The Grass Crown (58 page)

“Dear Picentes, I am not a Roman!” Saunio cried, clinging like an ape to one of the pillars and jigging up and down, his mask dangling from the fingers of one hand. “Do not, I implore you, lump me in with those fellows there!” He pointed to the Roman dais. “I am a mere Latin, dear Picentes, I too suffer the fasces marching up and down our beloved Italy, I too deplore the acts of these arrogant Roman predators!”

At which point Quintus Servilius rose from his ivory curule chair, stepped down from the dais, walked across the orchestra space, and mounted the stage.

“If you don’t want a spear through your chest, actor, get yourself off!” said Quintus Servilius to Saunio. “Never in my life have I had to put up with such insults! Think yourselves lucky, you Italian scum, that I don’t order my men to kill the lot of you!”

He turned from Saunio to the audience, the acoustics so good he was able to speak in a normal voice and be heard at the very top of the cavea. “I shall not forget what was said here!” he snapped. “Roman auctoritas has been mortally offended! The citizens of this Italian dungheap will pay dearly, so much I promise you!”

What happened next happened so quickly that no one afterward quite understood its mechanics; the whole five thousand Picentines in the audience descended in one screaming, flailing mass upon the two Roman front rows, leaping to the vacant half circle of the orchestra and turning there to fall upon troopers and lictors and togate Roman citizens in a solid wall of moving bodies and plucking, pulling, pinching hands. Not one spear was raised, not one sword was drawn, not one axe was detached from its surrounding bundle of rods; troopers and lictors, togate men and their ornamented women, all were literally torn apart. The front of the theater became a welter of blood, bits of bodies were thrown like balls from one side of the orchestra to the other. The crowd shrieked and squealed shrilly, wept with joy and hate, and reduced forty Roman officials and two hundred Roman businessmen and their women to chunks of bleeding meat. Fonteius and Fabricius perished among the first.

Nor did Quintus Servilius of the Augur’s family escape. Some of the crowd jumped onto the stage before he could think of moving, and took exquisite pleasure in tearing off his ears, twisting his nose until it came away, gouging out his eyes, ripping his fingers off all cruelly bitten by their rings, and then, as he screamed without pause, they lifted him at feet and hands and head, and pulled him effortlessly into six heaving pieces.

When it was finished the Picentines of Asculum cheered and danced, heaped the various bits of every Roman slain in the theater upon a pile in the forum, and ran through the streets dragging those Romans who had not gone to see the play to their deaths. By nightfall, no Roman citizen or relative of a Roman citizen remained alive within Asculum Picentum. The town shut its massive gates and began to discuss how it would both provision itself and survive. No one regretted the madness of a moment; it was rather as if the action had finally lanced a huge festering abscess of hate within them, and now they could enjoy that hate, vow never again to tolerate Rome.

Four days after the events at Asculum Picentum, the news of them reached Rome. The two Roman actors had escaped the stage and hidden, shivering in terror, watching the ghastly slaughter in the theater, then had fled the city just before the gates were closed. It took them four days to get to Rome, walking part of the way, begging seats in mule carts and pillion rides on horses, too terrified to say a word about Asculum Picentum until they reached safety. As they were actors, the tale lost nothing in its retelling; all of Rome recoiled in incredulous horror, the Senate donned mourning for its lost praetor, and the Vestal Virgins made an offering for Fonteius, the father of their newest little acquisition.

If anything about the massacre could be termed fortunate, it was perhaps that the elections in Rome had already taken place, thus sparing the Senate at least the ordeal of having to cope with Philippus unaided. Lucius Julius Caesar and Publius Rutilius Lupus were the new consuls, a good man in Caesar tied by economic necessity to a conceited but rich inadequacy like Lupus. It was another eight-praetor year, with the usual mixture of patrician and plebeian, competent and incompetent, getting in; the new consul Lucius Julius Caesar’s cross-eyed younger brother, Caesar Strabo, was a curule aedile. The quaestors included none other than Quintus Sertorius, whose winning of the Grass Crown in Spain would procure him any and every office. Gaius Marius, the cousin of his mother, had already ensured that Sertorius possessed the senatorial census; when a new pair of censors were elected, he was sure to be admitted to the Senate. Of law courts he may have seen little, but for such a young man, his name was quite famous, and he had that magical appeal to the general populace Gaius Marius also possessed.

