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It was an arena quite as stormy as any theater of war that spring, for Aulus Sempronius Asellio ran foul of the moneylenders. The finances of Rome, both .public and private, were in a worse condition even than during the second Punic war, when Hannibal had occupied Italy and isolated Rome. Money was hiding throughout the business community, the Treasury was virtually empty, and little was coming in. Even the parts of Campania still in Roman hands were too chaotic to permit the orderly collecting of rents; the quaestors were finding it hard to make anyone pay customs duties and port dues, while one of the two biggest ports, Brundisium, was completely cut off; the Italians were now nonpaying insurgents; pleading King Mithridates as an excuse, Asia Province was proving dilatory in returning its contracted incomes to Rome; Bithynia was paying nothing at all; and the incomes from Africa and Sicily were eaten up in extra purchases of wheat before they left Africa or Sicily. To make matters worse, Rome was actually in debt to one of her own provinces, Italian Gaul, from which area most of her weapons and armaments were coming. The one-in-eight plated silver denarius issue of Marcus Livius Drusus had given everyone an extreme mistrust of coined money, and too many sesterces were minted in an attempt to get around this difficulty. Borrowing was rife among those of middle and upper income, and the lending interest rate was higher than in history. Having a good business head, Aulus Sempronius Asellio decided that the best way to improve matters was to act to relieve debt. His technique was attractive and legal; he invoked an ancient statute which forbade charging a fee for lending money. In other words, said Asellio, it was illegal to levy interest on loans. That the antique law had been ignored for centuries and that usury was a thriving business among a large group of knight-financiers was just too bad. The fact was, announced Asellio, that far more knight-financiers were in the business of borrowing money than lending it. Until their distress was relieved, no one in Rome could begin to recover. The number of unrepaid loans was escalating daily, debtors were at their wits' end, and as the bankruptcy courts were closed along with all the other courts creditors were resorting to violent means in order to collect their debts. Before Asellio could enforce his revival of that old law, the moneylenders heard of his intention and petitioned him to reopen the bankruptcy courts. "Tat?" he cried. "What? Here is Rome devastated by the most serious crisis since Hannibal, and the men I see in front of my tribunal are actually petitioning me to make matters worse? As far as I'm concerned, you are a small number of repellently avaricious men, and so I take leave to tell you! Go away! If you don't, you'll get a court reopened, all right! A court specially convened to prosecute you for lending money with interest!" From this stand Asellio refused to be budged. If he could do no more for Rome's debtors than to insist that interest was illegal, he was nonetheless lightening the burden of debt enormously, and in a perfectly legal way. Let the capital be repaid, by all means. But not the interest. The Sempronii, Asellio's family, had a tradition of protecting the distressed; burning to follow in his family's tradition, Asellio espoused his mission with all the fervor of a fanatic, dismissing his enemies as impotent in the face of the law. What he failed to take into account was that not all his enemies were knights. There were also senators in the money lending business, despite the fact that membership in the Senate forbade any purely commercial activity especially one as unspeakably sordid as usury. Included among the senatorial moneylenders was Lucius Cassius, a tribune of the plebs. At the outbreak of war he had gone into the business because his senatorial census income was barely enough; but as Rome's chances of winning deteriorated, Cassius found himself with everything he had lent outstanding, no payments coming in, and the prospect of scrutiny by the new censors looming ever closer. Though Lucius Cassius was by no means the biggest moneylender in the Senate, he was the youngest, he was desperate to the point of panic, and by nature he was a rather lawless individual. Cassius acted, not only on his own behalf; he engaged himself to act for all the usurers. Asellio was an augur. As he was also the urban praetor, he inspected the omens on behalf of the city regularly from the podium of the temple of Castor and Pollux. A few days after his confrontation with the moneylenders he was already taking the auspices when he noticed that the crowd in the Forum below him was much larger than the usual gathering to witness an augury. As he lifted a bowl to pour out a libation, someone threw a stone at him. It struck him just above the left brow, spinning him around, and the bowl flew from his hands to bounce down the temple steps in a series of ringing clatters, sacred water splashing everywhere. Then came more stones, storms of them; crouching low and pulling his particolored toga further over his head, Asellio ran down the steps and headed instinctively for the temple of Vesta. But the good elements in the crowd fled the moment they realized what was afoot, and the irate moneylenders who were his assailants positioned themselves between Asellio and sanctuary at Vesta's holy hearth. There was only one way left for him to go, through the narrow passage called the Clivus Vestae and up the Vestal Steps onto the Via Nova, scant feet above the floor of the Forum. With the usurers in full cry after him, Asellio ran for his life into the Via Nova, a street of taverns serving Forum Romanum and Palatine both. Screaming for help, he burst into the establishment belonging to Publius Cloatius. No help was forthcoming. While two men held Cloatius and two more his assistant, the rest of the crowd picked Asellio up bodily and stretched him out across a table in much the same way as an augur's acolytes dealt with the sacrificial victim. Someone cut his throat with such gusto that the knife scraped on the column of bones behind it, and there across the table Asellio died in a fountain of blood, while Publius Cloatius wept and vowed, shrieking, that he knew no one in that crowd, no one! Nor, it appeared, did anyone else in Rome. Appalled by the sacrilegious aspects of the deed as much as by the murder itself, the Senate offered a reward of ten thousand denarii for information leading to the apprehension of the assassins, publicly deploring the killing of an augur clad in full regalia and in the midst of an official ceremony. When not a whisper surfaced during the ensuing eight days, the Senate added more incentives to its reward pardon for an accomplice, manumission for a slave of either sex, promotion to a rural tribe for a freedman or freedwoman. Still not a whisper.
