The First Man in Rome (126 page)

"Open the doors," said Marius to his lictors.

Inside the early sun threw rays and beams through a pall of slowly settling dust and lit up the lichen-grey heaps of tiles lying everywhere, their broken edges and more sheltered undersides a rich rust-red, almost the color of blood. Fifteen bodies lay squeezed into the smallest huddles or splayed with arms akimbo and legs twisted, half-buried by shattered tiles.

"You and I, Princeps Senatus," said Marius. "No one else."

Together they entered the hall and picked their way from one body to the next, looking for signs of life. Saturninus had been struck so quickly and effectively that he hadn't tried to hunch himself up protectively; his face was hidden below a carapace of tiles, and when revealed looked sightlessly into the sky, his black lashes caked with tile dust and plaster dust. Scaurus bent to close the eyes, and winced fastidiously; so much dust lay upon the drying eyeballs that the lids refused to come down. Lucius Equitius had fared worst. Hardly an inch of him was not bruised or cut or swollen from a tile, and it took Marius and Scaurus many moments to toss aside the heap burying him. Saufeius— who had run into a corner—had died from a shard which apparently struck the floor and bounced up to lodge itself like a huge fat spearhead in the side of his neck; his head was almost severed. And Titus Labienus had taken the long edge of an unfractured tile in the small of his back, gone down without feeling anything below the colossal break in his spine.

Marius and Scaurus conferred.

"What am I to do with those idiots out there?" Marius asked.

"What
can
you do?"

The right half of Marius's upper lip lifted. "Oh, come, Princeps Senatus! Take some of the burden upon your scraggy old carcass! You're not going to skip away from any of this, so much do I promise. Either back me—or be prepared for a fight that will leave everything done here today looking like the women's Bona Dea festival!"

"All right, all right!" said Scaurus irritably. "I didn't mean I wouldn't back you, you literal-minded rustic! All I meant was what I said—what
can
you do?"

"Under the powers invested in me by the
Senatus Consultum
I can do whatever I like, from arresting every last one of that brave little band outside, to sending them home without so much as a verbal chastisement. Which do you consider expedient?"

"The expedient thing is to send them all home. The proper thing is to arrest them and charge them with the murder of fellow Romans. Since the prisoners hadn't stood trial, they were still Roman citizens when they met their deaths."

Marius cocked his only mobile eyebrow. "So which course shall I take, Princeps Senatus? The expedient one—or the proper one?''

Scaurus shrugged. "The expedient one, Gaius Marius. You know that as well as I do. If you take the proper one, you'll drive a wedge so deeply into Rome's tree that the whole world might fall along with it."

They walked out into the open air and stood together at the top of the Senate steps, looking down into the faces of the people in the immediate vicinity; beyond these scant hundreds, the Forum Romanum was empty, clean, dreamy in the morning sun.

"I hereby proclaim a general amnesty!" cried Gaius Marius at the top of his voice. "Go home, young men," he said to the raiding party, "you are indemnified along with everyone else." He turned to the main body of his listeners.

"Where are the tribunes of the plebs? Here? Good! Call your meeting, there is no crowd. The first business of the day will be the election of two more tribunes of the plebs. Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Lucius Equitius are dead. Chief lictor, send for some of your fellows and the public slaves, and clear up the mess inside the Curia Hostilia. Give the bodies to their families for honorable burial, for they had not been tried for their crimes, and are therefore still Roman citizens of good standing."

He walked down the steps and crossed to the rostra, for he was senior consul and supervisor of the ceremonies which would inaugurate the new tribunes; had he been a patrician, his junior colleague would have seen to it, which was why one at least of the consuls had to be a plebeian, to have access to the
concilium plebis.

And then it happened, perhaps because the gossip grapevine was in its usual splendid working order, and the word had sparkled up and down its tendrils with the speed of sunbeams. The Forum began to fill with people, thousands upon thousands of them hurrying from Esquiline, Caelian, Viminal, Quirinal, Subura, Palatine, Aventine, Oppian. The same crowd, Gaius Marius saw at once, which had jammed into the Forum during the elections of the tribunes of the plebs.