Among an unusually impressive collection of tribunes of the plebs was one hideous name—Quintus Varius Severus Hybrida Sucronensis, already vowing that the moment the new college entered office, he would see that those who had supported citizenship for Italy would pay, from the highest to the lowest. When the news of the massacre at Asculum Picentum arrived, it provided Varius with wonderful ammunition; not yet in office, he canvassed tirelessly among the knights and Forum frequenters for support of his program of vengeance in the Plebeian Assembly. For the Senate, exasperated by the harping reproaches of Philippus and Caepio, the old year could not wind down quickly enough.

Then hard on the heels of the news from Asculum Picentum came a deputation of twenty Italian noblemen from the new capital of Italica, though they said nothing about Italica or Italia; they simply demanded an audience with the Senate on the matter of granting the franchise to every man south of—not the Arnus and the Rubico, but—the Padus in Italian Gaul! That new boundary had been shrewdly calculated to antagonize everyone in Rome from Senate to Head Count, for the leaders of the new nation Italia no longer wanted to be enfranchised. They wanted war.

Closeted with the delegation in the Senaculum, a little building adjacent to the temple of Concord, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus attempted to deal with this piece of blatant impudence. A loyal supporter of Drusus, after the death of Drusus he saw no point in continuing to press for a general enfranchisement; he liked being alive.

“You may tell your masters that nothing can be negotiated until full reparation for Asculum Picentum has been made,” said Scaurus disdainfully. “The Senate will not see you.”

“Asculum Picentum is simply steely evidence of how strongly all Italy feels,” said the leader of the delegation, Publius Vettius Scato of the Marsi. “It is not in our power to demand anything of Asculum Picentum, anyway. That decision belongs to the Picentes.”

“That decision,” said Scaurus harshly, “belongs to Rome.”

“We ask again that the Senate see us,” said Scato.

“The Senate will not see you,” said Scaurus, adamant.

Whereupon the twenty men turned to leave, none looking at all downcast, Scaurus noted. Last to go, Scato slipped a rolled document into Scaurus’s hand. “Please take this, Marcus Aemilius, on behalf of the Marsi,” he said.

Scaurus didn’t open the document until he got home, when his scribe, to whom he had entrusted it, gave it back to him. Pulling it apart with some annoyance because he had forgotten it, he began to decipher its contents with growing amazement.

At dawn he summoned a meeting of the Senate, poorly attended because of the short notice; as usual, Philippus and Caepio did not bother to turn up. But Sextus Caesar did, as did the incoming consuls and praetors, all the outgoing tribunes of the plebs and most of the incoming ones—with the conspicuous exception of Varius. The consulars were present; counting heads, Sextus Caesar saw in some relief that he did have a quorum after all.

“I have here,” said Scaurus Princeps Senatus, “a document signed by three men of the Marsi—Quintus Poppaedius Silo, who calls himself consul—Publius Vettius Scato, who calls himself praetor—and Lucius Fraucus, who calls himself councillor. I shall read it out to you.

“To the Senate and People of Rome. We, the elected representatives of the Marsic nation, do hereby on behalf of our people declare that we withdraw from our Allied status with Rome. That we will not pay to Rome any taxes, tithes, duties, or dues which may be demanded of us. That we will not contribute troops to Rome. That we will take back from Rome the town of Alba Fucentia and all its lands. Please regard this as a declaration of war.”

The House hummed; Gaius Marius extended his hand for the document, and Scaurus gave it to him. Slowly it went round the ranks of those present, until everyone had seen for himself that it was both genuine and unequivocal.

