The First Man in Rome (137 page)

Marcomanni
One of the three peoples who tacked themselves on to the German migration of 120 B.C. The Marcomanni were Celts closely allied to the Boii of Boiohaemum, and originally lived around the headwaters of the river Albis (modern Czechoslovakia). They joined the Cimbri and Teutones in about the seventh year of the trek, 113 B.C.

Marsi
One of the most important Italian peoples. The Marsi lived surrounding the Fucine Lake, which belonged to them; they extended into the mountains of the high Apennines, and controlled the passes on the western—that is, the Roman—side. Their history indicates that they were always loyal to. Rome, and did not side either with the Samnites or with Hannibal. They were extremely martial, affluent, and populous, and adopted Latin as their language fairly early. Their chief town was Marruvium; Alba Fucens, a larger and more important town, was a Latin Rights colony seeded on Marsic territory by Rome. The Marsi worshiped snakes, and were famous snake charmers.

Martha
The Syrian prophetess who predicted that Gaius Marius would be consul of Rome seven times before he had been consul once. She extracted a promise from Marius that he would bring her to Rome, where she lived as his guest in his house until she died, and regularly scandalized the city's inhabitants by appearing in a purple litter. It is my own novelist's license which added the second part of her prophecy, to the effect that a nephew of Marius's wife Julia would be a greater Roman than he; I needed to do this to make events in a later book more logical and reasonable.

Massilia
Modern Marseilles. This superb seaport in southern Gaul-across-the-Alps not far from the mouth of the Rhodanus River was founded as a Greek colony in about 600 B.C. The Massiliotes, as its inhabitants were called, soon made cultural and trading inroads into Gaul, and were influential in Hellenizing those Gallic tribes which lived along their trade routes; this was especially true of the Volcae Tectosages of Tolosa, the Ligures of Nicaea and Portus Herculis Monoeci (modern Nice and Monaco), and some of the peoples who lived along the lower Rhodanus River. Massiliotes introduced the grapevine and the olive tree to Gaul. The city's inhabitants were quick to see the potential of Rome, and allied Massilia to Rome during the Second Punic War. It was Massiliote complaints about the depredations of the headhunting Salluvii of western Liguria which led to the famous Gallic expedition of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus in 122 B.C., and the founding of Transalpine Gaul (Gaul-across-the-Alps).

Mauretania
Modern Morocco. In Gaius Marius's day, far western North Africa. The boundary between Numidia and Mauretania was the Muluchath River, about 600 miles (960 km) west of Cirta. The inhabitants of Mauretania were called Moors; they were Berbers racially. The capital was Tingis (modern Tangier). There were kings; during the time of Gaius Marius's war against Jugurtha, the King's name was Bocchus.

Mediolanum   
Modern Milan.

mentula, mentulae
(pl.)
The great Latin obscenity for the penis.

mentulam caco
"I shit on your prick!"

merda
A Latin obscenity referring more to the droppings of animals than to human excrement.
Metella Calva
The sister of Lucius Caecilius Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus and Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus. She was married to Lucius Licinius Lucullus, and was the mother of the Brothers Luculli. She was one of the very few women of her time to earn a mention in the ancient sources; she had a lifelong penchant for choosing low-class lovers, and pursued her affairs in scandalous manner.

Middle Sea
My name for the Mediterranean Sea, which in the time of Gaius Marius had not yet acquired its later Latin name—"Our Sea." Properly, it was called Mare Internum.

Military Man
The
vir militaris.
He was a man whose whole career revolved around the army, and who continued to serve as a senior officer in the army beyond his obligatory number of campaigns. Such men entered the political arena relying upon their military history to recommend them to the electors; many of them never bothered to embark upon a political career at all, but if a
vir militaris
aspired to command an army, he had to attain the rank of praetor. Gaius Marius, Quintus Sertorius, Titus Didius, Gaius Pomptinus, and Publius Ventidius were all Military Men; but Gaius Julius Caesar the Dictator, the greatest military man of them all, was never a Military Man.

mime, Mimus
First a Greek theatrical form, the mime gathered its most enthusiastic followers in Rome, and kept increasing in popularity from the third century B.C. Where the actors in comedy and tragedy wore masks, and adhered to the strictly accented and metered script of the playwright, the actors in mime wore no masks, and evolved a technique closer to what we today might call ad-libbing. The repertoire of plots and situations was a stock one, but the individual performances did not contain formal memorized dialogue. Mime was considered vulgar, bawdy, poor theater, and much else by those who loved the proper theater of tragedy and comedy, but its snowballing popularity at the Roman games slowly banished formal drama to a poor second place. There can be no doubt that mime was very funny indeed. It seems to have survived in the stock characters of the commedia dell'arte—Harlequin's costume of patches and the jester's costume of patches closely resemble the
centunculus
of the mimetic fool, for example.

minim
A bright earth-red pigment with which the triumphing general painted his face, it would seem so that he looked like the terracotta-faced statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

Minoan
Not
a word the Romans would have used! It is the modern term (possibly coined by Sir Arthur Evans) to describe the civilization of Crete and Greece which existed during the second millennium B.C. I placed the term in Sulla's mouth during a conversation for the sake of clarity and convenience; for while the Romans knew of the civilization, what they called it, we do not know.
Mithridates  
The traditional name of the kings of Pontus. There were six kings of Pontus surnamed Mithridates, the last of whom was by far the greatest. The royal house of the Mithridatidae (to give it its proper name) claimed descent from the old Iranian kings, particularly from Darius the Great, but the features of the men displayed on truly wonderful coins of Pontus are Germano-Thracian.

modius, modii
(pl.)   
The measure of grain in Rome. One
modius
weighed 13 pounds (6 kg).
Moor  
The word for a Berber of Mauretania.

