candidate and line up the support Marius had promised him. So, armed with a bulky packet of letters from Marius to various people in Rome, Saturninus set off toward the Alps in a fast gig drawn by four mules, and with a purse large enough to make sure he could hire animals along the way as good as the four which started him on his journey.

  As he was leaving, an extraordinary trio came in on foot through the camp’s main gates. Three Gauls. Barbarian Gauls! Never having set eyes upon a barbarian in his life, Saturninus gaped. One was apparently the prisoner of the other two, for he was manacled. Oddly enough, he was less barbaric in his garb and appearance than the other two! A medium-sized fellow, fairish but not spectacularly so, his hair worn long but cut like a Greek, clean-shaven, clad in the trousers of a Gaul and in a Gallic coat of hairy wool bearing a faint and complicated check in its weave. The second fellow was very dark, but he wore a towering headdress of black feathers and golden wire which proclaimed him some Celtiberian outlander—and little else by way of clothing, displaying instead a body bulging with muscles. The third man was obviously the leader, a true barbarian Gaul, the bare skin of his chest white as milk yet weathered, his trousers bound with thongs like a German or one of the mythical Belgae; long red-gold hair hung down his back, long red-gold moustaches fell one on either side of his mouth, and around his neck he wore a massive dragon-headed tore of what looked like real gold.

  The gig started to move; as he swept by the little group at even closer quarters, Saturninus encountered the cold white gaze of the leader, and shivered in spite of himself. Now he was a complete barbarian!

  *

  The three Gauls continued on up the slope inside the camp’s main gates, challenged by no one until they reached the duty officer’s table under the shelter of the awning outside the general’s substantial timber house.

  “Gaius Marius, please,” said the leader in flawless Latin.

  The duty officer didn’t even blink. “I’ll see if he’s receiving,” he said, getting up. Within a moment he was out again. “The general says to go in, Lucius Cornelius.” he said, smiling widely.

  “Smart,” said Sertorius under his breath as he brushed past the duty officer with waggling headdress. “Just keep your mouth shut about this, hear me?”

  When he set eyes upon his two lieutenants, Marius stared as intently at them as had Saturninus, but with less amazement.

  “About time you came home,” he said to Sulla, grasping his hand warmly, then reaching to greet Sertorius.

  “We’re not here for very long,” said Sulla, jerking his captive forward. “All we came back to do was deliver you a gift for your triumphal parade. Meet King Copillus of the Volcae Tectosages, the same who connived at the annihilation of Lucius Cassius’s army at Burdigala.”

  “Ah!” Marius looked the prisoner over. “Doesn’t look much like a Gaul, does he? You and Quintus Sertorius look far more impressive.”

  Sertorius grinned; Sulla answered.

  “Well, with his capital at Tolosa, he’s been exposed to civilization for a long time. He speaks Greek well, and he’s probably only about half Gallic in his thinking. We caught him outside Burdigala.”

  “Is he really worth so much trouble?” Marius asked.

  “You’ll think so when I tell you,” said Sulla, smiling in his most tigerish fashion. “You see, he has a curious tale to tell—and he can tell it in a tongue Rome understands.”

  Arrested by the look on Sulla’s face, Marius stared at King Copillus more closely. “What tale?”

  “Oh, about ponds once full of gold. Gold that was loaded into Roman wagons and sent down the road from Tolosa to Narbo during the time when a certain Quintus Servilius Caepio was proconsul. Gold that mysteriously disappeared not far from Carcasso, leaving a cohort of Roman soldiers dead along the road, with their arms and armor stripped from them. Copillus was near Carcasso when that gold disappeared—after all, the gold was rightfully in his charge, according to his way of thinking. But the party of men who took the gold south into Spain was far too large and well armed to attack, for Copillus had only a few men with him. The interesting thing is that there was a Roman survivor— Furius, the praefectus fabrum. And a Greek freedman survivor—Quintus Servilius Bias. But Copillus wasn’t near Malaca several months later as the wagons full of gold rolled into a fish factory owned by one of Quintus Servilius Caepio’s clients, nor was he near Malaca when the gold sailed away to Smyrna labeled ‘Garum of Malaca, on Consignment for Quintus Servilius Caepio.’ But Copillus has a friend who has a friend who has a friend who well knows a Turdetanian bandit named Brigantius, and according to this Brigantius, he was hired to steal the gold and get it to Malaca. By the agents of none other than Quintus Servilius Caepio, namely Furius and the freedman Bias, who paid Brigantius with the wagons, the mules—and six hundred sets of good Roman arms and armor, taken from the men Brigantius killed. When the gold went east, Furius and Bias went with it.”

