Roma

by Steven Saylor

  The next day, Lucius did something he had done only once before. He wore the family fascinum.

  Occasionally, as a child, he had seen his mother wear it. When Lucius became a father, Menenia had ceremoniously passed the heirloom on to him; she explained its great antiquity and the little she knew of its origin, and she spoke of its power as a talisman to ward off evil. Lucius wore it on the day he received it, purely to please his mother, then put it away and forgot about it.

  But that night, as the storm continued to rage, the fascinum appeared in his dreams, hovering before a great fire. When Lucius awoke, he searched for it among a tangle of castoff adornments he kept in a strongbox. He put the chain over his neck. The gold talisman, concealed beneath his tunic and toga, was cold against his breast. Lucius was not a particularly religious man, but if the fascinum possessed any protective powers whatsoever, of all the days of his life, this was surely the day to wear it.

  To reach the house of Gaius in the Subura, Lucius had to cross the Forum. From the direction of the Senate House he heard echoes of shouting and weeping. A crowd was mourning Quintus Antyllius.

  Gaius’s house was more crowded than he had ever seen it. The atmosphere was one of barely suppressed hysteria. There was a surprisingly buoyant sprit among the men who rushed madly this way and that, almost a sense of celebration. The last time Lucius had seen such a mixture of dread, anticipation, and camaraderie had been when he stood before the walls of Carthage with Tiberius, just before the final siege. There was a sense that a new world, for better or worse, was about to be born, and the knowledge that many among them would not be alive the next day to see it.

  Gaius, standing among a group of reapers with scythes, saw him and waved him over.

  “You came by way of the Forum?”

  “Yes, but I stayed clear of the Senate House. I heard shouting, but I didn’t see—”

  “Never mind.” Gaius’s tone was oddly aloof. “My surrogate eyes and ears run back and forth, bringing me fresh reports every few minutes. Quintus Antyllius has been laid on a bier before the Rostra. Various senators are competing to see which of them can deliver the most sanctimonious eulogy. The mourners weep and tear their hair. Meanwhile, I’m afraid some of my more eager supporters have gathered on the periphery. No violence yet, only some name-calling. Whenever the mourners cry ‘Antyllius!’ my men shout back ‘Tiberius!’ Of course, the corpse of my brother was dragged through the streets and dumped in the river. No one can accuse us of doing such a thing to Antyllius.”

  “Gaius, what I did yesterday—it was unforgivable.”

  “And utterly out of character!” Gaius smiled, but his eyes were sad. “The Furies themselves must have unleashed your rage—who knew you carried so much inside you? Well, Quintus Antyllius is no great loss to the world. Of course, Opimius blames me for the murder. Even now he’s haranguing his fellow senators with all sorts of wild allegations, claiming that I intend to murder every one of them. ‘The Gracchans are planning a bloodbath!’ he cries. Curious, how his sort accuses the opposition of the very crimes which they themselves are plotting.”

  “Will it come to that, Gaius? A bloodbath?”

  “Ask Opimius. He’s doing his best to whip the senators into a frenzy. He’s proposed a measure he calls the Ultimate Decree. Sounds menacing, doesn’t it? It will allow the consuls ‘to take all necessary measures to defend the state.’ In other words, they’ll be empowered to kill any citizen on the spot, without a trial.”

  “Gaius, this can’t be happening.”

  “And yet, the gods have allowed it. A simpleminded fellow like Opimius doesn’t realize that something like this so-called Ultimate Decree will never be used only once. They’re opening Pandora’s box. Allow the state to murder its citizens once, and the same thing will happen again and again and again.” Gaius’s glib tone suddenly gave way and his voice cracked. “Alas, Lucius! What’s to become of our beloved Republic? Our wretched, tattered, hopelessly lost Republic?”

  He took Lucius by the hands for a moment, then pulled back and turned to address the reapers and the others nearby. “All of you, gather whatever weapons you have! Philocrates, bring me my sword! I’m not going to wait for them to attack me in my home. I shall go to the Forum and say a prayer before the statue of my father.”

  Licinia came running. She clutched his toga. “No, husband! You’re safe in this house, where your supporters can protect you.”

  “Only the gods can protect me now.”

