The Grass Crown (4 page)

“A couple of his brothers!” whispered Julia, horrified.

“Do you mean to say that there are more at home like Lucius Decumius?”

“No!” said Aurelia scornfully. “I mean his brothers in the crossroads college—his minions, Julia.” She looked cross. “Oh, I don’t know why I come to these family dinners on the rare occasions when I do come! Why is it that you never seem to understand that I have my life very nicely under control, and don’t need all this fussing and clucking?”

Julia said no more until she and Gaius Marius went to bed, having settled the household down, banished the slaves to their quarters, locked the door onto the street, and made an offering to the trio of gods who looked after every Roman home—Vesta of the hearth, the Di Penates of the storage cupboards, and the Lar Familiaris of the family.

“Aurelia was very difficult today,” she said then.

Marius was tired, a sensation he experienced a great deal more often these days than of yore, and one which shamed him. So rather than do what he longed to do—namely to roll over on his left side and go to sleep—he lay on his back, settled his wife within his left arm, and resigned himself to a chat about women and domestic problems. “Oh?” he asked.

“Can’t you bring Gaius Julius home? Aurelia is growing into an old retired Vestal Virgin, all—I don’t know! Sour. Crabby. Juiceless! Yes, that’s the right word, juiceless,” said Julia. “And that child is wearing her out.”

“Which child?” mumbled Marius.

“Her twenty-two-month-old son, Young Caesar. Oh, Gaius Marius, he is astonishing! I know such children are born occasionally, but I’ve certainly never met one before, nor even heard of one among our friends. I mean, all we mothers are happy if our sons know what dignitas and auctoritas are after their fathers have taken them for their first trip to the Forum at age seven! Yet this little mite knows already, though he’s never even met his father! I tell you, husband, Young Caesar is truly an astonishing child.”

She was warming up; another thought occurred to her, of sufficient moment to make her wriggle, bounce up and down. “Ah! I was talking to Crassus Orator’s wife, Mucia, yesterday, and she was saying that Crassus Orator is boasting of having a client with a son like Young Caesar.” She dug Marius in the ribs. “You must know the family, Gaius Marius, because they come from Arpinum.”

He hadn’t really followed any of this, but the elbow had completed what the wriggle and bounce had begun, and he was now awake enough to say, “Arpinum? Who?” Arpinum was his home, there lay the lands of his ancestors.

“Marcus Tullius Cicero. Crassus Orator’s client and the son have the same name.”

“Unfortunately I do indeed know the family. They’re some sort of cousins. Litigious-minded lot! Stole a bit of our land about a hundred years ago, won the court case. We haven’t really spoken to them since.” His eyelids fell.

“I see.” Julia cuddled closer. “Anyway, the boy is eight now, and so brilliant he’s going to study in the Forum. Crassus Orator is predicting that he’ll create quite a stir. I suppose when Young Caesar is eight, he’ll create quite a stir too.”

“Huh!” said Marius, yawning hugely.

She dug her elbow in again. “You, Gaius Marius, are going off to sleep! Wake up!”

His eyes flew open, he made a rumbling noise in the back of his throat. “Care to race me round the Capitol?” he asked.

Giggling, she settled down once more. “Well, I haven’t met this Cicero boy, but I have met my nephew, little Gaius Julius Caesar, and I can tell you, he isn’t… normal. I know we mostly reserve that word for people who are mentally defective, but I don’t see why it can’t mean the opposite as well.”

“The older you get, Julia, the more talkative you get,” complained the weary husband.

Julia ignored this. “Young Caesar isn’t two years old yet, but he’s about a hundred! Big words and properly phrased sentences—and he knows what the big words mean too!”

And suddenly Marius was wide awake, no longer tired. He lifted himself up to look at his wife, her serene face softly delineated by the little flame of a night lamp. Her nephew! Her nephew named Gaius! The Syrian Martha’s prophecy, revealed to him the first time he ever saw the crone, in Gauda’s palace at Carthage. She had predicted that he would be the First Man in Rome, and that he would be consul seven times. But, she had added, he would not be the greatest of all Romans. His wife’s nephew named Gaius would be! And he had said to himself at the time, Over my dead body. No one is going to eclipse me. Now here was the child, a living fact.