"What can you expect?" asked Gaius Marius of Young Caesar as they shuffled round the peristyle-garden. "The moneylenders covered it up, of course." "So Lucius Decumius says." Marius stopped. "How much congress do you have with that arch-villain, Young Caesar?" he demanded. "A lot, Gaius Marius. He's a thousand paces deep in all sorts of information." "Not fit for your ears, most of it, I'll bet." Young Caesar grinned. "My ears grew, along with the rest of me, in the Subura. I doubt there's much can mortify them." "Cheeky!" The massive right hand came out in a gentle cuff to the boy's head. "This garden is too small for us, Gaius Marius. If you want to get any real use back in your left side, we're going to have to walk farther and faster.'' It was said with firmness and authority, in a tone which brooked no argument. He got it anyway. "I am not permitting Rome to see me like this!" roared Gaius Marius. Young Caesar deliberately relinquished his grasp of Marius's left arm and let the Great Man totter unsupported. When the prospect of a fall seemed inevitable, the boy moved back and propped Marius up with deceptive ease. It never failed to amaze Marius how much strength that slight frame contained, nor had it failed to register upon Marius that Young Caesar used his strength with an uncanny instinct as to where and how it would prove of maximum effect. "Gaius Marius, I stopped calling you Uncle when I came to you after your stroke because I thought your stroke put us on much the same level. Your dignitas is diminished, mine is enhanced. We are equals. But in some things I am definitely your superior," said the boy fearlessly. "As a favor to my mother and because I thought I could be of help to a great man I gave up my free time to keep you company and get you walking again. You declined to lie on your couch and have me read to you, and the mine of stories you had to tell me are all told. I know every flower and every shrub and every weed in this whole garden
! And I say to you straight, it has outlived its purpose. Tomorrow we're going out the door into the Clivus Argentarius. I don't care whether we go up it and onto the Campus Martius, or whether we go down it through the Porta Fontinalis. But tomorrow we go out!" Fierce brown eyes glared down into rather chilly blue ones; no matter how Marius disciplined himself to ignore it, Young Caesar's eyes always reminded him of Sulla's. Like encountering some huge cat on a hunting expedition, and discovering that the orbs which ought to be yellow were instead a pale blue ringed round with midnight. Such cats were considered visitors from the Underworld; perhaps too were such men? The duel of gazes continued unabated. "I won't go," said Marius. "You will go." "The gods rot you, Young Caesar! I cannot give in to a boy! Haven't you some more diplomatic way of putting things?" Pure amusement flooded into those unsettling eyes, gave them a life and attractiveness quite alien to Sulla's. "When dealing with you, Gaius Marius, there is no such thing as diplomacy," said Young Caesar. "Diplomatic language is the prerogative of diplomats. You are not a diplomat, which is a mercy. One always knows where one stands with Gaius Marius. And that I like as much as I like you." "You're not going to take no for an answer, are you, boy?" Marius asked, feeling his will crumble. First the steel, then the fur mitten. What a technique! "You're right, I will not take no for an answer." "Well then, sit me down over there, boy. If we are to go out tomorrow, I'm going to need a rest now." A rumble came up through his throat. "How about we go outside with me in a litter, all the way to the Via Recta? Then I could hop out and we could walk to your heart's content." "When we get as far as the Via Recta, Gaius Marius, it will be as the result of our own efforts." For a while they sat in silence, Young Caesar keeping himself perfectly still; it had not taken him long to realize that Marius detested fidgeting, and when he had said so to his mother, she had simply observed that if such was the case, learning not to fidget would be very good training. He might have discovered how to get the best of Gaius Marius, but he couldn't get the best of his mother! What had been required of him was, of course, not what any lad of ten wanted to do, or liked doing. Every single day after lessons with Marcus Antonius Gnipho finished, he had to abandon all his ideas of wandering off with his friend Gaius Matius from the other ground-floor apartment, and go instead to Marius's house to keep him company. There was no time left for himself because his mother refused to allow him to skip a day, an hour, a moment. "It is your duty," she would say upon the rare occasions when he would beg to be permitted to go with Gaius Matius to the Campus Martius to witness some very special event the choosing of the war-horses to run in the October race, or a team of gladiators hired for a funeral on the following day strutting through their paces. "But I will never not have duty of some kind!" he would say. "Is there to be no moment when I can forget it?" And she would answer, "No, Gaius Julius. Duty is with you