  “Go unarmed, then! If you go out armed, with armed men around you, there’ll surely be violence, and they’ll put the blame on you.”

  “I’d rather die in battle than like a sheep offered for sacrifice.” He flashed a crooked smile.

  “Gaius, this is no joke! The same men who killed Tiberius are determined to murder you, as well.”

  “While I breathe, I’m still a free citizen of Roma. I won’t be a prisoner in my home.” Gaius pulled away from her and moved toward the door.

  Licinia was wracked with sobs. Lucius attempted to put his arm around her, but she shook him off, refusing to be consoled. As the last of Gaius’s entourage disappeared from the vestibule, Lucius went running after them.

  As Gaius proceeded through the streets of the Subura, shutters flew opened. Men cheered him, but few of them joined the entourage. Lucius looked about nervously. Where were the vast throngs who once had promised to defend Gaius to the death? They seemed to have melted away. As the small band entered the Forum, idlers and bystanders gawked with curiosity, then scattered, sensing trouble and fleeing from it.

  Before the statue of his father, Gaius paused for a long time, gazing up at the face of the elder Tiberius. His loyal young slave Philocrates stood to his left. Lucius stood to his right. Gaius spoke in a dreamy voice.

  “My grandfather cast a long shadow; men know me as the grandson of Scipio Africanus, not the son of Tiberius Gracchus. But my father was also a great Roman. His victories in Spain established a peace that lasted twenty-five years. His embassies to Asia made him the confidante of kings. He was twice elected consul, twice awarded triumphs, and served as censor. My brother would have been as great, if he had lived. I had hoped that I might—” His voice broke. Tears fell from his eyes and streamed down his cheeks. “Did we live and die for nothing?”

  Lucius heard shouting from the direction of the Senate House, followed by the sounds of a street fight. The noise came nearer. “Gaius, we must get back to your house. There aren’t enough of us to take them on.”

  Gaius gave a start. He pricked up his ears, then shook his head. “The fighting has moved between us and the Subura. We can’t go back. This is where I’ll make my stand. This is where I’ll fall.”

  Lucius’s heart sank, but he took a deep breath. “I won’t desert you, Gaius.”

  “You’re a true friend, Lucius.”

  Armed men appeared in the distance. They spotted Gaius, gave a shout, and ran toward him. The entourage was vastly outnumbered. Men looked to Gaius for orders, but he stood as stiff and silent as his father’s statue. Some of his supporters panicked and began to flee in all directions.

  At last, Gaius cried out in despair. “Lucius! Philocrates! All of you, follow me!” He cast off his toga, as did Lucius and the others who were wearing them, the better to run in his under-tunic.

  With the mob at their heels, they raced from the Forum. They skirted the slope of the Palatine and sprinted across the Circus Maximus. In the narrow streets of the Aventine, they lost their pursuers. Near the crest of the hill, they came to the Temple of Diana.

  Gaius ran into the temple. The handful of supporters who followed watched him fall to his knees before the statue of the goddess. “Queen of the hunt!” he cried, gasping for breath. “Daughter of Jupiter, sister of Apollo! Accept this sacrifice!” He placed the pommel of his sword on the floor and pointed the blade toward his chest. Before he could fall on it, two of his followers rushed to stop him. One of them gripped his shoulders and pulled h
im back. The other snatched the sword and handed it to Philocrates.

  Gaius wept. He beat his fists against the floor. “Ungrateful, treacherous Romans, I put a curse on you!” he shouted. “I pointed the way to freedom, and you turned against me. I risked everything for you, and now you abandon me. Be slaves forever, then, to the murderers in the Senate!”

  It seemed to Lucius that a madness had come over his friend. Gaius had always been a brave man and a fighter, yet now he seemed determined to die by his own hand, without a struggle. Gaius had been utterly sure of his cause, yet now he renounced it; he had been utterly devoted to the common citizens of Roma, yet now he cursed them. Lucius was appalled, but he could not judge Gaius. He himself had been seized by a madness the previous day, when he struck Antyllius dead without thinking.

  A straggler ran into the temple. “They’re close behind me!” he shouted. “They’re coming this way!”

