1. First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

  6

  Clitumna had a nephew. Since he was her sister’s boy, he did not bear the family name, Clitumnus; his name was Lucius Gavius Stichus, which to Sulla indicated some ancestor of his father's had been a slave. Why else the nickname Stichus? A slave's name, but more than that. Stichus was the archetypal slave's name, the joke name, the butt name. However, Lucius Gavius Stichus insisted his family had earned the name because of their long association with slavery; like his father and his grandfather at least, Lucius Gavius Stichus dealt in slaves, ran a snug little agency for domestic servants situated in the Porticus Metelli on the Campus Martius. It was not a high-flying firm catering to the elite, but rather a well-established business catering to those whose purses did not run to more than three or four slave helpers. Odd, thought Sulla when the steward informed him that the mistress's nephew was in the study, how he collected Gaviuses. There had been his father's boon drinking companion, Marcus Gavius Brocchus, and the dear old grammaticus Quintus Gavius Myrto. Gavius. It wasn't a very common family name, nor one of any distinction. Yet he had known three Gaviuses. Well, the Gavius who had drunk with his father and the Gavius who had given Sulla no mean education aroused feelings in him he did not mind owning; but Stichus was very different. Had he suspected Clitumna was being honored by a visit from her awful nephew he wouldn't have come home, and he stood for a moment in the atrium debating what his next course of action should be flight from the house, or flight to some part of it where Stichus did not stick his sticky beak. The garden. With a nod and a smile for the steward's thoughtfulness in warning him, he bypassed the study and went into the peristyle, found a seat warmed a little by the weak sun, and sat gazing blindly at the dreadful statue of Apollo chasing a Daphne already more tree than dryad. Clitumna loved it, which was why she had bought it. But did the Lord of Light ever have such aggressively yellow hair, or eyes so putridly blue, or skin so cloyingly pink? And how could one admire a sculptor so lost to the criteria of asceticism that he turned all of Daphne's fingers into identical bright green twigs, and all of Daphne's toes into identical murky brown rootlets? The idiot had even he probably considered it his master touch bedaubed poor Daphne's one remaining humanoid breast with a trickle of purple sap oozing from her knotty nipple! To gaze at it blindly was the only way Sulla had managed to preserve the work, when every part of his outraged senses screamed to take an axe to it. "What am I doing here?" he asked poor Daphne, who ought to have looked terrified, and instead only managed to simper. She didn't answer. "What am I doing here?" he asked Apollo. Apollo didn't answer. He put up one hand to press its fingers against his eyes, and closed them, and began the all-too-familiar process of disciplining himself into oh, not exactly acceptance, more a form of grim endurance. Gavius. Think of a different Gavius than Stichus. Think of Quintus Gavius Myrto, who had given him no mean education.

  They had met not long after Sulla's seventh birthday, when the skinny but strong little boy had been helping his sodden father home to the single room on the Vicus Sandalarius where they had lived at the time. Sulla Senior collapsed on the street, and Quintus Gavius Myrto had come to the boy's rescue. Together they got the father home, with Myrto, fascinated by Sulla's appearance and the purity of the Latin he spoke, firing questions at him the whole way. As soon as Sulla Senior was tipped onto his straw pallet, the old grammaticus sat himself down on the only chair and proceeded to extricate as much of his family history from him as the boy knew. And ended in explaining that he himself was a teacher, and offering to teach the boy to read and write for nothing. Sulla's plight appalled him: a patrician Cornelius with obvious potential stuck for the rest of his life in penury somewhere amid the stews of the poorest parts of Rome? It didn't bear thinking of. The boy should at least be equipped to earn a living as a clerk or a scribe! And what if by some miracle the Sullan luck changed, and he had the opportunity to espouse his rightful way of life, only to be prevented by illiteracy? Sulla had accepted the offer to be taught, but scorned the gratis element. Whenever he could, he stole enough to slip old Quintus Gavius Myrto a silver denarius or a plump chicken, and when he was a little older, he sold himself to get that silver denarius. If Myrto suspected that these payments were gained at the cost of honor, he never said so; for he was wise enough to understand that in tendering them, the boy was demonstrating the value he placed upon this unexpected chance to learn. So he took the coins with every indication of pleasure and gratitude, and never gave Sulla reason to think that he worried himself sick over how they were come by. To be taught rhetoric and walk in the train