And, with the trouble largely over and a feeling of peace within his heart, he looked out into that ocean of faces and saw what Lucius Appuleius Saturninus had seen: a source of power as yet untapped, innocent of the guile experience and education brought, ready to believe some passionately eloquent demagogue's self-seeking
kharisma
and put themselves under a different master. Not for me, thought Gaius Marius; to be the First Man in Rome at the whim of the gullible is no victory. I have enjoyed the status of First Man in Rome the old way, the hard way, battling the prejudices and monstrosities of the
cursus honorum.

But, Gaius Marius concluded his thoughts gleefully, I shall make one last gesture to show Scaurus Princeps Senatus, Catulus Caesar, Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, and the rest of the
boni
that if I
had
chosen Saturninus's way, they'd be dead inside the Curia Hostilia all covered in tiles, and I'd be running Rome single-handed. For I am to Saturninus what Jupiter is to Cupid.

He stepped to that edge of the rostra which faced the lower Forum rather than the well of the Comitia, and held out his arms in a gesture which seemed to embrace the crowd, draw it to him as a father beckons his children. "People of Rome, go back to your houses!" he thundered. "The crisis is past. Rome is safe. And I, Gaius Marius, have great pleasure in announcing to you that a fleet of grain ships arrived in Ostia harbor yesterday. The barges will be coming upstream all day today, and by tomorrow there will be grain available from the State granaries of the Aventine at one sestertius the
modius,
the price which Lucius Appuleius Saturninus's grain law laid down. However, Lucius Appuleius is dead, and his law invalid. It is I, Gaius Marius, consul of Rome, who gives to you your grain! The special price will continue until I step down from office in nineteen days' time. After that, it is up to the new magistrates to decide what price you will pay. The one sestertius I shall charge you is my parting gift to you, Quirites! For I love you, and I have fought for you, and I have won for you. Never, never forget it!
Long
—
live
—
Rome!"

And down from the rostra he stepped amid a wave of cheers, his arms above his head, that fierce twisted grin a fitting farewell, with its good side and its bad side.

Catulus Caesar stood rooted to the spot. "Did you hear that?" he gasped to Scaurus. "He just gave away nineteen days of grain—
in his name!
At a cost to the Treasury of thousands of talents! How dare he!"

"Are you going to get up on the rostra and contradict him, Quintus Lutatius?" asked Sulla, grinning. "With all your loyal young Good Men standing there getting off free?"

"Damn him!"
Catulus Caesar was almost weeping.

Scaurus broke into peals of laughter. "He did it to us again, Quintus Lutatius!" he said when he was able. "Oh, what an earthshaker that man is! He stuck it to us, and he's left us to pay the bill! I loathe him—but by all the gods, I do love him too!'' And away he went into another paroxysm.

"There are times, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, when I do not even begin to understand you!" Catulus Caesar said, and stalked off in his best camel manner.

"Whereas I, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, understand you all too well,'' said Sulla, laughing even harder than Scaurus.

When Glaucia killed himself with his sword and Marius extended the amnesty to Gaius Claudius and his followers, Rome breathed more easily; the Forum strife might be presumed to be over. But that was not so. The young Brothers Luculli brought Gaius Servilius Augur to trial in the treason court, and violence broke out afresh. Senatorial feelings ran high because the case split the Good Men; Catulus Caesar and Scaurus Princeps Senatus and their followers were firmly aligned with the Luculli, whereas Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus and Crassus Orator were committed by ties of patronage and friendship to Servilius the Augur.

The unprecedented crowds which had filled the Forum Romanum during the troubles with Saturninus had disappeared, but the habitual Forum frequenters turned out in force to witness this trial, attracted by the youth and pathos of the two Luculli—who were fully aware of this, and determined to use it in every way they could. Varro Lucullus, the younger brother, had donned his toga of manhood only days before the trial began; neither he nor the eighteen-year-old Lucius Lucullus yet needed to shave. Their agents, cunningly placed among the crowd, whispered that these two poor lads had just received the news that their exiled father was dead—and that the long-ennobled family Licinius Lucullus now had only these two poor lads to defend its honor, its
dignitas.

