Fortune's Favorites

by Colleen McCullough

  From that day to this New Year's Day of the third year of Sulla's reign, nothing further had been heard.

  "Our entire journey has been dogged by ill luck," said Marcus Perperna. “We were shipwrecked off Crete and taken captive by pirates-it took two months for the cities of Peloponnesian Greece to raise our ransoms, and then we had to finish the voyage by sailing to Cyrene and hugging the Libyan coast to Alexandria."

  "In a pirate vessel?" asked Sulla, aware of the gravity of this news, but nonetheless inclined to laugh; Perperna looked so old and shrunken-and terrified!

  "As you so shrewdly surmise, in a pirate vessel."

  "And what happened when you reached Alexandria?"

  "Nothing good, Lucius Cornelius. Nothing good!" Perperna heaved a huge sigh. "We found the Alexandrians had acted with celerity and efficiency. They knew exactly whereabouts to send after King Ptolemy Alexander was murdered."

  "Send for what, Perperna?"

  "Send for the two bastard sons of Ptolemy Soter Chickpea, Lucius Cornelius. They petitioned King Tigranes in Syria to give them both young men-the elder to rule Egypt, and the younger to rule Cyprus."

  "Clever, but not unexpected," said Sulla. "Go on."

  “By the time we reached Alexandria, King Ptolemy Auletes was already on the throne, and his wife-the daughter of King Mithridates-was beside him as Queen Cleopatra Tryphaena. His younger brother-whom the Alexandrians have decided to call Ptolemy the Cyprian-was sent to be regent of Cyprus. His wife-another daughter of Mithridates-went with him."

  "And her name is?"

  "Mithridatidis Nyssa."

  "The whole thing is illegal," said Sulla, frowning.

  "Not according to the Alexandrians!"

  "Go on, Perperna, go on! Tell me the worst."

  "Well, we produced the will, of course. And informed the Alexandrians that we had come formally to annex the Kingdom of Egypt into the empire of Rome as a province."

  "And what did they say to that, Perperna?"

  "They laughed at us, Lucius Cornelius. By various methods their lawyers proceeded to prove that the will was invalid, then they pointed to the King and Queen upon their thrones and showed us that they had found legitimate heirs."

  "But they're not legitimate!"

  "Only under Roman law, they said, and denied that it applied to Egypt. Under Egyptian law-which seems to consist largely of rules made up on the spur of the moment to support whatever the Alexandrians have in mind-the King and Queen are legitimate."

  "So what did you do, Perperna?"

  "What could I do, Lucius Cornelius? Alexandria was crawling with soldiers! We thanked our Roman gods that we managed to get out of Egypt alive, and with our persons intact."

  "Quite right," said Sulla, who did not bother venting his spleen upon unworthy objects. "However, the fact remains that the will is valid. Egypt now belongs to Rome." He drummed his fingers on his desk. "Unfortunately there isn't much Rome can do at the present time. I've had to send fourteen legions to Spain to deal with Quintus Sertorius, and I've no wish to add to the Treasury's expenses by mounting another campaign at the opposite end of the world. Not with Tigranes riding roughshod over most of Syria and no curb in the vicinity now that the Parthian heirs are so embroiled in civil war. Have you still got the will?"

  "Oh yes, Lucius Cornelius."

  "Then tomorrow I'll inform the Senate what's happened and give the will back to the Vestals against the day when Rome can afford to annex Egypt by force-which is the only way we're going to come into our inheritance, I think."

  "Egypt is fabulously rich."

  "That's no news to me, Perperna! The Ptolemies are sitting on the greatest treasure in the world, as well as one of the world's richest countries." Sulla assumed the expression which indicated he was finished, but said, it appeared as an afterthought, "I suppose that means you didn't obtain the two thousand talents of gold from Tyre?''

  "Oh, we got that without any trouble, Lucius Cornelius," said Perperna, shocked. "The bankers handed it over the moment we produced the will. On our way home, as you instructed."

  Sulla roared with laughter. "Well done for you, Perperna! I can almost forgive you the debacle in Alexandria!" He got up, rubbing his hands together in glee. "A welcome addition to the Treasury. And so the Senate will see it, I'm sure. At least poor Rome didn't have to pay for an embassage without seeing an adequate financial return."