  Lucius and Philocrates pulled Gaius to his feet. They turned him toward the entrance. In a daze, he ran out into the street. His pursuers saw him and shouted. The chase resumed.

  For Lucius, the headlong flight was like a nightmare. The winding streets of the Aventine, the old fountain at the mouth of the Appian Aqueduct, the salt warehouses along the Tiber, and the bustling markets of the Forum Boarium, all these places were utterly familiar yet utterly strange. Seeing them pass by, men laughed and cheered them on, like spectators watching a footrace. Others jeered at the desperate little entourage, and pelted them with radishes and turnips and bits of bones and hooves from the market.

  At the bridge across the Tiber, some of the men stopped and turned about, determined to make a stand. They begged Gaius to keep running, vowing to hold the bridge as long as they could. Accompanied only by Philocrates and Lucius, Gaius reached the far side of the Tiber just as his pursuers arrived at the bridge. The sounds of battle echoed across the river.

  The west bank of the Tiber was largely wild and undeveloped. The three of them left the road, thinking to disappear amid the dense foliage. A narrow pathway led them to a stand of tall trees. The soft earth seemed to swallow the sound of their footsteps. Amid the leafy shadows, a beam of sunlight fell upon a stone altar in a small clearing. Lucius felt more than ever that he was moving through a dream.

  “What place is this?” he whispered.

  “The Grove of the Furies,” said Gaius in a hollow voice. “Tisiphone, Megaera, and Allecto: the vengeful sisters who punish sinful mortals with madness. Only black sheep can be sacrificed to them. Do you see their images on the altar? They carry whips and torches. Their hair is made of snakes. They’re older than Jupiter. They were born of the blood that was spilled when Cronus the Titan castrated his father Uranus—born of a crime of a son against his father. Yet I’ve always honored my father, and my grandfather! Why have the Furies led me here?”

  He dropped to his knees before the altar. Shouts echoed amid the treetops. Their pursuers were drawing near.

  “Philocrates, do you have my sword?”

  The young slave quailed. “Master, please—”

  “Put an end to me, Philocrates. At the Temple of Diana, I lost my nerve. I let them stop me. Do it for me, Philocrates. Do it now!” He threw back his head and raised his chest.

  “Master, I can’t bear to do it.”

  “I command you, Philocrates!”

  Weeping and trembling, the young slave turned the blade on himself and fell forward. His cry of anguish reverberated though the woods. The pursuers heard and shouted to one another. They were very close.

  Gaius knelt over the slave. He stroked the youth’s hair, then pulled the sword from his chest. He looked up at Lucius and extended the hilt toward him.

  “This is what the Furies want,” Gaius whispered. “This is what they demand of you, Lucius. You brought about this crisis, when you slew Antyllius. Now you must end it.”

  “By doing the thing I least desire in all the world to do?” cried Lucius.

  “Would you allow me to be tortured and torn to pieces by my enemies?”

  Lucius took the sword. He could not look at Gaius’s face. He circled him, knelt behind him, and clutched him tightly with one arm. He raised the blade to Gaius’s throat.

  With his last breath, Gaius hissed a curse. “Let them be slaves of the Senate forever!”

  Lucius drew the blade across Gaius’s throat. Gaius convulsed. Blood flowed warm and wet over Lucius’s encircling arm.

  Lucius drew back and staggered to his feet. Still twitching, Gaius’s body fell beside that of the dead slave. Lucius dropped the blade between them.

  He stepped back into the shadows and hid himself amid the foliage just as the pursuers entered the little clearing.

  “Numa’s balls! Dead already!” one of them shouted. “Look at the two of them—he let the slave kill him, then the slave killed himself. The coward cheated us!”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said another. “The bounty’s just as good, no matter who killed him. The consul Opimius promised a fat reward for the head of each and every citizen on his list, and the fattest reward of all is for the head of Gaius Gracchus. I claim it!”

  Beating back the others with a snarl, the man raised his sword and hacked at Gaius’s neck until the head came free. He lifted it by the hair and swung the trophy in a circle over his head, whooping with triumph. Blood and bits of gore spattered the onlookers and stained the altar. A few drops penetrated the foliage and struck Lucius in the face, but he did not flinch.

