The First Man in Rome (142 page)

Senators alone were entitled to wear a tunic bearing the
latus clavus
or broad purple stripe; they also wore closed shoes of maroon leather and a ring (originally of iron, it came to be gold). Meetings of the Senate had to be held in places which had been properly inaugurated, for the Senate did not always meet in its own House, the Curia Hostilia. The ceremonies and meeting of New Year's Day, for example, were held in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, while meetings to discuss war were held in the temple of Bellona, outside the
pomerium.

There was a rigid hierarchy among those allowed to speak in senatorial meetings, with the Princeps Senatus at the top of the list in Gaius Marius's day; patricians always preceded plebeians of precisely the same status otherwise. Not all senators by any means were allowed to speak. The
senatores pedarii
(I have used the British parliamentary term "backbenchers" to describe them, as they sat behind those who did speak) were permitted only to vote, not speak. No restriction was placed upon a man's oration in terms of length of time or germane content; hence the popularity of the technique now called filibustering—talking a motion out. Sessions could go on only between sunrise and sunset, and could not continue if the Comitia went into session, though meetings could be convoked on comitial days of the calendar if no Comitia met. If the issue was unimportant or the response completely unanimous, voting could be by voice or a show of hands, but formal voting was by division of the House. An advisory rather than a legislative body, the Senate issued its
consulta
or decrees as requests to the various Assemblies. If the issue was serious, a quorum had to be present before a vote could be taken, though we do not know the precise number constituting a quorum in Gaius Marius's day; perhaps a quarter? Certainly most meetings were not heavily attended, as there was no rule which said a senator had to attend meetings on a regular basis.

In certain areas it had become tradition for the Senate to reign supreme, despite its lack of legislating power; this was true of the
fiscus,
for the Senate controlled the Treasury, true of foreign affairs, and true of war. In civil emergencies, after the time of Gaius Gracchus the Senate could override all other bodies of government by passing the
Senatus Consultum de republica defendenda
—its "ultimate decree."

Sequana River
The modern Seine, in France.

Servian Walls
Murus Servii Tullii or Tulli. The Romans believed that the walls enclosing the Republican city had been erected in the time of King Servius Tullius. However, evidence suggests that these walls were not actually built until after the Gauls under Brennus (1) sacked Rome in 390 B.C.

Servius Tullius
Or Servius Tullus. The sixth King of Rome, and the only King of Rome who was a Latin, if not a Roman. Though thought to have built the Servian Walls (which he didn't), he probably did build the Agger, the great double rampart of the Campus Esquilinus. A lawmaker and an enlightened king, he negotiated a treaty between Rome and the Latin League which was still displayed carefully in the temple of Diana at the end of the Republic. His death was ever after a scandal, for his own daughter, Tullia, conspired with her lover, Tarquinius Superbus, to murder first her husband and then her father, Servius Tullius. He was cut down in a street off the Clivus Orbius, and Tullia then drove her carriage back and forth over her father's body.

sestertius, sesterces
The commonest of Roman coins, the sestertius was the unit of Roman accounting, hence its prominence in Latin writings of Republican date. Its name derives from
semis tertius,
meaning two and a half
(ases).
In Latin writing, it was abbreviated as 7
I
5. A small silver coin, it was worth one quarter of a denarius. I have kept to the strict Latin when referring to this coin in the singular, but in the plural (more frequently mentioned by
far) I have used the Anglicized "sesterces."

Sibyl, Sibylline Books
Properly, Sibylla. An oracle. The Sibyl issued her prognostications in an ecstatic frenzy, as did most oracular priestesses. The most famous Sibyl lived in a cave at Cumae, on the Campanian coast. The Roman State possessed a series of written prophecies called the Sibylline Books, acquired, it was believed, by King Tarquinius Priscus; originally written on palm leaves (transferred later to paper), they were in Greek. At the time of Gaius Marius, these Sibylline Books were so revered that they were in the care of a special college of ten minor priests, the
decemviri sacris faciundis,
and in crises were solemnly consulted to see if there was a prophecy which fitted the situation.