  All the eastern kings were being troublesome-one of the penalties Rome was forced to endure because her internecine strife had made it impossible for Sulla to remain in the east long enough to render both Mithridates and Tigranes permanently impotent. As it was, no sooner had Sulla sailed home than Mithridates was back intriguing to annex Cappadocia, and Lucius Licinius Murena (then governor of Asia Province and Cilicia) had promptly gone to war against him-without Sulla's knowledge or permission, and in contravention of the Treaty of Dardanus. For a while Murena had done amazingly well, until self-confidence had led him into a series of disastrous encounters with Mithridates on his own soil of Pontus. Sulla had been obliged to send the elder Aulus Gabinius to order Murena back to his own provinces. It had been Sulla's intention to punish Murena for his cavalier behavior, but then had come the confrontation with Pompey; so Murena had had to be allowed to return and celebrate a triumph in order to put Pompey in his place.

  In the meantime, Tigranes had used the six years just gone by to expand his kingdom of Armenia southward and westward into lands belonging to the King of the Parthians and the rapidly disintegrating Kingdom of Syria. He had begun to see his chance when he learned that old King Mithradates of the Parthians was too ill to proceed with a projected invasion of Syria-and too ill to prevent the barbarians called Massagetae from taking over all his lands to the north and east of Parthia itself, as well as to prevent one of his sons, Gotarzes, from usurping Babylonia.

  As Tigranes himself had once predicted, the death of King Mithradates of the Parthians had provoked a war of succession complicated by the fact that the old man had had three official queens-two his paternal half sisters, and the third none other than a daughter of Tigranes called Automa. While various sons of various mothers fought over what remained, yet another vital satrapy seceded-fabulously rich Elymais, watered by the eastern tributaries of the Tigris, the rivers Choaspes and Pasitigris; the silt-free harbors to the east of the Tigris-Euphrates delta were lost, as was the city of Susa, one of the Parthian royal seats. Uncaring, the sons of old King Mithradates warred on.

  So did Tigranes. His first move (in the year Gaius Marius died) was to invade in succession the petty kingdoms of Sophene, Gordyene, Adiabene, and finally Osrhoene. These four little states conquered, Tigranes now owned all the lands bordering the eastern bank of the Euphrates from above Tomisa all the way down to Europus; the big cities of Amida, Edessa and Nisibis were now also his, as were the tolls levied along the great river. But rather than entrust such commercial enterprises as toll collecting to his own Armenians, Tigranes wooed and won over the Skenite Arabs who controlled the arid regions between the Euphrates and the Tigris south of Osrhoene, and exacted tolls on every caravan which passed across their territory. Nomad Bedouins though they were, Tigranes moved the Skenite Arabs into Edessa and Carrhae and appointed them the collectors of Euphrates tolls at Samosata and Zeugma. Their king–whose royal title was Abgar–was now the client of Tigranes, and the Greek-speaking populations of all the towns the King of Armenia had overcome were forced to emigrate to those parts of Armenia where the Greek language was hitherto unknown. Tigranes desperately wanted to be the civilized ruler of a Hellenized kingdom-and what better way to Hellenize it than to implant colonies of Greek speakers within its borders?

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  As a child Tigranes had been held hostage by the King of the Parthians and had lived in Seleuceia-upon-Tigris, far away from Armenia. At the time of his father's death he was the only living son, but the King of the Parthians had demanded a huge price for releasing the youth Tigranes-seventy val
leys in the richest part of Armenia, which was Media Atropatene. Now Tigranes marched into Media Atropatene and took back the seventy valleys, stuffed with gold, lapis lazuli, turquoise and fertile pastures.

  He now found, however, that he lacked sufficient Nesaean horses to mount his growing numbers of cataphracts. These strange cavalrymen were clad from head to foot in steel-mesh armor-as were their horses, which needed to be large to carry the weight. So in the following year Tigranes invaded Media itself, the home of the Nesaean horse, and annexed it to Armenia. Ecbatana, summer royal seat of the Kings of the Parthians-and before them, the summer royal seat of the Kings of Media and Persia, including Alexander the Great- was burned to the ground, and its magnificent palace sacked.

