The First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

  “Why couldn’t they have fallen on their swords?” asked Scaurus fretfully. “Think of all the trouble they would have saved us! Suicide an admission of guilt, no trials, no strangler in the Career Tullianum—we don’t dare throw them off the Tarpeian Rock!”

  Sulla stood listening, his ears absorbing what was said, but his eyes resting thoughtfully upon Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet. However, he said nothing.

  “Well, the trial is something we’ll worry about when the time comes,” said Marius. “In the meantime, we have to find somewhere to put them where they’ll be safe.”

  “The Lautumiae is out of the question,” said Scaurus at once. “If for some reason—or at someone’s instigation— a big crowd decides to rescue them, those cells will never withstand attack, not if every lictor we have is standing guard. It’s not Saturninus I’m concerned about, but that ghastly creature Equitius. All it will take is for one silly woman to start weeping and wailing because the son of Tiberius Gracchus is going to die, and we could have trouble.” He grunted. “And as if that weren’t enough, look at our young bloods down there, slavering. They wouldn’t mind lynching Saturninus in the least.”

  “Then I suggest,” said Marius joyously, “that we shut them up inside the Curia Hostilia.”

  Scaurus Princeps Senatus looked stunned. “We can’t do that, Gaius Marius!”

  “Why not?”

  “Imprison traitors in the Senate House! It’s—it’s—why, it’s like offering our old gods a sacrifice of a turd!”

  “They’ve already fouled the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, everything to do with the State religion is going to have to be purified anyway. The Curia has absolutely no windows, and the best doors in Rome. The alternative is for some of us to volunteer to hold them in our own homes— would you like Saturninus? Take him, and I’ll take Equitius. I think Quintus Lutatius should have Glaucia,” said Marius, grinning.

  “The Curia Hostilia is an excellent idea,” said Sulla, still looking thoughtfully at Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet.

  “Grrrr!” snarled Scaurus Princeps Senatus, not at Marius or Sulla, but at circumstances. Then he nodded decisively. “You are quite right, Gaius Marius. The Curia Hostilia it must be, I’m afraid.”

  “Good!” said Marius, clapped Sulla on the shoulder in a signal to move off, and added with a frightful lopsided grin, “While I see to the details, Marcus Aemilius, I’ll leave it to you to explain to your fellow Good Men why we need to use our venerable meeting-house as a prison.”

  “Why, thank you!” said Scaurus.

  “Think nothing of it.”

  When they were out of earshot of all who mattered, Marius glanced at Sulla curiously. “What are you up to?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure I’m going to tell you,” said Sulla.

  “You’ll be careful, please. I don’t want you hauled up for treason.”

  “I’ll be careful, Gaius Marius.”

  *

  Saturninus and his confederates had surrendered on the eighth day of December; on the ninth, Gaius Marius reconvened the Centuriate Assembly and heard the declaration of candidates for the curule magistracies.

  Lucius Cornelius Sulla didn’t bother going out to the saepta; he was busy doing other things, including having long talks with Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet, and squeezing in a visit to Aurelia, though he knew from Publius Rutilius Rufus that she was all right, and that Lucius Decumius had kept his tavern louts away from the Forum Romanum.

  The tenth day of the month was the day upon which the new tribunes of the plebs entered office; but two of them, Saturninus and Equitius, were locked up in the Senate House. And everyone was worried that the crowd might reappear, for it seemed to be most interested in the doings of the tribunes of the plebs.

  Though Marius would not permit his little army of three days before to come to the Forum Romanum clad in armor or girt with swords, he had the Basilica Porcia closed off to its normal complement of merchants and bankers, and kept it purely for the storage of arms and armor; on its ground floor at the Senate House end were the offices of the College of Tribunes of the Plebs, and here the eight who were not involved in the Saturninus business were to assemble at dawn, after which the inaugural meeting of the Plebeian Assembly would be conducted as quickly as possible, and with no reference to the missing two.

  But dawn had not yet broken and the Forum Romanum was utterly deserted when Caepio Junior and Metellus Pius Piglet led their raiding party down the Argiletum toward the Curia Hostilia. They had gone the long way round to make sure no guard detected them, but when they spread out around the Curia, they discovered they had the whole area to themselves.