of a great advocate of the law courts was a dream Sulla knew he would never attain, which only gave added luster to the humbler efforts of Quintus Gavius Myrto. For thanks to Myrto, he could speak the purest Attic Greek, and acquired at least the basic rudiments of rhetoric. Myrto's library had been extensive, and so Sulla had read his Homer and his Pindar and his Hesiod, his Plato and his Menander and his Eratosthenes, his Euclid and his Archimedes. And he had read in Latin too Ennius, Accius, Cassius Hemina, Cato the Censor. Ploughing through every scroll he could lay his hands on, he discovered a world where his own situation could be forgotten for a few precious hours, a world of noble heroes and great deeds, scientific fact and philosophical fantasy, the style of literature and the style of mathematics. Luckily the only asset his father had not lost long before Sulla was born was his beautiful Latin; thus of his Latin Sulla had no cause to be ashamed, but he also spoke the cant of the Subura perfectly, and a fairly correct yet lower class of Latin which meant he could move through any Roman sphere without comment. Quintus Gavius Myrto's little school had always been held in a quiet corner of the Macellum Cuppedenis, the spice and flower markets which lay behind the Forum Romanum on its eastern side. Since he could not afford premises but must teach in the public domain, Myrto would say, what better place to pound knowledge into thick young Roman skulls than amid the heady perfumes of roses and violets, peppercorns and cinnamon? Not for Myrto a post as live-in tutor to some pampered plebeian pup, nor even the exclusivity of half a dozen knightly scions taught in a proper schoolroom decently cloistered from the racket of the streets. No, Myrto simply had his lone slave set up his high chair and the stools for his students where shoppers would not trip over them, and taught his reading, writing, and arithmetic in the open air amid the cries and bellows and sales pitches of the spice and flower merchants. Had he not been well liked and had he not given a small discount to boys and girls whose fathers owned stalls in the Cuppedenis, he would soon have been intimidated into moving on; but as he was well liked and he did discount his teaching, he was allowed to hold his school in the same corner until he died when Sulla was fifteen. Myrto charged ten sesterces per week per student, and regularly dealt with ten or fifteen children (always more boys than girls, yet he was never without several girls). His income was about five thousand sesterces a year; he paid two thousand of that for a very nice large single room in a house belonging to one of his early students; it cost him about one thousand sesterces a year to feed himself and his elderly but devoted slave quite well, and the rest of his income he spent upon books. If he wasn't teaching because it was a market day or a holiday, he could be found browsing in the libraries and bookshops and publishing houses of the Argiletum, a broad street which ran off the Forum Romanum alongside the Basilica Aemilia and the Senate House. "Oh, Lucius Cornelius," he was wont to say when he got the boy on his own after lessons were over, desperate (though he never let that desperation show) to keep the boy safe, to keep him off the streets, "somewhere in this enormous world a man or a woman has hidden the works of Aristotle! If you only knew how much I long to read that man! Such a volume of work, such a mind imagine it, the tutor of Alexander the Great! They say he wrote about absolutely everything good and evil, stars and atoms, souls and hell, dogs and cats, leaves and muscles, the gods and men, systems of thought and the chaos of mindlessness. What a treat that would be, to read the lost works of Aristotle!" And then he would shrug his shoulders, suck at his teet
h in the irritating way he had that all his students for decades had mocked behind his back, strike his hands together in a little smack of frustration, and potter among the lovely leathery smell of book buckets and the acrid reek of best-quality paper. "Nevermind, nevermind," he would say as he went, "I shouldn't complain, when I have my Homer and my Plato." When he died, which he did in the midst of a cold spell after his old slave had slipped on the icy stairs and broken his neck (amazing how when the line between two people is severed like that, thought Sulla at the time, both ends will go), it was easy to see how very well loved he had been. Not for Quintus Gavius Myrto the hideous indignity of a pauper's place in the lime pits beyond the Agger; no, he had a proper procession, professional mourners, a eulogy, a pyre scented with myrrh and frankincense and Jericho balsam, and a handsome stone tomb to house his ashes. The coin was paid to the custodians of the death records at the temple of Venus Libitina, courtesy of the excellent undertaker hired to manage Myrto's funeral. It had been organized and paid for by two generations of students, who wept for him with genuine grief. Sulla had walked dry-eyed and high-headed in the throng which escorted