The First Man in Rome (121 page)

Lucius Decumius was right. At sunrise Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla walked up onto the Arx of the Capitol and stood leaning on the low wall barring the top of the Lautumiae cliff to take in the sight of the whole Forum Romanum spread below. As far as they could see was that ocean of people, densely packed from the Clivus Capitolinus to the Velia. It was orderly, somber, shot with menace, breathtaking.

"Why?"
asked Marius.

"According to Lucius Decumius, they're here to make their presence felt. The Comitia will be in session to elect the new tribunes of the plebs, and they've heard that Saturninus is going to stand, and they think he's their best hope for full bellies. The famine has only just begun, Gaius Marius. And they don't want a famine," said Sulla, voice even.

"But they can't influence the outcome of a tribal election, any more than they can elections in the Centuries! Almost all of them will belong to the four city tribes."

"True. And there won't be many voters from the thirty-one rural tribes apart from those who live in Rome," said Sulla. "There's no holiday atmosphere today to tempt the rural voters. So a handful of what's below will actually vote. They know that. They're not here to vote. They're just here to make us aware they're here."

"Saturninus's idea?" asked Marius.

"No. His crowd is the one you saw on the Kalends, and every day since. The shitters and pissers, I call them. Just rabble. Denizens of crossroads colleges, ex-gladiators, thieves and malcontents, gullible shopkeepers bleeding from the lack of money, freedmen bored with groveling to their ex-masters, and many who think there might be a denarius or two to be made out of keeping Lucius Appuleius a tribune of the plebs."

"They're actually more than that," said Marius. "They're a devoted following for the first man ever to stand on the rostra and take them seriously.'' He shifted his weight onto his paretic left foot. “But these people here today don't belong to Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. They don't belong to anyone. Ye gods, there weren't more Cimbri on the field at Vercellae than I see here! And I don't have an army. All I have is a purple-bordered toga. A sobering thought."

"Indeed it is," said Sulla.

"Though, I don't know. . . . Maybe my purple-bordered toga is all the army I need. All of a sudden, Lucius Cornelius, I'm looking at Rome in a different light than ever before. Today they've brought themselves down there to show themselves to us. But every day they're inside Rome, going about whatever is their business. Within an hour they could be down there showing themselves to us again. And we believe we govern them?"

"We do, Gaius Marius. They can't govern themselves. They put themselves in our keeping. But Gaius Gracchus gave them cheap bread to eat, and the aediles give them wonderful games to watch. Now Saturninus comes along and promises them cheap bread in the midst of a famine. He can't keep his promise, and they're beginning to suspect he can't. Which is really why they've come to show themselves to him during his elections," said Sulla.

Marius had found his metaphor. "They're a gigantic yet very good-natured bull. When he comes to meet you because you have a bucket in your hand, all he's interested in is the food he knows you've got in the bucket. But when he discovers the bucket is empty, he doesn't turn in terrible rage to gore you. He just assumes you've hidden his food somewhere on your person, and crushes you to death looking for it without even noticing he's turned you into pulp beneath his feet."

"Saturninus is carrying an empty bucket," said Sulla.

“Precisely,'' said Marius, and turned away from the wall. "Come, Lucius Cornelius, let's take the bull by his horns."

"And hope," said Sulla, grinning, "that he doesn't have any hay on them after all!"

No one in the gargantuan crowd made it difficult for the senators and politically minded citizens who normally always cast their votes in the Comitia to get through; while Marius mounted the rostra, Sulla went to stand on the Senate steps with the rest of the patrician senators. The actual voters of the Plebeian Assembly that day found themselves an island in the ocean of fairly silent onlookers—and a sunken island at that, the rostra like a flat-topped rock standing above the well of the Comitia and the top surface of the ocean. Of course Saturninus's thousands of rabble had been expected, which had led many of the senators and normal voters to secret knives or clubs beneath their togas, especially Caepio Junior's little band of conservative young
boni;
but here was no Saturninian rabble. Here was all of lowly Rome in protest. Knives and clubs were suddenly felt to be a mistake.