He lay back again, his tiredness translated to aching limbs. Too much time, too much energy, too much passion had he put into his battle to become the First Man in Rome, to stand by tamely and see the luster of his name dimmed by a precocious aristocrat who would come into his own when he, Gaius Marius, was too old or too dead to oppose him. Greatly though he loved his wife, humbly though he admitted that it was her aristocratic name which had procured him that first consulship, still he would not willingly see her nephew, blood of her blood, rise higher than he himself had.

Of consulships he had won six, which meant there was a seventh yet to come. No one in Roman public life seriously believed that Gaius Marius could ever regain his past glory, those halcyon years when the Centuries had voted him in, three times in absentia, as a pledge of their conviction that he, Gaius Marius, was the only man who could save Rome from the Germans. Well, he had saved them. And what thanks had he got? A landslide of opposition, disapproval, destructiveness. The ongoing enmity of Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar, of Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle, of a huge and powerful senatorial faction united in no other way than to bring down Gaius Marius. Little men with big names, appalled at the idea that their beloved Rome had been saved by a despised New Man—an Italian hayseed with no Greek, as Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle had put it many years before.

Well, it wasn’t over yet. Stroke or no stroke, Gaius Marius would be consul a seventh time—and go down in the history books as the greatest Roman the Republic had ever known. Nor was he going to let some beautiful, golden-haired descendant of the goddess Venus step into the history books ahead of himself—the patrician Gaius Marius was not, the Roman Gaius Marius was not.

“I’ll fix you, boy!” he said aloud, and squeezed Julia.

“What was that?” she asked.

“In a few days we’re leaving for Pessinus, you and I and our son,” he said.

She sat up. “Oh, Gaius Marius! Really? How wonderful! Are you sure you want to take us with you?”

“I’m sure, wife. I don’t care a rush what the conventions say. We’re going to be away for two or three years, and that’s too long a time at my age to spend without seeing my wife and son. If I were a younger man, perhaps. And, since I’m journeying as a privatus, there’s no official obstacle to my taking my family along with me.” He chuckled. “I’m footing the bill myself.”

“Oh, Gaius Marius!” She could find nothing else to say.

“We’ll have a look at Athens, Smyrna, Pergamum, Nicomedia, a hundred other places.”

“Tarsus?” she asked eagerly. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to travel the world!”

He still ached, but the sleepiness surged back overwhelmingly. Down went his eyelids; his lower jaw sagged.

For a few more moments Julia chattered on, then ran out of superlatives, and sat hugging her knees happily. She turned to Gaius Marius, smiling tenderly. “Dear love, I don’t suppose… ?” she asked delicately.

Her answer was his first snore. Good wife of twelve years that she was, she shook her head gently, still smiling, and turned him onto his right side.

Having stamped out every last ember of the slave revolt in Sicily, Manius Aquillius had come home, if not in triumph, at least in high enough standing to have been awarded an ovation by the Senate. That he could not ask for a triumph was due to the nature of the enemy, who, being enslaved civilians, could not claim to be the soldiers of an enemy nation; civil wars and slave wars occupied a special niche in the Roman military code. To be commissioned by the Senate to put down a civil uprising was no less an honor and no less an undertaking than dealing with a foreign army and enemy, but the general’s right to claim a triumph was nonetheless denied. The triumph was the way the People of Rome were physically shown the rewards of war—the prisoners, the captured money, plunder of all descriptions from golden nails in once-kingly doors to packets of cinnamon and frankincense. For everything taken enriched the coffers of Rome, and the People could see with their own eyes how profitable a business war was—if you were Roman, that is, and being Roman, won. But in civil and slave uprisings there were no profits to be made, only losses to be endured. Property looted by the enemy and recaptured had to be returned to its rightful owners; the State could demand no percentage of it.