Quintus Gavius Myrto out of the city to the burning place, thrown his bunch of roses into the fierce fire, and paid a silver denarius to the undertaker as his share. But later, after his father had crumpled in a wine-soaked heap and his unhappy sister had tidied things up as decently as she could, Sulla sat in his corner of the room in which the three of them lived at the time, and pondered his unexpected treasure trove in aching disbelief. For Quintus Gavius Myrto had arranged his death as tidily as he had his life; his will had been registered and lodged with the Vestal Virgins, a simple document, since he had no cash to bequeath. All that he had to leave his books and his precious model of sun and moon and planets revolving around the earth he left to Sulla. Sulla had wept then, in drear and empty agony; his best and dearest and only real friend was gone, but every day of his life he would see Myrto's little library, and remember. "One day, Quintus Gavius," he said through the pain of his spasming throat, "I will find the lost works of Aristotle." Of course he hadn't managed to keep the books and the model long. One day he came home to find the corner where his straw pallet was lodged bare of everything save that pallet. His father had taken the lovingly accumulated treasures of Quintus Gavius Myrto and sold them all to buy wine. There followed the only occasion during Sulla's life with his father when he tried to commit parricide; luckily his sister had been present and put herself between them until sanity returned. It was very shortly afterward that she married her Nonius and went with him to Picenum. As for young Sulla, he never forgot, and he never forgave. At the end of his life, when he owned thousands of books and half a hundred models of the universe, he still would dwell upon the lost library of Quintus Gavius Myrto, and his grief.

  The mental trick had worked; Sulla came back to the present moment and the garishly painted, clumsily executed group of Apollo and Daphne. When his eyes drifted past it and encountered the even more ghastly statue of Perseus holding up the Gorgon's head, he almost leaped to his feet, strong enough now to deal with Stichus. He stalked down the garden toward the study, which was the room normally reserved for the sole use of the head of the household; by default, it had been given over to Sulla, who functioned more or less as the man-about-the-house. The pimply little fart was stuffing his face with candied figs when Sulla walked into the tablinum, poking his dirty sticky fingers through the rolls of books slowly accumulating in the pigeonholed walls. "Ohhhhhhh!" Stichus whinnied at sight of Sulla, snatching his hands away. "It's lucky I know you're too stupid to read," said Sulla, snapping his fingers at the servant in the doorway. "Here," he said to the servant, a costly pretty Greek not worth a tenth what Clitumna had paid, "get a bowl of water and a clean cloth, and wipe up the mess Master Stichus has made." His eerie eyes stared at Stichus with the fixed malice of a goat in them, and he said to that unfortunate, who was trying to wipe the syrup off his hands by rubbing them on his expensive tunic, "I wish you'd get it out of your head that I keep a store of naughty picture books! I don't. Why should I? I don't need them. Naughty picture books are for people who don't have the guts to do anything. People like you, Stichus." "One day," said Stichus, "this house and everything in it is going to be mine. You won't be so uppity then!" "I hope you're offering plenty of sacrifices to postpone that day, Lucius Gavius, because it's likely to be your last. If it weren't for Clitumna, I'd cut you up into little pieces and feed you to the dogs." Stichus stared at the toga on Sulla's powerful frame, raising his brows; he wasn't really afraid of Sulla, he'd known him too long, but he did sense that danger lurked inside Sulla's fiery head, therefore normally he trod warily. A mode of conduct reinforced by his knowledge that his silly old Auntie Clittie could not be swerved from her slavish devotion to the fellow. However, upon his arrival an hour earlier he had found his aunt and her boon companion Nicopolis in a fine state because their darling Lucius Cornelius had gone out in a rage wearing his toga. When Stichus dragged all of the story out of Clitumna, from Metrobius to the ensuing brawl, he was disgusted. Sickened. So now he flopped himself down in Sulla's chair and said, "My, my, we are looking every inch the Roman today! Been to the inauguration of the consuls, have we? What a laugh! Your ancestry isn't half as good as mine." Sulla picked him up out of the chair by clamping the fingers of his right hand on one side of Stichus's jaw and his right thumb on the other side, a hold so exquisitely painful that its victim couldn't even scream; by the time he recovered enough breath to do so, he had seen Sulla's face, and didn't, just stood as mute and graven as his aunt and her boon companion had at dawn that morning. "My ancestry," said Sulla pleasantly, "is no business of yours. Now get out of my room." "It won't be