  Three years had gone by. While Sulla marched slowly up the Italian peninsula, Tigranes had turned his attention to the west and crossed the Euphrates into Commagene. Unopposed, he occupied all the lands of northern Syria between the Amanus Mountains and the Libanus Mountains, including mighty Antioch and the lower half of the valley of the Orontes River. Even a part of Cilicia Pedia fell to him, around the eastern shore of the Sinus Issicus.

  Syria was genuine Hellenized territory, its populace a fully Greek-speaking one powerfully under the influence of Greek customs. No sooner had he established his authority in Syria than Tigranes uplifted whole communities of these hapless Greek-speakers and sent them and their families to live in his newly built capital of Tigranocerta. Most favored were the artisans, not one of whom was allowed to remain in Syria. However, the King understood the need to protect his Greek imports from his Median-speaking native peoples, who were directed under pain of death to treat the new citizens with care and kindness.

  And while Sulla was legislating to have himself appointed Dictator of Rome, Tigranes formally adopted the title he had hungered for all his life-King of Kings. Queen Cleopatra Selene of Syria-youngest sister and at one time wife of Ptolemy Soter Chickpea-who had managed to rule Syria through several Seleucid husbands, was taken from Antioch and made to live in the humblest circumstances in a tiny village on the Euphrates; her place in the palace at Antioch was taken by the satrap Magadates, who was to rule Syria in the name of Tigranes, King of Kings.

  King of Kings, thought Sulla cynically; all those eastern potentates thought themselves King of Kings. Even, it seemed, the two bastard sons of Ptolemy Soter Chickpea, who now ruled in Egypt and Cyprus with their Mithridatid wives. But the will of the dead Ptolemy Alexander the Second was genuine; no one knew that better than Sulla did, for he was its witness. Sooner or later Egypt would belong to Rome. For the moment Ptolemy Auletes must be allowed to reign in Alexandria; but, vowed Sulla, that puppet of Mithridates and Tigranes would never know an easy moment! The Senate of Rome would send regularly to Alexandria demanding that Ptolemy Auletes step down in favor of Rome, the true owner of Egypt.

  As for King Mithridates of Pontus-interesting, that he had lost two hundred thousand men in the freezing cold of the Caucasus-he would have to be discouraged yet again from trying to annex Cappadocia. Complaining by letter to Sulla that Murena had plundered and burned four hundred villages along the Halys River, Mithridates had proceeded to take the Cappadocian bank of the Halys off poor Cappadocia; to make this ploy look legitimate, he had given King Ariobarzanes of Cappadocia a new bride, one of his own daughters. When Sulla discovered that the girl was a four-year-old child, he sent yet another messenger to see King Mithridates and order him in Rome's name to quit Cappadocia absolutely, bride or no bride. The messenger had returned very recently, bearing a letter from Mithridates promising to do as he was told-and informing Sulla that the King of Pontus was going to send an embassage to Rome to ratify the Treaty of Dardanus into watertight legality.

  "He'd better make sure his embassage doesn't dawdle," said Sulla to himself as he terminated all these thoughts of eastern kings by going to find his wife. It was in her presence-for she wasn't very far away-that he ended his audible reflections by saying, "If they do dawdle, they won't find me here to dicker with them-and good luck dickering with the Senate!"

  "I beg your pardon, my love?" asked Valeria, startled.

  "Nothing. Give me a kiss."

  Her kisses were nice enough. Just as she was nice enough, Valeria Messala. So far Sulla had found this fourth marriage a pleasant experience. But not a stimulating one. A part of that was due to his age and his illnesses, he was aware; but a larger part of it was due to the seductive and sensuous shortcomings of aristocratic Roman women, who just could not relax sufficiently in bed to enter into the kind of sexual cavorting the Dictator hankered after. His prowess was flagging: he needed to be stimulated! Why was it that women could love a man madly, yet not enter wholeheartedly into his sexual wants?

  "I believe," said Varro, who was the hapless recipient of this question, “that women are passive vessels, Lucius Cornelius. They are made to hold things, from a man's penis to a baby. And the one who holds things is passive. Must be passive! Otherwise the hold is not stable. It is the same with animals. The male is the active participant, and must rid himself of his excessive desires by rutting with many different females."

  He had come to inform Sulla that Pompey was coming to Rome on a brief visit, and to enquire whether Sulla would like to see the young man. Instead of being given an audience, however, he found himself the audience, and had not yet managed to find the right moment to put his own query forward.