in every moment of your life, in every breath you draw, and duty cannot be ignored to pander to yourself.'' So off he would go to the house of Gaius Marius, no falter in his step, no slowing of his pace, remembering to smile and say hello to this one and that as he hurried through the busy Suburan streets, forcing himself to go a little faster as he passed by the bookshops of the Argiletum in case he succumbed to the lure of going inside. All the product of his mother's cool yet remorseless teaching never dawdle, never look as if you have time to spare, never indulge yourself even when it comes to books, always smile and say hello to anyone who knows you, and many who don't. Sometimes before he knocked on Gaius Marius's door he would run up the steps of the Fontinalis tower and stand atop it to gaze down on the Campus Martius, longing to be there with the other boys to cut and thrust and parry with a wooden sword, to pound some idiot bully's head into the grass, to steal radishes from the fields along the Via Recta, to be a part of the rough-and-tumble. But then long before his eyes could grow tired of the scene he would turn away, lope down the tower steps and be at Gaius Marius's door before anyone could realize he was a few moments late. He loved his Aunt Julia, who usually answered the door to him in person; she always had a special smile for him, and a kiss too. How wonderful to be kissed! His mother did not approve of the habit, she said it had a corrupting influence, it was too Greek to be moral. Luckily his Aunt Julia didn't feel the same. When she leaned forward to plant that kiss upon his lips she never, never turned her head aside to aim for cheek or chin he would lower his lids and breathe in as deeply as he could, just to catch every last morsel of her essence in his nostrils. For years after she had passed from the world, the aging Gaius Julius Caesar would scent a faint tendril of her perfume stealing off some woman's skin, and the tears would spring to his eyes before he could control them. She always gave him the day's report then and there: "He's very cross today," or, "He's had a visit from a friend and it's put him in an excellent mood," or, "He thinks the paralysis is becoming worse, so he's very down.'' The routine was that she fed him his dinner in the midafternoon, sending him off to snatch a respite from his duties with Gaius Marius while she fed Gaius Marius his dinner herself. He would curl up on the couch in her workroom and read a book as he ate something he would never have been allowed to do at home and bury himself in the doings of heroes, or the verses of a poet. Words enchanted him. They could make his heart soar or stumble or gallop; there were times when, as with Homer, they painted for him a world more real than the one he lived in. "Death can find nothing to expose in him that is not beautiful," he would say over and over to himself, picturing the young warrior dead so brave, so noble, so perfect that, be he Achilles or Hector or Patroclus, he triumphed even over his own passing. But then he would hear his aunt calling, or a servant would come to knock on the workroom door and tell him he was wanted again, and down would go the book immediately, his burden shouldered once more. Without resentment or frustration. Gaius Marius was a heavy burden. Old thin and fat and then thin again his skin hanging in sloppy folds and wattles that frightful fleshly landslide down the left side of his face and the look in those terrible eyes. He drooled from the left side of his mouth without seeming to know he drooled, so that the gobbet hung until it made contact with his tunic and soaked into a permanently wet patch. Sometimes he ranted, mostly at his hapless watch-pup, the only person who was tethered to him for long enough to use as a verbal vent for all that ire; sometimes he would weep until tears joined the spittle, and his nose ran disgustingly too; sometimes he would laugh at some private joke until the very rafters shook and Aunt Julia would come drifting in with her smile plastered in place, and gently shoo Young Caesar home. At first the child felt helpless, not knowing what to do or how to do it. But he was a creature of infinite resource, so in time he found out how to handle Gaius Marius. It was either that, or fail in the task his mother had given him a thought so unthinkable he could not begin to imagine the consequences. He also discovered the flaws in his own nature. He lacked patience, for one thing, though his mother's training enabled him to conceal this shortcoming under mountains of what genuinely seemed like patience, and in the end he came not to know the difference between real patience and assumed patience. Being of strong stomach he came not to notice the drooling, and being of strong mind he came to know what must be done. No one ever told him, for no one ever understood save he; even the physicians. Gaius Marius must be made to move. Gaius Marius must be made to exercise. Gaius Marius must be made to see that he would live again as a normal man. "And what else have you learned from Lucius Decumius, or some other Suburan ruffian?" Marius asked. The lad jumped, so sudden was the question, so aimless and faraway his own thoughts. "Well, I've pieced something together if I'm right. I think I am." "What?" "The reason behind Cato the Consul's decision to leave Samnium and Campania to Lucius Cornelius and transfer himself to your old command against the Marsi." "Oho! Tell me your theory, Young Caesar." "It's about the kind of man I think Lucius Cornelius has to be," said Young Caesar seriously. "What kind of man is that?" "A man who can make other men very afraid." "He can that!" "He must have known he would never be given the southern command. It belongs