your room forever!" gasped Stichus, scuttling to the door and almost colliding with the returning slave, now bearing a bowl of water and a cloth. "Don't count on it" was Sulla's parting shot. The expensive slave sidled into the room trying to look demure. Sulla eyed him up and down sourly. "Clean it up, you mincing flower," he said, and went to find the women. Stichus had beaten Sulla to Clitumna, who was closeted with her precious nephew and was not to be disturbed, said the steward apologetically. So Sulla walked down the colonnade surrounding the peristyle-garden to the suite of rooms where his mistress Nicopolis lived. There were savory smells coming from the cookhouse at the far end of the garden, a site it shared with the bathroom and the latrine; like most houses on the Palatine, Clitumna's was connected to the water supply and the sewers, thus relieving the staff of the burden of fetching water from a public fountain and toting the contents of the chamber pots to the nearest public latrine or drain opening in the gutter. "You know, Lucius Cornelius," said Nicopolis, abandoning her fancy work, "if you would only come down out of your aristocratic high-flies occasionally, you'd do a lot better." He sat on a comfortable couch with a sigh, rugging himself up a little more warmly in his toga because the room was cold, and let the servant girl nicknamed Bithy remove his winter boots. She was a nice cheerful lass with an unpronounceable name, from the backwoods of Bithynia; Clitumna had picked her up cheap from her nephew and inadvertently acquired a treasure. When the girl finished unlacing the boots she bustled out of the room purposefully; in a moment she returned bearing a pair of thick warm socks which she smoothed carefully over Sulla's perfect, snow-white feet. "Thank you, Bithy," he said, smiling at her and reaching out a careless hand to ruffle her hair. She absolutely glowed. Funny little thing, he thought with a tenderness that surprised him, until he realized that she reminded him of the girl next door. Julilla ... "How do you mean?" he asked Nicopolis, who seemed as usual impervious to the cold. "Why should that greedy little crawler Stichus inherit everything when Clitumna goes to join her dubious ancestors? If you would only change your tactics a fraction, Lucius Cornelius my very dear friend, she'd leave the lot to you. And she's got a lot, believe me!" "What's he doing, bleating that I hurt him?" asked Sulla, taking a bowl of nuts from Bithy with another special smile. "Of course he is! And lavishly embro
idering it, I'm sure. I don't blame you in the least, he's detestable, but he is her only blood kin and she loves him, so she's blind to his faults. But she loves you more, haughty wretch that you are! So when you see her next, don't go all icy and proud and refuse to justify yourself spin her a story about Sticky Stichy even better than the one he' s spinning about you Half-intrigued, half-skeptical, he stared at her. "Go on, she'd never be stupid enough to fall for it," he said. "Oh, darling Lucius! When you want, you can make any woman fall for any line you care to toss them. Try it! Just this once? For my sake?" wheedled Nicopolis. "No. I'd end up the fool, Nicky." "You wouldn't, you know," Nicopolis persevered. "There isn't enough money in the world to make me grovel to the likes of Clitumna!" "She doesn't have all the money in the world, but she does have more than enough to see you into the Senate," whispered the temptress beguilingly. "No! You're wrong, you really are. There's this house, admittedly, but she spends every penny she gets and what she doesn't spend, Sticky Stichy does." "Not so. Why do you think her bankers hang on her every word as if she were Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi? She's got a very tidy fortune invested with them, and she doesn't spend half of her income. Besides which, give Sticky Stichy his due, he's not short of a sestertius either. As long as his late father's accountant and manager are capable of working, that business of Stichy's will continue to do very nicely." Sulla sat up with a jerk, loosening the folds of toga. "Nicky, you wouldn't spin me a tale, would you?" "I would, but not about this," she said, threading her needle with purple wool intertwined with gold bullion. "She'll live to be a hundred," he said then, subsiding onto the couch and handing back the bowl of nuts to Bithy, no longer hungry. "I agree, she might live to be a hundred," said Nicopolis, plunging her needle into the tapestry and drawing her glittering thread through very, very carefully. Her big dark eyes surveyed Sulla tranquilly. "But then again, she may not. Hers isn't a long-lived family, you know." There were noises outside; Lucius Gavius Stichus was evidently taking his leave of his Aunt Clitumna. Sulla stood up, let the servant girl slip backless Greek slippers onto his feet. The massive length and breadth of the toga slumped to the floor, but he seemed not to notice. "All right, Nicky, just this once I'll try it," he said, and grinned. "Wish me luck!" But before she could, he was gone.