2. The Grass Crown

by Colleen McCullough

  At the beginning of March he spoke in the Senate about the ager publicus, aware that his mask was sure to slip, that some of the ultra-conservatives would suddenly see how dangerous this son of one of their own was going to be. But Drusus had confided in Scaurus Princeps Senatus, in Crassus Orator, and in Scaevola, and brought them round to his way of thinking. And if he could do that, then he had a chance to win over the whole Senate, so much was sure. He got up to speak with a certain change in his demeanor that warned everyone something special was coming. Never had he seemed so self-contained, so wrought, so immaculate in manner and garb. "There is an evil in our midst," Drusus said, speaking from the center of the floor down by the great bronze doors which he had requested be closed. And paused, his eyes passing slowly from one part of the House to another, using that trick he had of making each and every man believe he looked at and spoke to him alone. "There is an evil in our midst. A great evil. An evil we have brought upon ourselves! For we created it! Thinking as is so often the way that what we were doing was admirable, a good and proper thing. Because I am aware of this, and have nothing but respect for our ancestors, I do not criticize the creators of this evil in our midst, nor cast the slightest slur upon those who inhabited this august building in earlier times. "But what is this evil in our midst?" Drusus asked rhetorically, pointed brows raised even as he dropped his voice. "It is the ager publicus, Conscript Fathers. The ager publicus. The evil in our midst. Yes, it is an evil! We took the best land from our Italian, our Sicilian, and our foreign enemies and we made it our own, and called it the ager publicus of Rome. Convinced that we were adding to the common wealth of Rome, that we would reap the benefits of so much good soil, so much extra prosperity. But it has not turned out that way, has it? Instead of keeping the confiscated land in its original small parcels, we expanded the size of the blocks we rented out all in order to lessen the workload upon our civil servants, and keep Roman government from becoming a Greek bureaucracy. Thus we rendered our ager publicus unattractive to the farmers who had cultivated it, daunted them by the size of the allotments, and removed all hope of their continuing to use it by the size of the rents. The ager publicus became the province of the wealthy those who can afford the rent and turn the land to the kind of activities its sheer size dictates. Where once these lands contributed greatly to the feeding of Italy, now they can only produce things to wear. Where once these lands were well settled and properly farmed, now they are huge, sparse, quite often neglected." The faces he looked at were setting; Drusus's heart seemed to slow and labor within his chest, he could feel his breath growing short, he had to struggle to maintain his air of calm, his stern tones. No one had interjected. They hadn't had enough of him yet. Therefore he must plough on as if he hadn't noticed the change. "But that, Conscript Fathers, was only the beginning of the evil. That was what Tiberius Gracchus saw when he rode through the latifundia of Etruria and found that the work was being done by foreign slaves rather than the good men of Italy and of Rome. That was what Gaius Gracchus saw when he took up his dead brother's task ten years later. I see it too. But I am not a Sempronius Gracchus. I do not regard the reasons of the Brothers Gracchi as big enough to disturb the mos maiorum, our customs and traditions. In the day of the Brothers Gracchi, I would have sided with my father." He stopped to use his trick with his eyes, now blazing his absolute sincerity. "I mean that, Conscript Fathers! In the day of Tiberius Gracchus, in the day of Gaius Gracchus, I would have sided with my father. He was in the right of it. But times have changed. Other factors have evolved that swell the evil attached to the ager publicus. First, I mention the troubles in our Asia Province started by Gaius Gracchus when he legislated to provide for the farming of the tithes and taxes there by private companies. The taxes of Italy have been farmed for longer by far, but were never so significant. As a result of this shelving of our senatorial responsibilities and the increasing role in public government of factions within the Ordo Equester, we have seen a model Asia Province administration lobbied against, attacked vitriolically- and finally, in the trial of our esteemed consular Publius Rutilius Rufus, have been given to understand by these knight factions that we the members of the Senate of Rome! had better not dare again to graze upon their turf. Well, I have begun the cessation of that kind of intimidation by making the Ordo Equester share its control of these courts equally with the Senate, and palliated knightly injury by expanding the size of the Senate. But the evil is still there." Some of the faces were not quite so set; mention of his dear uncle, Publius Rutilius Rufus, had worked in his favor and so, he saw, did his reference to Quintus Mucius Scaevola's administration of Asia Province as a model one. "It has been joined, Conscript Fathers, by a new evil. How many of you know what this new evil is? Very few, I would think. I am referring to an evil created by Gaius Marius though I acquit that