to the consul. So he didn't bother to argue. He just waited for Lucius Cato the Consul to arrive in Capua, and then he cast a spell that frightened Cato the Consul so badly that Cato the Consul decided to put as big a distance between himself and Campania as he possibly could." "How did you piece that hypothesis together?" "From Lucius Decumius. And from my mother." "She'd know," said Marius cryptically. Frowning, Young Caesar glanced sideways at him, then shrugged. "Once Lucius Cornelius has the top command and no one stupid to hamper him, he has to do well. I think he's a very good general." "Not as good as me." Marius sighed, half a sob. The boy pounced immediately. "Now don't you start to feel sorry for yourself, Gaius Marius! You'll be fit to command again, especially once we get out of this silly garden.'' Not up to this attack, Marius changed the subject. "And has your Suburan grapevine told you how Cato the Consul is doing against the Marsi?" he asked, and snorted. "No one ever tells me what's going on they think it might upset me! What upsets me, however, is not knowing what goes on. If I didn't hear from you, I'd explode!" Young Caesar grinned. "My grapevine has it that the consul got into trouble the moment he arrived in Tibur. Pompey Strabo took your old troops he's very good at that! so Lucius Cato the Consul is left with none save raw recruits farm boys newly enfranchised, from Umbria and Etruria. Not only is he at a loss how to train them, but his legates don't know either. So he commenced his training program by calling an assembly of the whole army. He harangued them without pity. You know the sort of thing they were idiots and yokels, cretins and barbarians, a miserable lot of worms, he was used to far better, they'd all be dead if they didn't smarten up, and so forth." "Shades of Lupus and Caepio!" cried Marius incredulously. "Anyway, one of the men assembled at Tibur to hear all this rubbish is a friend of Lucius Decumius's. Name of Titus Titinius. By profession Titus Titinius is a retired veteran centurion whom you gave a bit of your Etrurian land to after Vercellae. He says he did you a good turn once." "Yes, I remember him very well," said Marius, trying to smile and dribbling copiously. Out came Young Caesar's "Marius handkerchief" as he called it; the saliva was wiped neatly away. "He comes to Rome to stay with Lucius Decumius regularly because he likes to hear the goings-on in the Forum. But when the war broke out he enlisted as a training centurion. He was based in Capua for a long time, but he was sent to help Cato the Consul at the beginning of this year.'' "I presume Titus Titinius and the other training centurions hadn't had a chance to begin to train when Cato the Consul delivered his harangue at Tibur?" "Exactly. But he didn't exclude them from the harangue. And that was how he got into trouble. Titus Titinius became so angry as he listened to Cato the Consul abuse everybody that he finally bent down and picked up a big clod of earth. And he threw it at Cato the Consul! The next thing, everyone was bombarding Cato the Consul with clods of earth! He ended knee-deep in them, with his army on the verge of mutiny." Finding inspiration, the boy chuckled. "Marred, mired, muzzled!" "Stop fiddling around with words and get on with it!" "Sorry, Gaius Marius." "So?" "He wasn't hurt at all, but Cato the Consul felt that his dignitas and auctoritas had suffered intolerably. Instead of just forgetting the incident, he clapped Titus Titinius in chains and sent him to Rome with a letter asking that the Senate try him for inciting a mutiny. He arrived this morning, and he's sitting in the Lautumiae cells." Marius began to struggle to his feet. "Well, that settles our destination tomorrow morning, Young Caesar!" he said, sounding quite lighthearted. "We're going to see what will happen to Titus Titinius?" "If it's in the Senate, boy, I am, anyway. You can wait in the vestibule." Young Caesar hauled Marius up and moved automatically to his left side to take the weight of the useless limbs. "I won't need to do that, Gaius Marius. He's being brought before the Plebeian Assembly. The Senate wants nothing to do with it." "You're a patrician, you can't stand in the Comitia when the Plebs are meeting. But in my state, I can't either. So we will find a good spot on top of the Senate steps and watch the circus from there," said Marius. "Oh, I needed this! A Forum circus is far better than anything the aediles can ever think to put in the games!"
2. The Grass Crown Page 60