Silanus, Silenus
The satyrlike face—ugly, leering, and flatly pug-nosed—which spewed water into Rome's public fountains as set up in stone by Cato the Censor.

sinus
A pronounced curve or fold. The term was used in many different ways, but for the purposes of this book, two meanings are used. One refers to the geographical feature we call a gulf—Sinus Arabicus (the Red Sea), Sinus Ligusticus (the Gulf of Genoa), Sinus Gallicus (the Gulf of Lions). The second refers to the folds of the toga as it emerged from under the right arm and was swept up over the left shoulder—the togate Roman's pocket.

Skeptic
An adherent of the school of philosophy founded by Pyrrhon and his pupil Timon, and based upon the town of Scepsis in the Troad, hence the name. Skeptics did not admit that dogma existed, and believed that no man would ever master knowledge. In consequence, they disbelieved everything.

smaragdus
Emerald. It is debatable whether the stone the ancients called emerald was our emerald, though those stones from Scythia may have been; the stones mined on islands in the Red Sea and a part of the private entitlements of the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt were definitely beryl.

Smyrna
One of the greatest of the port cities on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. It lay near the mouth of the river Hermus. Originally an Ionian Greek colony, it suffered an extinction of nearly three hundred years, from the sixth to the third century B.C. When re-established by Alexander the Great, it never looked back. Its chief business was money, but it was also a center for learning.
Sosius
A name associated with the book trade in Rome. Two brothers named Sosius published during the principate of Augustus. I have taken the name and extrapolated it backward in time; Roman businesses were very often family businesses, and the book trade in Rome was already flourishing in Marius's day. Therefore, why not a Sosius in Marius's day?

spelt
A kind of flour, very fine and soft and white, not suitable for making bread, but excellent for making cakes. It was ground from the variety of wheat now known as
Triticum spelta.

steel
The term "Iron Age" is rather misleading, for iron in itself is not a very usable metal. It only replaced bronze when ancient smiths discovered ways of steeling it; from then on, it was the metal of choice for tools, weapons, and other apparatus requiring a combination of hardness, durability, and capacity to take an edge or a point. Aristotle and Theophrastus, both living in the Greece of the fourth century B.C., talk about "steel," not "iron." However, the whole process of working iron into a usable metal evolved in total ignorance of the chemistry and metallurgy underlying it. The main ore utilized to extract iron was haematite; pyrites was little used because of the extreme toxicity of its sulphuric by-products. Strabo and Pliny the Elder both describe the method of roasting (oxidation) the ore in a hearth-type furnace; but the shaft furnace (reduction) was more efficient, could smelt larger quantities of ore, and was the method of choice. Most smelting yards used both hearth and shaft furnaces, and produced slag-contaminated "blooms" which were called sows. These sows were then reheated to above melting point, and compelled to take up additional carbon from the charcoal by hammering (forging); this also drove out much of the contaminating slag, though ancient steels were never entirely free of it. Roman smiths were fully conversant with the techniques of annealing, quenching, tempering, and cementation (this last forced more carbon into the iron). Each of these procedures changed the characteristics of the basic carbon steel in a different way, so that steels suitable for various purposes were made—razors, sword blades, knives, axes, saws, wood chisels, cold chisels, nails, spikes, etc. So precious were the steels suitable for cutting edges that a thin piece of edge steel was welded (the Romans knew two methods of welding: pressure welding and fusion welding) onto a cheaper base. However, the Roman sword blade was made entirely of steel, taking a cruelly sharp edge; it was produced by tempering at about 280°C. (Those readers who are old enough may remember carving knives or machetes made of nonstainless carbon steel, and remember with longing in our stainless-steel age how viciously sharp they were, and how easy they were to keep viciously sharp—these blades were very similar indeed to Roman ones.) Tongs, anvils, hammers, bellows, crucibles, fire bricks, and the other tools in trade of a smith were known and universally used. Many of the ancient theories were quite wrong: it was thought, for instance, that the nature of the liquid used in quenching affected the quenching; and no one understood that the real reason why the iron mined in Noricum produced such superb steel lay in the fact that it contained a small amount of manganese uncontaminated by phosphorus, arsenic, or sulphur, and so was the raw material of manganese steel.