Mons Genava Pass  
What name the Romans actually gave to the modern Montgenevre Pass through the Alps from the headwaters of the Dora Riparia in Italy to the headwaters of the Durance in France, I do not know. For the sake of a tag in the reader's mind, I Latinized the modern French name. This was the most consistently used of all the alpine passes, for it lay on the Via Aemilia
I
Via Domitia.

Mosa River  
The modern Meuse (in Dutch, Maas).

Mosella River  
The modern Moselle.

Muluchath River  
The modern Moulouya.

Muthul River   
A river in central Numidia. There is still great debate about the identity of the stream. I have made it a tributary of the river Bagradas, after the
Atlas of Classical History
(edited by Richard J. A. Talbert).

Mutina   
Modern Modena, in Italy.

Narbo  
Modern Narbonne, in France.

Neapolis   
Modern Naples. It was one of the largest and most successful of the Greek colonies planted in southern Italy, though it fell under Roman domination by the end of the fourth century B.C. In the Hannibalic troubles, Neapolis was wise enough to remain loyal to Rome, and so lost none of its lands to Rome. During the Republic, it was distinctly less important as a port than Puteoli, but it thrived nonetheless.

Nearer Spain
The Roman province. In Latin, it was called Hispania Citerior. The territory embraced the Mediterranean coastal plain and mountainous foothills behind, from just south of New Carthage all the way north to the Pyrenees. The southern boundary between the two provinces was fairly tenuous, but seems to have run between the range of mountains called the Orospeda and the taller range behind Abdera called the Solorius. In Gaius Marius's day, the largest settlement was New Carthage (now known as Cartagena), because the Orospeda range behind it was honeycombed with productive silver mines the Romans had taken over when Carthage fell. Only one other part of the province was of much interest to its Roman governors: the valley of the Iberus River (the modern Ebro) and its tributaries, this area being very rich. The governor had two seats: New Carthage in the south, and Tarraco in the north. The nearer Spanish province was never as important to Rome as Further Spain.

nectar
The drink of the gods. Apparently its base was honey.

nefas
The Latin word for sacrilege.

Nemausus
Modern Nîmes, in France. It lay on the western side of the salt marshes of the Rhodanus delta, and from the time of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (ca. 120 B.C.), it was connected by a long causeway to the town of Arelate on the eastern side of the delta. Gaius Marius did much needed repairs to this causeway while waiting for the Germans in 104 B.C.

nemo
The Latin for nobody or no one.

Nicomedes
A name belonging to the kings of Bithynia. There were either three or four kings called Nicomedes; modern scholars differ about the number.

noble,
Nobilis.
The word used to describe a man and his descendants once the consulship had been achieved; it was an artificial aristocracy invented by the plebeians in order to further reduce the distinction of being patrician, since more plebeians reached the consulship during the last half of the Republic than did patricians. By the time of Gaius Marius, nobility mattered greatly. Some modern authorities extend the term
nobilis
to cover those men who reached the status of praetor without achieving the consulship. However, my feeling is that this would have demeaned its exclusivity too much, so I have reserved nobility for those of proven consular family.

nomen, nomina
(pl.)
The family or gentilicial name— the name of the
gens.
Cornelius, Julius, Domitius, Livius, Marius, Marcius, Sulpicius, etc., were gentilicial names. I have not used
gens
very much in this book, as it takes a feminine ending; thus, it was not the
gens
Julius, but the
gens
Julia. Too confusing for non-Latin readers, English being a neutral language. Thus I have preferred to say "family Julius," and keep things simple.

 
Noricum
What might today be called the eastern Tyrol and the Yugoslavian Alps. Its people were called the Taurisci, and were Celts. The main settlement was Noreia.

Numantia
A small town of some four thousand Celtiberians, on the upper Durius River in Nearer Spain. It had successfully resisted a whole series of Roman armies and generals, starting with Cato the Censor, in 195 B.C., and ending with Hostilius Mancinus in 137 B.C. Then in 135 B.C., Scipio Aemilianus was given the job of reducing it, and did so after a siege which lasted eight months. Jugurtha of Numidia, Gaius Marius, Publius Rutilius Rufus, and Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus were all on Scipio Aemilianus's staff. When the town finally surrendered, Scipio Aemilianus literally tore it apart, dismantled it, executed or deported its people, and used it as an object lesson to the Celtiberians to show them that they couldn't win against Rome.

numen, numina
(pl.)
Literally, "divinity" (but also "a nodding of the head").
Numen
is a word used by modern scholars, rather than the Romans, to describe the peculiarly disembodied nature of the original Italian and Roman gods, if indeed they could be called gods. Spiritual forces might be a better description. These old gods were the forces which governed everything from rain and wind to the function of a doorway, to the proper siting of boundary stones or the element we call luck. They were faceless, sexless, and without a mythology. The word mostly used to describe them nowadays is the Anglicized adjective "numinous." As time wore on through the years of the Republic, and it became the mark of culture to subscribe to things Greek, many of the original numinous gods acquired a name, a sex, and even occasionally a face, but to call Roman religion a hybrid bastardization of the Greeks is to underestimate Rome grievously. Unlike the Greeks, Roman religion was so intimately tied to all the strata of government that one could not survive without the other; this dated back to before the kings of Rome, when all the gods were numinous, and it remained very much a fact until Christianization of the Emperors and their courts undermined the old religion of the Roman State. In the days of Gaius Marius, long before this State religion began to lose its hold, even the most brilliant and iconoclastic among the Romans subscribed scrupulously to religious matters, including men like Gaius Marius and Gaius Julius Caesar the Dictator. It was probably that numinous element in the religion which riddled even the most brilliant and iconoclastic Romans with superstitions.