“It appears that we have a war on our hands,” said Marius.

“With the Marsi?” asked Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus. “I know when I spoke to Silo outside the Colline Gate he said it would be war—but the Marsi couldn’t defeat us! They don’t have enough people to go to war against Rome! Those two legions he had with him would be about as many as the Marsi could scrape up.”

“It does seem peculiar,” admitted Scaurus.

“Unless,” said Sextus Caesar, “there are other Italian nations involved as well.”

But that no one would believe, including Marius. The meeting dissolved without any conclusion being reached, save that it would be prudent to keep a closer eye on Italy—only not with another pair of itinerant praetors! Servius Sulpicius Galba, the praetor deputed to investigate “the Italian question” to the south of Rome, had written to say he was on his way back. When he arrived, the House thought it would be in better case to decide what ought to be done. War with Italy? Perhaps so. But not yet.

“I know that when Marcus Livius was alive, I believed with fervor that war with Italy was just around the corner,” said Marius to Scaurus as the meeting broke up, “but now that he’s gone, I cannot credit it! And I have been asking myself if it was just that way he had. Now—I don’t honestly know. Are the Marsi in this alone? Surely they must be! And yet—I never thought of Quintus Poppaedius Silo as a fool.”

“I echo everything you have just said, Gaius Marius,” Scaurus agreed. “Oh, why didn’t I read that paper while Scato was still inside Rome? The gods are toying with us, I feel it in my bones.”

Of course the time of year militated against anything outside of Rome occupying senatorial minds, no matter how serious or how puzzling; no one wanted to make decisions when one pair of consuls was almost at the end of their term, and the incoming pair was still feeling their way anent House alliances.

Thus it was that internal affairs preoccupied both Senate and Forum during December; the most trivial incidents, because close at hand and essentially Roman, outweighed the Marsic declaration of war easily. Among the more trivial incidents was the vacant priesthood of Marcus Livius Drusus. Even after so many years, Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus still felt he should have been given the place given to Drusus; so he was very quick to put up the name of his elder son, Gnaeus, recently engaged to Cornelia Cinna, the oldest daughter of the patrician Lucius Cornelius Cinna. The pontificate of course belonged to a plebeian, as Drusus had been a plebeian. By the time the nominations were all in, the list of candidates read like a plebeian honor roll. It included Metellus Pius the Piglet, another man existing in a smoldering resentment, as his father’s place had gone by election to Gaius Aurelius Cotta. Then at the last moment Scaurus Princeps Senatus stunned everyone by putting up a patrician name—Mamercus Aemilius Lepidus Livianus, the brother of Drusus.

“It’s not legal on two counts!” snarled Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus. “Number one, he’s a patrician. Number two, he’s an Aemilius, and you’re already a pontifex, Marcus Aemilius, which means another Aemilius can’t belong.”

“Rubbish!” said Scaurus roundly. “I’m not nominating him as an adopted Aemilius, but as the blood brother of the dead priest. He’s a Livius Drusus, and I say he must be nominated.”

The College of Pontifices finally agreed that in this situation Mamercus should be accounted a Livius Drusus, and permitted his name to be added to the list of candidates. How fond of Drusus the electors had become was soon obvious; Mamercus carried all seventeen tribes and succeeded to the priesthood of his brother.

More serious—or so it seemed at the time—was the conduct of Quintus Varius Severus Hybrida Sucronensis. When the new College of Tribunes of the Plebs entered office on the tenth day of December, Quintus Varius immediately moved that a law be placed on the tablets to treason-try every man who had been known to support the general enfranchisement of Italy. All nine of his colleagues promptly vetoed even the discussion of such an act. But Varius took his example from Saturninus, filled the Comitia with louts and hirelings, and succeeded in intimidating the rest of the college into withdrawing their vetos. He also succeeded in intimidating all other opposition, with the result that the New Year saw the establishment of a special treason court all of Rome began to call the Varian Commission, empowered to try only those men who had supported enfranchisement of the Italians. Its terms of reference were so vague and flexible that almost anyone could find himself arraigned, its jury composed purely of knights.