Thus the ovation was invented. Like the triumph, it consisted of a procession along the same route; however, the general didn’t ride in the antique triumphal chariot, did not paint his face, did not wear triumphal garb; no trumpets sounded, only the less inspirational tweetling of flutes; and rather than a bull, the Great God received a sheep, thereby sharing the lesser status of the ceremony with the general.

His ovation had well satisfied Manius Aquillius. Having celebrated it, he took his place in the Senate once more, and as a consular—an ex-consul—was asked to give his opinion ahead of a consular of equal standing but who had not celebrated a triumph or ovation. Tainted with the lingering odium of his parent, another Manius Aquillius, he had originally despaired of reaching the consulship. Some facts were hard to live down if a man’s family was only moderately noble; and the fact was that Manius Aquillius’s father had, in the aftermath of the wars following the death of King Attalus III of Pergamum, sold more than half the territory of Phrygia to the father of the present King Mithridates of Pontus for a sum of gold he had popped into his own purse. By rights the territory should have gone, together with the rest of King Attalus’s possessions, into the formation of the Roman Asia Province, as King Attalus had willed his kingdom to Rome. Backward, owning a populace so ignorant they made poor slaves, Phrygia hadn’t seemed to the elder Manius Aquillius like much of a loss for Rome. But the men in Senate and Forum with real clout had not forgiven the elder, nor forgotten the incident when the younger Manius Aquillius entered the political arena.

To attain the praetorship had been a struggle, and had cost most of what was left of that Pontic gold, for the father had been neither thrifty nor prudent. So when the younger Manius Aquillius’s own golden opportunity had come, he seized it very quickly. After the Germans had defeated that ghastly pair Caepio and Mallius Maximus in Gaul-across-the-Alps—and looked set to pour down the Rhodanus Valley and into Italy—it had been the praetor Manius Aquillius who had proposed that Gaius Marius be elected consul in absentia in order to have the requisite imperium to deal with the menace. His action put Gaius Marius under an obligation to him—an obligation Gaius Marius was only too happy to discharge.

As a result, Manius Aquillius had served as Marius’s legate and been instrumental in defeating the Teutones at Aquae Sextiae. Bearing the news of that much-needed victory to Rome, he had been elected junior consul in conjunction with Marius’s fifth term. And after the year of his consulship was over, he had taken two of his general’s superbly trained veteran legions to Sicily, there to cauterize the festering sore of a slave revolt which had been going on for several years at great peril to Rome’s grain supply.

Home again, treated to an ovation, he had hoped to stand for election as censor when it came time to vote a new pair in. But the leaders with the real clout in Senate and Forum had only been biding their time. Gaius Marius himself had fallen in the aftermath of Lucius Appuleius Saturninus’s attempt to take over Rome, and Manius Aquillius found himself without protection. He was haled into the extortion court by a tribune of the plebs with plenty of clout and powerful friends among the knights who served both as jurors and presidents of the major courts—the tribune of the plebs Publius Servilius Vatia. Not one of the patrician Servilii, admittedly, Vatia came nonetheless from an important plebeian noble family. And he intended to go far.

The trial took place in an uneasy Forum; several events had helped render it so, starting with the days of Saturninus, though everyone had hoped after his death that there would be no more Forum violence, no more murders of magistrates. Yet there had been violence, there had been murder; chiefly as the result of the efforts of Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle’s son, the Piglet, to bring some of his vindicated father’s enemies to account. Out of the Piglet’s strenuous fight to bring his father home, he had earned a more worthy cognomen than the Piglet—he was now Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius—Pius meaning the Dutiful One. And with that fight successfully concluded, the Piglet Metellus Pius was determined Piggle-wiggle’s enemies would suffer. Including Manius Aquillius, so obviously Gaius Marius’s man.

Attendance in the Plebeian Assembly was down, so a poor audience surrounded the spot in the lower Forum Romanum where the extortion court had been directed by the Plebeian Assembly to set up its tribunal.