eminent sextuple consular of acting in any knowledge of what he was starting. That is the trouble! At the time the evil begins it is not an evil at all! It is a result of change, of need, of shifting balances within our systems of government and within our armies. We had run out of soldiers. And why had we run out of soldiers? Among the many reasons is one which cannot be separated from the ager publicus. I mean that creation of the ager publicus threw the smallholding farmers off their land, and they ceased to breed so many sons, and so could not fuel the army. Gaius Marius did the only thing he could do, looking back on it from this point in time. He enlisted the capite censi in the army. He made soldiers out of the Head Count masses who did not have the money to buy their gear, did not come from landowning families did not, in effect, have two sesterces to jingle together." When he spoke on his voice was hushed; every head craned forward, every ear was cocked. "Army pay is little. The spoils from our defeat of the Germans were pitiful. Gaius Marius and his successors, including his legates, had taught the Head Count how to fight, to know one end of a sword from the other, to experience a sense of worth, of dignity as Roman men. And I happen to agree with Gaius Marius! We cannot just throw them back into their mean urban back lanes, into their mean rural hovels. To do that would be to breed an entirely new kind of evil, a mass of well-trained men with nothing in their purses, time on their hands, and a growing sense of injury at their treatment by men of our class. Gaius Marius's answer which started while he was still in Africa fighting King Jugurtha was to settle these retired army veterans of no means upon foreign public land. It was the long and praiseworthy task of last year's urban praetor, Gaius Julius Caesar, to do this upon the islands in the African Lesser Syrtis. I am of the opinion and I urge you strongly, fellow members of this House, to consider what I say as no more than a safeguard against our future! I am of the opinion that Gaius Marius was right, and that we should continue to settle these Head Count veterans on foreign ager publicus." From the beginning Drusus had not moved from his original place. Nor did he move now. There were those whose faces had hardened again at the mere mention of Gaius Marius's name, but Marius himself continued to sit upon his chair in the forefront of the consulars with great dignity and an impassive face. On the middle tier opposite Marius's central position sat the ex-praetor Lucius Cornelius Sulla, returned now from his governorship of Cilicia, and very interested in what Drusus was saying. "All this, however, does not deal with the most brooding and immediate evil, the ager publicus of Italy and Sicily. Something must be done! For while ever we have this evil on our hands, Conscript Fathers, it is going to eat into our morals, our ethics, our sense of fitness, the mos maiorum itself. At the moment the Italian ager publicus belongs to those among ourselves and the First Class knights who are interested in latifundia grazing. The ager publicus of Sicily belongs to certain large-scale wheat growers who mostly live here in Rome and leave their Sicilian undertakings to overseers and slaves. A stable situation, you think? Then consider this! Ever since Tiberius and Gaius Sempronius Gracchus put the idea into our minds, the ager publicus of Italy and Sicily sits there just waiting to be sliced up and grabbed for this or that. How honorable will the gene
rals of the future be? Will they, like Gaius Marius, be content to settle their veterans upon foreign public lands or will they woo their veteran troops with promises of Italian land? How honorable will the tribunes of the plebs be in future years? Isn't it possible that another Saturninus might arise, woo the lowly with promises of land allotments in Etruria, in Campania, in Umbria, in Sicily? How honorable will the plutocrats of the future be? Might it not come about that the public lands are extended in the size of their allotments even more, until one or two or three men own half of Italy, half of Sicily? For what is the point of saying that the ager publicus is the property of the State, when the State leases it out, and when the men who run the State can legislate to do whatever they like with it?" Drusus drew a great breath, straddled his legs wide apart, and launched into his peroration. "Get rid of the lot, I say! Blot the so-called public lands of Italy and Sicily out of existence! Let us gather the courage here and now to do what must be done slice up the whole of our public lands and donate them to the poor, the deserving, soldier veterans, any and all comers! Start with the richest and most aristocratic among us give each man sitting here today his ten iugera out of our ager publicus give every Roman citizen there is his ten little iugera! To some of us, not worth spitting upon. To others, more precious than all they own. Give it away, I say! Give every last iota of it away! Leave nothing for the pernicious men of the future to use to destroy us, our class, our wealth. Leave nothing for them to fiddle with save caelum aut caenum sky and scum! I have sworn to do it, Conscript Fathers, and do it I will! I will leave nothing in the Roman ager publicus below the sky that is not the scum on top of useless swamp! Not because I care about the poor and deserving! Not