“He’ll use it to pursue his own enemies—and the enemies of Philippus and Caepio,” said Scaurus Princeps Senatus, who made no secret of his opinion. “Wait and see! This is the most disgraceful piece of legislation ever foisted upon us!”

That Scaurus was right Varius demonstrated in the selection of his first victim, the stiff, formal, ultra-conservative praetor of five years earlier, Lucius Aurelius Cotta. Half brother of Aurelia on her father’s side. Never an ardent proponent of enfranchisement, Cotta had nonetheless swung round to it—along with many others in the Senate—during those days when Drusus had fought so strenuously in the House; one of the most cogent reasons behind Cotta’s change of heart was his detestation of Philippus and Caepio. He then made the mistake of cutting Quintus Varius dead.

This oldest Cotta of his generation was an excellent choice for the Varian Commission’s first victim; not as high as the consulars, nor as low as the pedarii. If Varius gained a conviction, his court would become an instrument of terror for the Senate. The first day’s proceedings showed Lucius Cotta all too clearly what his fate was going to be, for the jury impaneled was stuffed with haters of the Senate, and scant notice of the defense’s jury challenges was taken by the court president, the enormously powerful knight-plutocrat Titus Pomponius.

“My father is wrong,” said young Titus Pomponius, standing in the crowd which had gathered to watch the Varian Commission swing into action.

His auditor was another member of Scaevola the Augur’s little band of legal acolytes, Marcus Tullius Cicero, four years his junior in age, forty years his senior in intellect—if not in common sense.

“How do you mean?” asked Cicero, who had gravitated to young Titus Pomponius after the death of Sulla’s son. That had been the first real tragedy of Cicero’s life; even so many months later, he still found himself mourning and missing his dear dead friend.

“This obsession my father has to get into the Senate,” said young Titus Pomponius gloomily. “It eats at him, Marcus Tullius! Not one thing does he do that isn’t directed toward the Senate. Including snapping up Quintus Varius’s wheedling bait to be president of this court. Of course the invalidation of Marcus Livius Drusus’s laws destroyed his certain selection for the Senate, and Quintus Varius has used that to lure him into this. He’s been promised that if he does as he’s told, he’ll get his Senate membership as soon as the new censors are elected.”

“But your father’s in business,” objected Cicero. “He’d have to give it all up except for owning land if he became a senator.”

“Oh, don’t worry, he would!” said young Titus Pomponius, voice bitter. “Here am I, not quite twenty years old, already doing most of the work in the firm—and scant thanks I get, I can tell you! He’s actually ashamed of being in business!”

“What has all this got to do with your father’s being wrong?” asked Cicero.

“Everything, you dunce!” said young Titus. “He wants to get into the Senate! But he’s wrong to want that. He’s a knight, and one of Rome’s ten most important knights, at that. I can see nothing wrong with being one of Rome’s ten most important knights. He has the Public Horse—which he will pass on to me—everyone asks his advice, he’s a great power in the Comitia, and a consultant to the tribunes of the Treasury. Yet what does he want? To be a senator! To be one of those fools in the back row who never even get a chance to speak, let alone speak well!”

“You mean he’s a social climber,” said Cicero. “Well, I can see nothing wrong with that. So am I.”

“My father is already socially the best, Marcus Tullius! By birth and by wealth. The Pomponii are very closely related right down the generations to the Caecilii of the Pilius branch, and you can’t do better than that without being a patrician.” Born to the highest knightly nobility, young Titus went on without realizing how his words would hurt: he said, “I can understand your being a social climber, Marcus Tullius. When you get into the Senate you’ll be a New Man, and if you attain the consulship, you’ll ennoble your family. Which means you’ll have to cultivate every famous man you possibly can, plebeian and patrician. Whereas my father’s becoming a pedarius senator would actually be a backward step.”