One by one the twenty candidates standing for election as tribunes of the plebs declared themselves, while Marius stood by watchfully. First to do so was the presiding tribune, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. And the whole vast crowd began to cheer him deafeningly, a reception which clearly amazed him, Marius discovered, shifting to where he could keep his eyes on Saturninus's face. Saturninus was thinking, and transparently: what a following was this for one man! What might he not be able to do with three hundred thousand Roman lowly at his back? Who would ever have the courage to keep him out of the tribunate of the plebs when this monster cheered its approval?

Those who followed Saturninus in declaring their candidacies were greeted with indifferent silence; Publius Furius, Quintus Pompeius Rufus of the Picenum Pompeys, Sextus Titius whose origins were Samnite, and the red-haired, grey-eyed, extremely aristocratic-looking Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus, grandson of the Tusculan peasant Cato the Censor and great-grandson of a Celtic slave.

Last of all appeared none other than Lucius Equitius, the self-styled bastard son of Tiberius Gracchus whom Metellus Numidicus when censor had tried to exclude from the rolls of the
Ordo Equester.
The crowd began to cheer again, great billows of wildly enthusiastic sound; here stood a relic of the beloved Tiberius Gracchus. And Marius discovered how accurate his metaphor of the gigantic gentle bull had been, for the crowd began to move toward Lucius Equitius elevated on the rock of the rostra, utterly oblivious of its power. Its inexorable tidal swell crushed those in the Comitia and its environs closer and closer together. Little waves of panic began among these intending voters as they experienced the suffocating sense of helpless terror all men feel who find themselves at the center of a force they cannot resist.

While everyone else stood paralyzed, the paralyzed Gaius Marius stepped forward quickly and held out his hands palms facing-out, miming a gesture which commanded HALT HALT HALT! The crowd halted immediately, the pressure decreased a little, and now the cheers were for Gaius Marius, the First Man in Rome, the Third Founder of Rome, the Conqueror of the Germans.

"Quickly, you fool!" he snapped at Saturninus, who stood apparently rapt, entranced by the noise emanating from those cheering throats. "Say you heard thunder— anything to dismiss the meeting! If we don't get our voters out of the Comitia, the crowd will kill them by sheer weight of numbers!'' Then he had the heralds sound their trumpets, and in the sudden silence he lifted his hands again. "Thunder!" he shouted. "The voting will take place tomorrow! Go home, people of Rome! Go home, go home!"

And the crowd went home.

Luckily most of the senators had sought shelter inside their own Curia, where Marius followed as soon as he could make his way. Saturninus, he noted, had descended from the rostra and was walking fearlessly into the maw of the crowd, smiling and holding out his arms like one of those peculiar Pisidian mystics who believed in the laying-on of hands. And Glaucia the urban praetor? He had ascended the rostra, and stood observing Saturninus among the crowd, the broadest of smiles upon his fair face.

The faces turned to Marius when he entered the Curia were white rather than fair, drawn rather than smiling.

"And what a vat of pickles is this!" said Scaurus Princeps Senatus, unbowed as usual, but definitely a little daunted.

Marius looked at the clusters of Conscript Fathers and said, very firmly, "Go home, please! The crowd won't hurt you, but slip up the Argiletum, even if you're heading for the Palatine. If all you have to complain about is a very long walk home, you're doing well. Now go! Go!"

Those he wanted to stay he tapped on the shoulder; just Sulla, Scaurus, Metellus Caprarius the censor, Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, Crassus Orator, and Crassus's cousin Scaevola, who were the curule aediles. Sulla, he noticed with interest, went up to Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet, murmured something to them, and gave them what looked suspiciously like affectionate pats on the shoulder as they left the building. I must find out what's going on, said Marius to himself, but later. When I have the time. If I ever do, judging by this mess.

"Well, today we've seen something none of us has ever seen before," he began. "Frightening, isn't it?"

"I don't think they mean any harm," said Sulla.

"Nor do I," said Marius. "But they're still the gigantic bull who doesn't know his own strength." He beckoned to his chief scribe. "Find someone to run up the Forum, will you? I want the president of the College of Lictors here at once."

"What do you suggest we do?" asked Scaurus. "Postpone the plebeian elections?"