stibium
A black antimony-based powder, soluble in water, used to paint or dye eyebrows and eyelashes, and to draw a line around the eyes.

Stoic
An adherent of the school of philosophy founded by the Phoenician Cypriot Zeno, in the third century B.C. Stoicism as a philosophical system of thought particularly appealed to the Romans. The basic tenet was concerned with nothing beyond virtue (strength of character) and its opposite, weakness of character. Virtue was the only good, weakness of character the only evil. Money, pain, death, and the other things which plague Man were not considered important, for the virtuous man is an essentially good man, and therefore by definition must be a happy and contented man, even if impoverished, in perpetual pain, and under sentence of death. As with everything Greek they espoused, the Romans did not so much modify this philosophy as evade its unpalatable concomitants by some very nice—if specious—reasoning. Brutus is an example.
Subura
The poorest and most densely populated part of the city of Rome. It lay to the east of the Forum Romanum, in the declivity between the Oppian spur of the Esquiline Mount, and the Viminal Hill. Its very long main street had three different names: at the bottom, where it became contiguous with the Argiletum, it was the Fauces Suburae; the next section was the Subura Major; and the final section, which scrambled up the steep flank of the Esquiline proper, was the Clivus Suburanus. The Subura Minor and the Vicus Patricii branched off the Subura Major in the direction of the Viminal Hill. The Subura was an area composed entirely of insulae, and contained only one prominent landmark, the Turris Mamilia, apparently some kind of tower. Its people were notoriously polyglot and independent of mind; many Jews lived in the Subura, for instance.
Suburana
The name of one of the four urban tribes, and one of the two into which newly enfranchised freedmen were placed (the other was the
tribus
Esquilina). In Republican times, this made Suburana one of the two largest in number of members of all the thirty-five tribes.

suffect consul
Consul suffectus.
When an elected consul died in office, or was otherwise rendered incapable of conducting his duties, the Senate appointed a substitute called a
suffectus.
The
suffectus
was not elected. Sometimes the Senate would appoint a
suffectus
even when the consular year was almost over; at other times no substitute would be appointed even when the consular year was far from over. These discrepancies reflected the mood within the House at the particular time. The name of the
suffectus
was engraved upon the list of Rome's consuls, and he was afterward entitled to call himself a consular.

sumptuary law   
A
lex sumptuaria.
This was a law which sought to regulate the amount of luxurious (that is, expensive) goods and
I
or foodstuffs a Roman might buy or have in his house, no matter how wealthy he was. During the Republic, sumptuary laws were often leveled at women, forbidding them to wear more than a specified amount of jewelry, or ride in litters or carriages within the Servian Walls; as several censors found out, women so legislated against were inclined to be a nasty force to be reckoned with.

suovetaurilia
This was a special sacrifice consisting of a pig
(su),
a sheep
(ove),
and an ox or bull
(taur).
It was offered on critical occasions to certain gods: Jupiter Optimus Maximus was one, Mars another, and others whose identities are not known. The ceremony surrounding the
suovetaurilia
called for the sacrificial victims to be led in a solemn procession before being killed. Besides the special occasions, there were two regular occasions on which a
suovetaurilia
was offered: the first occurred in late May, when the land was purified by the twelve minor priests called the Arval Brethren; the second occurred every five years, when the censors set up their booth on the Campus Martius and prepared to take the full census of every Roman citizen.
Syracuse
The capital and largest city of Sicily.