“This whole business is manifestly ridiculous,” said Publius Rutilius Rufus to Gaius Marius when they arrived to hear the proceedings of the last day of Manius Aquillius’s trial. “It was a slave war! I doubt there were any pickings to be had from Lilybaeum clear to Syracuse—and you can’t tell me that all those greedy Sicilian grain farmers didn’t keep a strict eye on Manius Aquillius! He wouldn’t have had the chance to palm a bronze coin!”

“This is the Piglet’s way of getting at me,” said Marius, shrugging. “Manius Aquillius knows that. He’s just paying the penalty for supporting me.”

“And paying the penalty for his father’s selling most of Phrygia,” said Rutilius Rufus.

“True.”

The proceedings had been conducted in the new manner laid down by the dead Gaius Servilius Glaucia when he legislated to give the courts back to the knights, thereby excluding the Senate from them save as defendants. Over the preceding days the jury of fifty-one of Rome’s most outstanding businessmen had been nominated, challenged and chosen, the prosecution and the defense had given their preliminary addresses, and the witnesses had been heard. Now on this last day the prosecution would speak for two hours, the defense for three, and the jury would then deliver its verdict immediately.

Servilius Vatia had done well for the State, Vatia himself being no mean advocate, and his helpers good; but there was no doubt that the audience, larger by far on this last day, had gathered to hear the heavy artillery—the advocates leading Manius Aquillius’s defense.

Cross-eyed Caesar Strabo spoke first, young and vicious, superbly well trained and gifted by nature with a fine turn of rhetorical phrase. He was followed by a man so able he had won the extra cognomen of Orator—Lucius Licinius Crassus Orator. And Crassus Orator gave way to another man who had won the cognomen Orator—Marcus Antonius Orator. To have acquired this cognomen, Orator, was not merely because of consummate public speaking; it rested too upon an unparalleled knowledge of the procedures of rhetoric—the proper, defined steps which had to be adhered to. Crassus Orator had the finer background in law, but Antonius Orator was the finer speaker.

“By a whisker only,” said Rutilius Rufus after Crassus Orator ended and Antonius Orator began.

A grunt was his only answer; Marius was concentrating upon Antonius Orator’s speech, wanting to be sure he got his money’s worth. For of course Manius Aquillius wasn’t paying for advocates of this quality, and everyone knew it. Gaius Marius was funding the defense. According to law and custom, an advocate could not solicit a fee; he could, however, accept a gift tendered as a token of appreciation for a job well done. And, as the Republic grew from middle into elderly age, it became generally accepted that advocates be given gifts. At first these had been works of art or furniture; but if the advocate was needy, he then had to dispose of the work of art or piece of furniture given to him. So in the end it had come down to outright gifts of money. Naturally nobody spoke about it, and everybody pretended it didn’t happen.

“How short your memories are, gentlemen of the jury!” cried Antonius Orator. “Come now, cast your minds back a few short years in time, to those impoverished Head Count crowds in our beloved Forum Romanum, their bellies as empty as their granaries. Do you not remember how some of you”—there were inevitably half a dozen grain lords on the panel—“could put no less than fifty sesterces a modius upon what little wheat your private granaries contained? And the crowds of Head Count gathered day after day, and looked at us, and growled in their throats. For Sicily, our breadbasket, was a ruin, a very Iliad of woes—”

Rutilius Rufus clutched at Marius’s arm and emitted a squawk of outraged horror. “There he goes! Oh, may every last one of these verbal thieves come down with worm-eaten sores! that’s my little epigram! A very Iliad of woes, indeed! Don’t you remember, Gaius Marius, how I wrote that selfsame phrase to you in Gaul years ago? And had to suffer Scaurus’s stealing it! And now what happens? It’s passed into general usage, with Scaurus’s name on it!”

“Tace!” said Marius, anxious to hear Marcus Antonius Orator.