because I worry about the fates of our Head Count veterans! Not because I grudge you of this House and our more pastoral knights the leasehold of these lands! Because and this is my only reason! because the public lands of Rome represent future disaster, lying there for some general to eye as a pension for his troops, lying there for some demagogic tribune of the plebs to eye as his ticket to First Man in Rome, lying there for two or three plutocrats to eye as their road to the ownership of all Italy or Sicily!" The House heard and the House was moved to think, so much did Drusus achieve; Philippus said nothing, and when Caepio asked to speak, Sextus Caesar denied him, saying curtly that enough had been said, the session would resume on the morrow. "You did well, Marcus Livius," said Marius, passing by on his way out. "Continue your program in this spirit, and you may be the first tribune of the plebs in history to carry the Senate." But, much to Drusus's surprise he hardly knew the man it was Lucius Cornelius Sulla who battened onto him outside, and asked for further speech without delay. "I've only just returned from the East, Marcus Livius, and I want to hear every detail. I want to know about the two laws you've already passed, as well as every single thought you own about the ager publicus," said that strange man, looking a little more weatherbeaten in the face than he had been before going east. Sulla was indeed interested, as he was one of the very few men listening who had sufficient intelligence and understanding to discern the fact that Drusus was not a radical, not a true reformer, but rather an intensely conservative man chiefly concerned to preserve the rights and privileges of his class, keep Rome as Rome had always been. They got no further than the well of the Comitia, where they were sheltered from the winds of winter, and there Sulla soaked in all of Drusus's opinions. From time to time he asked a question, but it was Drusus who spoke at length, grateful that at least one patrician Cornelius was disposed to listen to what most of the patrician Cornelii regarded as a betrayal. At the end Sulla held out his hand, smiling, and thanked Drusus sincerely. "I shall vote for you in the Senate, even if I can't vote for you in the Plebeian Assembly," he said. They walked back to the Palatine together, but neither evinced any interest in repairing to a warm study and a full flagon of wine; the kind of liking which would have produced such an invitation was not present on either side. At Drusus's house Sulla clapped him on the back and went straight on down the hill of the Clivus Victoriae to the spot where the alley in which his house lay branched off it. He was anxious to talk to his son, whose counsel he was coming to value more and more, though of mature wisdom there was none, a fact Sulla understood. Young Sulla was a partisan sounding board. To one who had few clients and scant chance of assembling armies of them, Young Sulla was a treasure beyond price. But it was not to be a happy homecoming. Young Sulla, said Aelia, had come down with a bad cold. There was a client to see him who had insisted upon waiting, purporting to be the bearer of urgent news. The mere mention of malaise in Young Sulla was enough to drive the client temporarily out of Sulla's head, however; he hurried not toward his study, but toward the comfortable sitting room where Aelia had established this cherished son, feeling that his airless, lightless sleeping cubicle was not a proper place for the invalid. There was a fever, a sore throat, sniffles from a runny nose, a slightly rheumy-eyed look of adoration; Sulla relaxed, kissed his son, comforted him by saying, "If you look after this affliction, my boy, it will last two market intervals and if you do not, it will last sixteen days. Let Aelia look after you, is my advice." Then he went to his study, frowning as to who or what was waiting for him; his clients were not of a kind to worry about him so much, for he was not a generous man, therefore did not distribute largesse. They mostly consisted of soldiers and centurions, provincial and rural nobodies who at one time or another had encountered him, been helped by him, and asked to become his clients. Few of what few there were had addresses in the city of Rome herself. It was Metrobius. He ought to have known, though he hadn't even guessed. A mark of how successful his mental campaign to keep Metrobius out of memory had been. How old was he now? In his early thirties, perhaps thirty-two or thirty-three. Where did the years go? Into oblivion. But Metrobius was still Metrobius and still, the kiss told him, his to command. Then Sulla shivered; the last time Metrobius had come to call on him at his house, Julilla had died. He didn't bring luck, even if he deemed love a substitute for luck. To Sulla, love was no substitute at all. He moved resolutely away from Metrobius's vicinity, seated himself behind his desk. "You should not be here," he said, quite curtly. Metrobius sighed, slid gracefully into the client's chair, and leaned his folded arms on the desk, his beautiful dark eyes sad. "I know I should not, Lucius Cornelius, but I am your client! You procured the citizenship for me without freedman status I am legitimately Lucius Cornelius Metrobius, of the tribe Cornelia. If anything, I imagine your steward is more worried by the infrequency of my appearances here, rather than the