  They carried long ladders which they propped against both sides of the building, reaching all the way up to the ancient fan-shaped tiles of the eaves, lichen-covered, brittle.

  “Remember,” said Caepio Junior to his troops, “that no sword must be raised, Lucius Cornelius says. We must abide by the letter of Gaius Marius’s orders.”

  One by one they scaled the ladders until the entire party of fifty squatted along the edge of the roof, which was shallow in pitch, and not an uncomfortable place to roost. There in the darkness they waited until the pale light in the east grew from dove-grey to bright gold, and the first rays of the sun came stealing down from the Esquiline Hill to bathe the roof of the Senate House. Some people were beginning to arrive below, but the ladders had been drawn up onto the Curia’s roof too, and no one noticed anything untoward because no one thought to look upward.

  “Do it!” cried Caepio Junior.

  Racing time—for Lucius Cornelius had told them they would not have very long—the raiding party began ripping tiles off the oak frames between the far more massive cedar beams. Light flooded into the hall below, bouncing off fifteen white faces staring up, more startled than terrified. And when each man on the roof had a stack of tiles beside him, he began to hurl them down through the gap he had made, straight into those faces. Saturninus fell at once, as did Lucius Equitius. Some of the prisoners tried to shelter in the hall’s farthest corners, but the young men on the roof very quickly became skilled at pitching their tiles in any direction accurately. The hall held no furniture of any kind, its users bringing their own stools with them, and the clerks a table or two from the Senate Offices next door on the Argiletum. So there was nothing to shield the prisoners below from the torrent of missiles, more effective as weapons than Sulla had suspected. Each tile broke upon impact with razor-sharp edges, and each weighed ten pounds.

  By the time Marius and his legates—including Sulla— got there, it was all over; the raiding party was descending the ladders to the ground, where its members stood quietly, no one trying to escape.

  “Shall I arrest them?” asked Sulla of Marius.

  Marius jumped, so deep in thought had he been when the quick question came. “No!” he said. “They’re not going anywhere.” And he glanced at Sulla, a covert sideways look which asked a silent question. And got his answer with the ghost of a wink.

  “Open the doors,” said Marius to his lictors.

  Inside the early sun threw rays and beams through a pall of slowly settling dust and lit up the lichen-grey heaps of tiles lying everywhere, their broken edges and more sheltered undersides a rich rust-red, almost the color of blood. Fifteen bodies lay squeezed into the smallest huddles or splayed with arms akimbo and legs twisted, half-buried by shattered tiles.

  “You and I, Princeps Senatus,” said Marius. “No one else.”

  Together they entered the hall and picked their way from one body to the next, looking for signs of life. Saturninus had been struck so quickly and effectively that he hadn’t tried to hunch himself up protectively; his face was hidden below a carapace of tiles, and when revealed looked sightlessly into the sky, his black lashes caked with tile dust and plaster dust. Scaurus bent to close the eyes, and winced fastidiously; so much dust lay upon the drying eyeballs that the lids refused to come down. Lucius Equitius had f
ared worst. Hardly an inch of him was not bruised or cut or swollen from a tile, and it took Marius and Scaurus many moments to toss aside the heap burying him. Saufeius— who had run into a corner—had died from a shard which apparently struck the floor and bounced up to lodge itself like a huge fat spearhead in the side of his neck; his head was almost severed. And Titus Labienus had taken the long edge of an unfractured tile in the small of his back, gone down without feeling anything below the colossal break in his spine.

  Marius and Scaurus conferred.

  “What am I to do with those idiots out there?” Marius asked.

  “What can you do?”

  The right half of Marius’s upper lip lifted. “Oh, come, Princeps Senatus! Take some of the burden upon your scraggy old carcass! You’re not going to skip away from any of this, so much do I promise. Either back me—or be prepared for a fight that will leave everything done here today looking like the women’s Bona Dea festival!”