“—made more woeful by a monumental maladministration! Now we all know who the monumental maladministrator was, don’t we?” The keen reddish eye rested upon a particularly vacant face in the second row of the jury. “No? Ah—let me refresh your memories! The young Brothers Lucullus brought him to account, sent him into a citizenless exile. I refer of course to Gaius Servilius Augur. No crops had been gathered in Sicily for four years when the loyal consul Manius Aquillius arrived. And I would remind you that Sicily is the source of over half our grain.”

Sulla slid up, nodded to Marius, then bent his attention upon the still simmering Rutilius Rufus. “How goes the trial?”

Rutilius Rufus snorted. “Oh, concerning Manius Aquillius, who knows? The jury wants to find any excuse to convict him, so I daresay it will. He’s to be an object lesson for any imprudent fellows who might contemplate supporting Gaius Marius.”

“Tace!” growled Marius again.

Rutilius Rufus moved out of earshot, tugging at Sulla to follow. “You’re not nearly so quick to support Gaius Marius yourself these days, are you, Lucius Cornelius?”

“I have a career to advance, Publius Rutilius, and I doubt I can do so by supporting Gaius Marius.”

Rutilius Rufus acknowledged the truth of this with a nod. “Yes, that’s understandable. But, my friend, he doesn’t deserve it! He deserves that those of us who know him and hold him in regard should stand by him.”

That cut; Sulla hunched his shoulders, hissed his pain. “It’s all very well for you to talk! You’re a consular, you’ve had your day! I haven’t! You can call me traitor if you like, but I swear to you, Publius Rutilius, that I will have my day! And the gods help those who oppose me.”

“Including Gaius Marius?”

“Including him.”

Rutilius Rufus said no more, only shook his head in despair.

Sulla too was silent for a while, then said, “I hear the Celtiberians are proving more than our current governor in Nearer Spain can bear. Dolabella in Further Spain is so tied down by the Lusitani that he can’t move to assist. It looks as if Titus Didius is going to have to go to Nearer Spain during his consulship.”

“That’s a pity,” said Rutilius Rufus. “I like Titus Didius’s style, New Man though he may be. Sensible laws for a change—and out of the consul’s chair.”

Sulla grinned. “What, you don’t think our beloved senior consul Metellus Nepos thought the laws up?”

“No more than you do, Lucius Cornelius. What Caecilius Metellus ever born was more concerned with improving the machinery of government than his own standing? Those two little laws of Titus Didius’s are as important as beneficial. No more rushing bills through the Assemblies, because now three full nundinae days must elapse between promulgation and ratification. And no more tacking unrelated matters together to make a law that’s as confusing as unwieldy. Yes, if nothing else good has happened this year in Senate or Comitia, at least we can claim Titus Didius’s laws,” said Rutilius Rufus with satisfaction.

But Sulla wasn’t interested in Titus Didius’s laws. “All fine and fair, Publius Rutilius, but you’re missing my point! If Titus Didius goes to Nearer Spain to put down the Celtiberians, I’m going with him as his senior legate. I’ve already had a word with him, and he’s more than agreeable. It’s going to be a long and nasty war, so there’ll be booty to share in, and reputations to be made. Who knows? I might even get to command an army.”

“You already have a military reputation, Lucius Cornelius.”

“But look at all the cacat between then and now!” cried Sulla angrily. “They’ve forgotten, all these voting idiots with more money than sense! So what happens? Catulus Caesar would prefer I was dead in case I ever open my mouth about a mutiny, and Scaurus punishes me for something I didn’t do.” He showed his teeth. “They ought to worry, that pair! Because if the day ever comes when I decide they’ve kept me out of the ivory chair forever, I’ll make them wish they were never born!”

And I believe him! thought Rutilius Rufus, conscious of a coldness in his bones. Oh, this is a dangerous man! Better that he absents himself. “Then go to Spain with Didius,” he said. “You’re right, it’s the best way to the praetorship. A fresh start, a new reputation. But what a pity you can’t manage election as curule aedile. You’re such a showman you’d put on wonderful games! After that, you’d be a landslide praetor.”