other way around. Truly, I do or say nothing to imperil your precious reputation! Not to my friends and colleagues in the theater, not to my lovers, not to your staff. Please, credit me where credit is due!" Sulla's eyes filled with tears, hastily blinked away. "I know, Metrobius. And I do thank you." He sighed, got up, went to the console where the wine was kept. "A cup?" "Thank you." Sulla deposited the silver goblet on the desk in front of Metrobius, then slipped his arms around Metrobius's shoulders, and stood behind him to lean his cheek on the dense black hair. But before Metrobius could do more than lift his hands to clasp at Sulla's arms, Sulla was gone again, seated at his desk. "What's this urgent matter?" he asked. "Do you know a fellow called Censorinus?" "Which Censorinus? Nasty young Gaius Marcius Censorinus, or that Censorinus who is a Forum frequenter of easy means with amusing senatorial aspirations?" "The second specimen. I didn't think you knew your fellow Romans so well, Lucius Cornelius." "Since I last saw you, I've been urban praetor. That job filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge." "I suppose it did." "What about this second specimen of Censorinus?" "He's going to lay charges against you in the treason court, alleging that you took a huge bribe from the Parthians in return for betraying Rome's interests in the East." Sulla blinked. "Ye gods! I didn't think there was anyone in Rome with so much awareness of what happened to me in the East! I have received no encouragement even to report my adventures in full to the Senate. Censorinus? How would he know what went on east of the For
um Romanum, let alone east of the Euphrates? And how did you find out, when I've heard no whisper of this elsewhere?" "He's a theater buff, and his chief recreation is the giving of parties at which actors strut round the more tragic the actor, the better. So I go to his parties regularly," said Metrobius, smiling without any admiration for Censorinus. "No, Lucius Cornelius, the man is not one of my lovers! I despise him. But I do adore parties. None are ever as good as the ones you used to throw in the old days, alas. But Censorinus's efforts are bearable. And one meets the usual crowd at them people I know well, am fond of. The man serves good food and good wine." Metrobius pursed his red lips, looked thoughtful. "However, it has not escaped me that in the past few months Censorinus has had some odd people at his flings. And is sporting a quizzing-glass made from a single flawless emerald the sort of gem he could never have afforded to buy, even if he does have enough money for the senatorial census. I mean, that emerald quizzing-glass is a gem fit for a Ptolemy of Egypt, not a Forum frequenter!" Sulla sipped at his wine, smiling slowly. "How fascinating! I can see I must cultivate this Censorinus after my trial, if not before. Have you any ideas?" "I think he's an agent for I don't know! Perhaps the Parthians, or some other eastern lot. His peculiar party guests are definitely orientals of some kind embroidered robes flashing gold, jewels all over the place, plenty of money to drop into every eagerly outstretched Roman hand." "Not the Parthians," said Sulla positively. "They are not concerned about what happens west of the Euphrates, I know that for a fact. It's Mithridates. Or Tigranes of Armenia. But I'll settle for Mithridates of Pontus. Well, well!" He rubbed his hands together gleefully. "So Gaius Marius and I have Pontus really worried, do we? And, it seems, more Sulla than Marius! That's because I've had speech with Tigranes and concluded a treaty with the satraps of the King of the Parthians. Well, well!" "What can you do?" asked Metrobius anxiously. "Oh, don't worry about me," said Sulla cheerfully, getting up to nudge the shutter flaps on his windows completely closed. "Forewarned is definitely forearmed. I'll bide my time, wait for Censorinus to make his move. And then..." "And then what?" Sulla's teeth showed nastily. "Why, I'll make him wish he had never been born." He passed to the atrium door to shoot its bolt, and from there he went to the door opening onto the peristyle colonnade, bolted it. "In the meantime, the best love of my life apart from my son, you're here and the damage is done. I can't allow you to leave without touching you." "Nor would I go until you did." They stood embraced, chins on each other's shoulders. "Do you remember, all those years ago?" asked Metrobius dreamily, eyes closed, smiling. "You in that absurd yellow skirt, with the dye running down the insides of your thighs?" Sulla smiled too, one hand sliding through the crisp head of hair, the other sliding down the straight hard back voluptuously. "And you wearing that wig of living little snakes." "Well, I was Medusa!" "Believe me, you looked the part." "You talk too much," said Sulla. It was over an hour later before Metrobius departed; no one had evinced any interest in his visit, though Sulla did say to the ever-warm, always-loving Aelia that he had just been given news of an impending prosecution in the treason court. She gasped, fluttered. "Oh, Lucius Cornelius!" "Don't worry, my dear," said Sulla lightly. "It will come to nothing, I promise you." She looked anxious. "Are you feeling well?" "Believe me, wife, I haven't felt so well in years or so in the mood to make passionate love to you," said Sulla, his arm about her waist. "Now come to bed."