  Never before, thought Sulla, have I seen Gaius Marius looking utterly stunned, even when he read the letter that said he was elected consul in absentia—that just winded him, whereas this tries his credulity.

  “Ye gods!” Marius whispered. “He wouldn’t dare!”

  “He dared, all right,” said Sulla contemptuously. “What matter that the price was six hundred good Roman soldier lives? After all, there were fifteen thousand talents of gold in those wagons! It turns out that the Volcae Tectosages do not regard themselves as the owners of the gold, only as its guardians. The wealth of Delphi, Olympia, Dodona, and a dozen other smaller sanctuaries, which the second Brennus took as the property of all the Gallic tribes. So now the Volcae Tectosages are accursed, and King Copillus doubly accursed. The wealth of Gaul is gone.”

  His shock evaporating, Marius now looked more at Sulla than at Copillus. It was a little story told in richly ringing tones, yes, but more than that; it was a little story told by a Gallic bard, not by a Roman senator.

  “You are a great actor, Lucius Cornelius,” he said.

  Sulla looked absurdly pleased. “My thanks, Gaius Marius.”

  “But you’re not staying? What about the winter? You’d be more comfortable here.” Marius grinned. “Especially young Quintus Sertorius, if he’s got no more in his clothes chest than a feathered crown.”

  “No, we’re off again tomorrow. The Cimbri are milling around the foothills of the Pyrenees, with the local tribesmen throwing every last thing they can find to throw down on them from every ledge, crag, rock, and cliff. The Germans seem to have a fascination for alps! But it’s taken Quintus Sertorius and me all these months to get close to the Cimbri—we’ve had to establish our identities with half of Gaul and Spain, it seems,” said Sulla.

  Marius poured out two cups of wine, looked at Copillus, and poured a third, which he handed to the prisoner. As he gave Sertorius his drink, he eyed his Sabine relative up and down gravely. “You look like Pluto’s rooster,” he said.

  Sertorius took a sip of the wine and sighed blissfully. “Tusculan!” he said, then preened. “Pluto’s rooster, eh? Well, better that than Proserpina’s crow.”

  “What news do you have of the Germans?” Marius asked.

  “In brief—I’ll tell you more over dinner—very little. It’s too early yet to be able to give you information about where they come from, or what drives them. Next time. I’ll get back well ahead of any move they might make in the direction of Italy, never fear. But I can tell you where they all are at this very moment. The Teutones and the Tigurini, Marcomanni, and Cherusci are trying to cross the Rhenus into Germania, while the Cimbri
are trying to cross the Pyrenees into Spain. I don’t think either group will succeed,” said Sulla, putting down his cup. “Oh, that wine was good!”

  Marius called for his duty officer. “Send me three reliable men, would you?” he asked. “And see if you can find comfortable quarters for King Copillus here. He’ll have to be locked up, unfortunately, but only until we can get him away to Rome.”

  “I wouldn’t put him in Rome,” said Sulla thoughtfully, when the duty officer had departed. “In fact, I’d be very quiet about where I did put him, anyway.”

  “Caepio? He wouldn’t dare!” said Marius.

  “He purloined the gold,” said Sulla.

  “All right, we’ll put the King in Nersia,” said Marius briskly.’ ‘Quintus Sertorius, has your mother got any friends who wouldn’t mind housing the King for a year or two? I’ll make sure the money’s good.”

  “She’ll find someone,” said Sertorius confidently.

  “What a piece of luck!’’ crowed Marius. “I never thought we’d get the evidence to send Caepio into well-deserved exile, but King Copillus is it. We’ll keep it very quiet until we’re all back in Rome after the Germans are beaten, then we’ll arraign Caepio on charges of extortion and treason!”

  “Treason?” asked Sulla, blinking. “Not with the friends he’s got in the Centuries!”

  “Ah,” said Marius blandly, “but friends in the Centuries can’t help him when he’s tried in a special treason court manned only by knights.”

  “What are you up to, Gaius Marius?” Sulla demanded.

  “I’ve got myself two tribunes of the plebs for next year!’’ said Marius triumphantly.

  “They mightn’t get in,” said Sertorius prosaically.

  “They’ll get in!” said Marius and Sulla in chorus.

  Then all three laughed, and the prisoner continued to stand with great dignity, pretending he could understand their Latin, and waiting for whatever was to befall him next.