  “What about the slave?” someone said, giving the corpse a kick.

  “Worthless. Leave it for now. Back to the city, my friends, where there’s plenty more killing to do!”

  Nauseated, burning with anger, paralyzed by fear, Lucius remained silent and unseen in the shadows. After the men had gone, he reached up to touch his breast, and felt the fascinum beneath his tunic. Amazed that he was still alive, he whispered a prayer to whatever power had seen fit to protect him.

  In the days that followed, under sanction of the Ultimate Decree, more than three thousand Roman citizens were put to death. The Gracchan movement was obliterated.

  Remarkably, Lucius survived the massacre unscathed. For many days he remained secluded in his house, waiting for a banging on the door that never came. His name never appeared on the official list of enemies of the state. He could not account for this omission. To be sure, toward the end, his relationship with Gaius had grown less public and more private. For whatever reason, Gaius’s enemies overlooked him, a stroke of good fortune over which Lucius never ceased to puzzle.

  It seemed to Lucius there was no rhyme or reason to his destiny. He had shunned Tiberius and Blossius, and by doing so had survived their follies, to his shame and regret; he had boldly embraced the cause of Gaius, and yet had survived his downfall, to even greater shame and regret. Lucius concluded that his was a charmed life, curiously immune to ordinary reversals of fortune. In the years that remained to him, he turned his back on politics and devoted himself to his career, which kept him very busy; there were always more roads to be built. He also became more religious. Each night, before going to bed, he said a prayer of thanksgiving to the god of the fascinum who had saved his life when death was very near. It was in his bed that he died many years later, a beloved husband and father, an accomplished builder of roads, and a much respected member of the Equestrian order.

  The consul Opimius was eventually brought to trial for perpetrating the slaughter of Roman citizens, but he was acquitted; the Ultimate Decree was upheld as a legal act, and thus shielded him from punishment. Later in his career, however, he was convicted for taking bribes while serving as ambassador to King Jugurtha of Numidia. Opimius became a bitter and much hated man in his twilight years, and he died in disgrace. His legacy to Roma was his authorship of the Ultimate Decree, which, as Gaius had predicted, was to be invoked repeatedly in the increasingly chaotic, increasingly bloody years to come.

  Following the example of her father at the end of his life, C
ornelia departed from Roma and retired to a villa on the coast, at a promontory called Misenum, taking Menenia with her for companionship. At Misenum she entertained visiting dignitaries and philosophers, and became legendary for her Stoic fortitude in the face of so much tragedy. To those who asked, she was happy to share her memories of her father, but she was even happier to talk about her sons. She spoke of Tiberius and Gaius without grief or tears, as if she were speaking of great men from the early days of the Republic. After her death, a statue of her was placed in the city and became a beloved shrine for the women of Roma.

  Cornelia had often expressed her desire to be remembered not as the daughter of Africanus, but as the mother of the Gracchi. So it came to pass. In death, the two brothers remained as fervently beloved, and as viciously hated, as they had been in life, and the double tragedy of their deaths made them figures of legend. Like their mother, they were immortalized with statues, and shrines were established on the spots where they died.

  Either as exemplars of evil or paragons of virtue, the names of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus would be invoked in speeches and debates for as long as the Republic would endure.

  HEADS IN THE FORUM

  81 B.C.

  “How did it come to this?” muttered Lucius Pinarius, talking to himself to keep up his courage as he hurried across the Forum. Despite the mild spring weather, he wore a hooded cloak. He nervously fingered the fascinum that hung at his breast—a family keepsake from his late grandfather—and whispered a prayer to the gods to keep him safe.

  The lowering sun of late afternoon loomed blood-red above the rooftops, casting long shadows. Quickening his pace, Lucius passed the Rostra. Nowadays, the beaks of captured ships were not the only trophies that adorned the speaker’s platform. Lucius tried not to look, but despite himself he took a quick glance at the severed heads planted on the row of tall spikes that now encircled the platform. Some of the heads had been on the Rostra for a month or more and were in an advanced state of decay, the features no longer recognizable. Others, dripping blood, had been placed there so recently that their gaping mouths and wide-open eyes still expressed shock and horror.