  “All right, all right!” said Scaurus irritably. “I didn’t mean I wouldn’t back you, you literal-minded rustic! All I meant was what I said—what can you do?”

  “Under the powers invested in me by the Senatus Consultum I can do whatever I like, from arresting every last one of that brave little band outside, to sending them home without so much as a verbal chastisement. Which do you consider expedient?”

  “The expedient thing is to send them all home. The proper thing is to arrest them and charge them with the murder of fellow Romans. Since the prisoners hadn’t stood trial, they were still Roman citizens when they met their deaths.”

  Marius cocked his only mobile eyebrow. “So which course shall I take, Princeps Senatus? The expedient one—or the proper one?’’

  Scaurus shrugged. “The expedient one, Gaius Marius. You know that as well as I do. If you take the proper one, you’ll drive a wedge so deeply into Rome’s tree that the whole world might fall along with it.”

  They walked out into the open air and stood together at the top of the Senate steps, looking down into the faces of the people in the immediate vicinity; beyond these scant hundreds, the Forum Romanum was empty, clean, dreamy in the morning sun.

  “I hereby proclaim a general amnesty!” cried Gaius Marius at the top of his voice. “Go home, young men,” he said to the raiding party, “you are indemnified along with everyone else.” He turned to the main body of his listeners.

  “Where are the tribunes of the plebs? Here? Good! Call your meeting, there is no crowd. The first business of the day will be the election of two more tribunes of the plebs. Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Lucius Equitius are dead. Chief lictor, send for some of your fellows and the public slaves, and clear up the mess inside the Curia Hostilia. Give the bodies to their families for honorable burial, for they had not been tried for their crimes, and are therefore still Roman citizens of good standing.”

  He walked down the steps and crossed to the rostra, for he was senior consul and supervisor of the ceremonies which would inaugurate the new tribunes; had he been a patrician, his junior colleague would have seen to it, which was why one at least of the consuls had to be a plebeian, to have access to the concilium plebis.

  And then it happened, perhaps because the gossip grapevine was in its usual splendid working order, and the word had sparkled up and down its tendrils with the speed of sunbeams. The Forum began to fill with people, thousands upon thousands of them hurrying from Esquiline, Caelian, Viminal, Quirinal, Subura, Palatine, Aventine, Oppian. The same crowd, Gaius Marius saw at once, which had jammed into the Forum during the elections of the tribunes of the plebs.

  And, with the trouble largely over and a feeling of peace within his heart, he looked out into that ocean of faces and saw what Lucius Appuleius Saturninus had seen: a source of power as yet untapped, innocent of the guile experience and education brought, ready to believe some passionately eloquent demagogue’s self-seeking kharisma and put themselves under a different master. Not for me, thought Gaius Marius; to be the First Man in Rome at the whim of the gullible is no victory. I have enjoyed the status of First Man in Rome the old way, the hard way, battling the prejudices and monstrosities of the cursus honorum.

  But, Gaius Marius concluded his thoughts gleefully, I shall make one last gesture to show Scaurus Princeps Senatus, Catulus Caesar, Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, and the rest of the boni that if I had chosen Saturninus’s way, they’d be dead inside the Curia Hostilia all covered in tiles, and I’d be running Rome single-handed. For I am to Saturninus what Jupiter is to Cupid.

  He stepped to that edge of the rostra which faced the lower Forum rather than the well of the Comitia, and held out his arms in a gesture which seemed to embrace the crowd, draw it to him as a father beckons his children. “People of Rome, go back to your houses!” he thundered. “The crisis is past. Rome is safe. And I, Gaius Marius, have great pleasure in announcing to you that a fleet of grain ships arrived in Ostia harbor yesterday. The barges will be coming upstream all day today, and by tomorrow there will be grain available from the State granaries of the Aventine at one sestertius the modius, the price which Lucius Appuleius Saturninus’s grain law laid down. However, Lucius Appuleius is dead, and his law invalid. It is I, Gaius Marius, consul of Rome, who gives to you your grain! The special price will continue until I step down from office in nineteen days’ time. After that, it is up to the new magistrates to decide what price you will pay. The one sestertius I shall charge you is my parting gift to you, Quirites! For I love you, and I have fought for you, and I have won for you. Never, never forget it! Long—live—Rome!”