Composed of knights, the jury had decided ahead of time that it was going to side with Servilius the Augur, who was a knight elevated to the Senate by his patron Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus. Even when this jury was being chosen, violence had played its part; the hired ex-gladiators of Servilius the Augur tried to prevent the trial's going on. But the handy little band of young nobles run by Caepio Junior and Metellus Pius Piglet had driven the bully-boys from the scene, killing one as it did so. The jury understood this message, and resigned itself to listening to the Brothers Luculli with more sympathy than it had originally intended.

"They'll convict the Augur," said Marius to Sulla as they stood off to one side, watching and listening keenly.

"They will indeed," said Sulla, who was fascinated by Lucius Lucullus, the older boy. "Brilliant!" he exclaimed when young Lucullus finished his speech. “I
like
him, Gaius Marius!"

But Marius was unimpressed. "He's as haughty and pokered up as his father was."

"You're known to support the Augur," said Sulla stiffly.

That shaft went wide; Marius just grinned. "I would support a Tingitanian ape if it made life difficult for the Good Men around our absent Piggle-wiggle, Lucius Cornelius."

"Servilius the Augur
is
a Tingitanian ape," said Sulla.

"I'm inclined to agree. He's going to lose."

A prediction borne out when the jury (eyeing Caepio Junior's band of young nobles) returned a unanimous verdict of
DAMNO,
even after being moved to tears by the impassioned defense speeches of Crassus Orator and Mucius Scaevola.

Not surprisingly, the trial ended in a brawl which Marius and Sulla viewed from a suitably aloof distance, and with huge enjoyment from the moment when Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus punched an intolerably jubilant Catulus Caesar on the mouth.

"Pollux and Lynceus!" said Marius, delighted when the pair settled down to engage in serious fisticuffs. "Oh, go it, Quintus Lutatius Pollux!" he roared.

"Not a bad classical allusion, given that the Ahenobarbi all swear it was Pollux put the red in their inky beards," said Sulla when a punch properly directed by Catulus Caesar smeared Ahenobarbus's whole face with blood.

"And hopefully," said Marius, turning away as soon as the brawl ended in defeat for Ahenobarbus, "that brings events in the Forum to an end for this hideous year."

"Oh, I don't know, Gaius Marius. We've still to endure the consular elections."

"They're not held in the Forum, one mercy."

Two days later Marcus Antonius held his triumph, and two days after that he was elected senior consul for the coming year; his colleague in the consulship was to be none other than Aulus Postumius Albinus, whose invasion of Numidia had, ten years ago, precipitated the war against Jugurtha.

"The electors are
complete
asses!" said Marius to Sulla with some passion. "They've just elected as junior consul one of the best examples I know of ambition allied to no talent of any kind! Tchah! Their memories are as short as their turds!"

"Well, they say constipation causes mental dullness," said Sulla, grinning despite the emergence of a new fear. He was hoping to run for praetor in the next year's elections, but had today sensed a mood in the electors of the Centuriate Assembly that boded ill for Marian candidates in future. Yet how do I dissociate myself from this man who has been so good to me? he asked himself unhappily.

"Luckily, I predict it's going to be a mentally dull year, and Aulus Albinus won't be given a chance to ruin things," Marius went on, unaware of Sulla's thoughts. "For the first time in a long time, Rome has no enemies worth a mention. We can rest. And Rome can rest."

Sulla made an effort, swung his mind away from a praetorship he knew was going to prove elusive. "What about the prophecy?" he asked abruptly. "Martha distinctly said you'd be consul of Rome seven times."

"I
will
be consul seven times, Lucius Cornelius."

"You believe that."

"I do."

Sulla sighed. "I'd be happy to reach praetor."

A facial hemiparesis enabled its sufferer to blow the most wonderfully derisive noises; Marius blew one now. "Rubbish!" he said vigorously. "You are
consul
material, Lucius Cornelius. In fact, one day you'll be the First Man in Rome."

"I thank you for your faith in me, Gaius Marius." Sulla turned a smile upon Marius almost as twisted as Marius's were these days. "Still, considering the difference in our ages, I won't be vying with
you
for the title," he said.

Marius laughed. "What a battle of the Titans that would be! No danger of it," he said with absolute certainty.