"No, we may as well get them over and done with," Marius said positively. "At the moment our crowd-bull is a docile beast, but who knows how angry he might become as the famine worsens? Let's not wait until he has to have hay wrapped round his horns to signify he gores, because it will be one of our chests he plugs if we do wait. I've sent for the head lictor because I think our bull will be bluffed tomorrow by a fence he could easily walk through. I'll have the public slaves work all night to set up a harmless-looking barricade all the way around the well of the Comitia and the ground between the Comitia and the Senate steps—just the usual sort of thing we erect in the Forum to fence off the area of combat from the spectators during funeral games, because they'll know the look of that, and not see it as a manifestation of fear on our part. Then I'll put every lictor Rome possesses on the inside of the barricade—all in crimson tunics, not togate, but unarmed except for staves. Whatever we do, we mustn't give our bull the dangerous idea that he's bigger and stronger than we are—bulls can think, you know! And tomorrow we hold the tribunician elections—I don't care if there are only thirty-five men there to vote. Which means all of you will go visiting on your ways home today, and command the senators in your vicinity to turn up ready to vote tomorrow. That way, we'll be sure to have at least one member of each of the tribes. It may be a skinny vote, but a vote it will be nonetheless. Understood, everyone?"

"Understood," said Scaurus.

"Where was Quintus Lutatius today?" asked Sulla of Scaurus.

"Ill, I believe," said Scaurus. "It would be genuine—he doesn't lack courage."

Marius looked at Metellus Caprarius the censor. "You, Gaius Caecilius, have the worst job tomorrow," he said, "for when Equitius declares himself a candidate, I'm going to have to ask you if you will allow him to stand. How will you say?"

Caprarius didn't hesitate. "I'll say no, Gaius Marius. A man who was a slave, to become a tribune of the plebs? It's unthinkable."

"All right, that's all, thank you," Marius said. "Be on your way, and get all our quivering fellow members here tomorrow. Lucius Cornelius, stay. I'm putting you in charge of the lictors, so you'd better be here when their head man comes."

*     *     *

The crowd was back in the Forum at dawn, to find the well of the Comitia cordoned off by the simple portable post-and-rope fencing they saw every time the Forum became the site of someone's gladiatorial funeral games; a crimson-tunicked lictor holding a long thick stave was positioned every few feet on the inside of the barricade's perimeter. Nothing nasty in that. And when Gaius Marius stepped forward and shouted his explanation, that he wanted no one inadvertently crushed, he was cheered as loudly as on the previous day. What the crowd couldn't see was the group inside the Curia Hostilia, positioned there well before dawn by Sulla: his fifty young members of the First Class, all clad in cuirasses and helmets, swords and daggers belted on, and carrying shields. An excited Caepio Junior was only their deputy leader, however, for Sulla was in command himself.

"We move only if I say we move," Sulla said, "and I mean it. If anyone moves
without
an order from me, I'll kill him."

On the rostra everyone was set to go; in the well of the Comitia a surprisingly large number of regular voters clustered along with perhaps half the Senate, while the patrician senators stood as always on the Senate steps. Among them was Catulus Caesar, looking ill enough to have been provided with a chair; also among them was the censor Caprarius, another whose plebeian status should have meant he went into the Comitia, but who wanted to be where everyone could see him.

When Saturninus declared his candidacy once more, the crowd cheered him hysterically; clearly his laying-on-of-hands visit on the previous day had worked wonders. As before, the rest of the candidates were greeted with silence. Until in last place came Lucius Equitius.

Marius swung to face the Senate steps, and lifted his one mobile eyebrow in a mute question to Metellus Caprarius; and Metellus Caprarius shook his head emphatically. To have spoken the question was impossible, for the crowd went on cheering Lucius Equitius as if it never intended to stop.

The heralds sounded their trumpets, Marius stepped forward, silence fell. "This man, Lucius Equitius, is not eligible for election as a tribune of the plebs!" he cried as loudly as he could. "There is an ambiguity about his citizen status which the censor must clarify before Lucius Equitius can stand for any public office attached to the Senate and People of Rome!"

Saturninus brushed past Marius and stood on the very edge of the rostra. "I deny any irregularity!"

"I declare on behalf of the censor that an irregularity does exist," said Marius, unmoved.