  And down from the rostra he stepped amid a wave of cheers, his arms above his head, that fierce twisted grin a fitting farewell, with its good side and its bad side.

  Catulus Caesar stood rooted to the spot. “Did you hear that?” he gasped to Scaurus. “He just gave away nineteen days of grain—in his name! At a cost to the Treasury of thousands of talents! How dare he!”

  “Are you going to get up on the rostra and contradict him, Quintus Lutatius?” asked Sulla, grinning. “With all your loyal young Good Men standing there getting off free?”

  “Damn him!” Catulus Caesar was almost weeping.

  Scaurus broke into peals of laughter. “He did it to us again, Quintus Lutatius!” he said when he was able. “Oh, what an earthshaker that man is! He stuck it to us, and he’s left us to pay the bill! I loathe him—but by all the gods, I do love him too!’’ And away he went into another paroxysm.

  “There are times, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, when I do not even begin to understand you!” Catulus Caesar said, and stalked off in his best camel manner.

  “Whereas I, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, understand you all too well,’’ said Sulla, laughing even harder than Scaurus.

  *

  When Glaucia killed himself with his sword and Marius extended the amnesty to Gaius Claudius and his followers, Rome breathed more easily; the Forum strife might be presumed to be over. But that was not so. The young Brothers Luculli brought Gaius Servilius Augur to trial in the treason court, and violence broke out afresh. Senatorial feelings ran high because the case split the Good Men; Catulus Caesar and Scaurus Princeps Senatus and their followers were firmly aligned with the Luculli, whereas Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus and Crassus Orator were committed by ties of patronage and friendship to Servilius the Augur.

  The unprecedented crowds which had filled the Forum Romanum during the troubles with Saturninus had disappeared, but the habitual Forum frequenters turned out in force to witness this trial, attracted by the youth and pathos of the two Luculli—who were fully aware of this, and determined to use it in every way they could. Varro Lucullus, the younger brother, had donned his toga of manhood only days before the trial began; neither he nor the eighteen-year-old Lucius Lucullus yet needed to shave. Their agents, cunningly placed among the crowd, whispered that these two poor lads had just received the news that their exiled father was dead—and that the long-ennobled family Licinius Lucullus now had onl
y these two poor lads to defend its honor, its dignitas.

  Composed of knights, the jury had decided ahead of time that it was going to side with Servilius the Augur, who was a knight elevated to the Senate by his patron Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus. Even when this jury was being chosen, violence had played its part; the hired ex-gladiators of Servilius the Augur tried to prevent the trial’s going on. But the handy little band of young nobles run by Caepio Junior and Metellus Pius Piglet had driven the bully-boys from the scene, killing one as it did so. The jury understood this message, and resigned itself to listening to the Brothers Luculli with more sympathy than it had originally intended.

  “They’ll convict the Augur,” said Marius to Sulla as they stood off to one side, watching and listening keenly.

  “They will indeed,” said Sulla, who was fascinated by Lucius Lucullus, the older boy. “Brilliant!” he exclaimed when young Lucullus finished his speech. “I like him, Gaius Marius!”

  But Marius was unimpressed. “He’s as haughty and pokered up as his father was.”

  “You’re known to support the Augur,” said Sulla stiffly.

  That shaft went wide; Marius just grinned. “I would support a Tingitanian ape if it made life difficult for the Good Men around our absent Piggle-wiggle, Lucius Cornelius.”

  “Servilius the Augur is a Tingitanian ape,” said Sulla.

  “I’m inclined to agree. He’s going to lose.”

  A prediction borne out when the jury (eyeing Caepio Junior’s band of young nobles) returned a unanimous verdict of DAMNO, even after being moved to tears by the impassioned defense speeches of Crassus Orator and Mucius Scaevola.

  Not surprisingly, the trial ended in a brawl which Marius and Sulla viewed from a suitably aloof distance, and with huge enjoyment from the moment when Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus punched an intolerably jubilant Catulus Caesar on the mouth.