  The darkened brows wriggled expressively. "Do you mean, my dear Varro, that a decently married man must rut with half of female Rome?"

  "No, no, of course not!" gasped Varro. "All females are passive, so he could not find satisfaction!"

  “Then do you mean that if a man wants his fleshly urges gratified to complete satiation, he ought to seek his sexual partners among men?" Sulla asked, face serious.

  "Ooh! Ah! Um!" squeaked Varro, writhing like a centipede pinned through its middle. "No, Lucius Cornelius, of course not! Definitely not!"

  “Then what is a decently married man to do?''

  "I am a student of natural phenomena, I know, but these are questions I am not qualified or skilled enough to answer!" babbled Varro, wishing he had not decided to visit this uncomfortable, perplexing man. The trouble was that ever since the months during which he, Varro, had anointed Sulla's disintegrating face, Sulla had displayed a great fondness for him, and tended to become offended if Varro didn't call to pay his respects.

  "Calm down, Varro, I'm teasing you!" said Sulla, laughing.

  "One never knows with you, Lucius Cornelius." Varro wet his lips, began to formulate in his mind the words which would put his announcement of Pompey's advent in the most favorable light; no fool, Varro was well aware that the Dictator's feelings toward Pompey were ambivalent.

  "I hear," said Sulla, unconscious of all this mental juggling of a simple sentence, “that Varro Lucullus has managed to get rid of his adoptive sister-your cousin, I believe."

  "Terentia, you mean?" Varro's face lit up. "Oh, yes! A truly wonderful stroke of luck!"

  "It's a long time," said the smiling Sulla, who adored all sorts of gossip these days, "since a woman as rich as Terentia has had so much trouble finding a husband."

  "That's not quite the situation," said Varro, temporizing. "One can always find a man willing to marry a rich woman. The trouble with Terentia-who is Rome's worst shrew, I grant you!-has forever been that she refused to look at any of the men her family found for her."

  Sulla's smile had become a grin. "She preferred to stay at home and make Varro Lucullus's life a misery, you mean."

  "Perhaps. Though she likes him well enough, I think. Her nature is at fault-and what can she do about that, since it was given to her at her birth?"

  "Then what happened? Love at first sight?"

  "Certainly not. The match was proposed by our swindling friend, Titus Pomponius who is now called Atticus because of his affection for Athens. Apparently he and Marcus Tullius Cicero have known each other for many years. Since you r
egulated Rome, Lucius Cornelius, Atticus visits Rome at least once a year.''

  "I am aware of it," said Sulla, who didn't hold Atticus's financial flutterings against him any more than he did Crassus's-it was the way Crassus had manipulated the proscriptions for his own gain caused his fall from Sulla's grace.

  "Anyway, Cicero's legal reputation has soared. So have his ambitions. But his purse is empty. He needed to marry an heiress, though it looked as if she would have to be one of those abysmally undistinguished girls our less salubrious plutocrats seem to produce in abundance. Then Atticus suggested Terentia." Varro stopped to look enquiringly at Sulla. "Do you know Marcus Tullius Cicero at all?" he asked.

  "Quite well when he was a lad. My late son-who would be about the same age had he lived-befriended him. He was thought a prodigy then. But between my son's death and the case of Sextus Roscius of Ameria, I saw him only as a contubernalis on my staff in Campania during the Italian War. Maturity hasn't changed him. He's just found his natural milieu, is all. He's as pedantic, talkative, and full of his own importance as he ever was. Qualities which stand him in good stead as an advocate! However, I admit freely that he has a magnificent turn of phrase. And he does have a mind! His worst fault is that he's related to Gaius Marius. They're both from Arpinum."

  Varro nodded. "Atticus approached Varro Lucullus, who agreed to press Cicero's suit with Terentia. And much to his surprise, she asked to meet Cicero! She had heard of his courtroom prowess, and told Varro Lucullus that she was determined to marry a man who was capable of fame. Cicero, she said, might be such a one."

  "How big is her dowry?"

  "Enormous! Two hundred talents."

  "The line of her suitors must stretch right round the block! And must contain some very pretty, smooth fellows. I begin to respect Terentia, if she's been proof against Rome's most expert fortune hunters," said Sulla.