The First Man in Rome (84 page)

End of digression. I mention it to sprinkle this whole episode with a little much-needed spice. And to make you understand why Lucullus went off to Campania smarting at having to take orders from precisely the sort of man Metella Calva might well have fancied were he poorer—rougher he could not be! There is something very fishy going on with Fimbria, incidentally. He has struck up a friendship with Gaius Memmius, of all people, and the two of them are as thick as thieves, and a lot of money is changing hands, though for what purpose is unclear.

Anyway, Lucullus soon cleaned up Campania. Young Titus Vettius was executed, as were his officers and the members of his slave army. Lucullus was commended for his work, and went back to hearing the assizes in places like Reate.

But didn't I tell you some time ago that I had a feeling about those tiny little servile uprisings in Campania last year? My nose was right. First we had Titus Vettius. And now we have a full-scale slave war on our hands in Sicily!

I have always thought Publius Licinius Nerva looked and acted like a mouse, but who could ever have dreamed that it would be dangerous to send him as praetor-governor to Sicily? He's so squeaky-meticulous the job should have suited him down to the ground. Scurrying here, scurrying there, laying in his stores for winter, writing copiously detailed accounts with the tip of his tail dipped in ink, whiskers twitching.

Of course all would have gone well, had it not been for this wretched law about freeing the Italian Allied slaves. Our praetor-governor Nerva scurried off to Sicily and began to manumit the Italians, who number about a quarter of the total grain slaves. And he got started in Syracuse, while his quaestor got started at the other end of the island, in Lilybaeum. It went slowly and precisely, Nerva being Nerva—he did, by the way, evolve an excellent system to catch out slaves claiming to be Italian who were not Italian, by quizzing them in Oscan and local geography of our peninsula. But he published his decree in Latin only, thinking this too would weed out potential imposters. With the result that those reading Greek had to rely upon others to translate, and the confusion grew, and grew, and grew....

The two weeks at the end of May saw Nerva free some eight hundred Italian slaves in Syracuse, while his quaestor in Lilybaeum marked time, waiting for orders. And there arrived in Syracuse a very angry deputation of grain farmers, all the members of which threatened to do things to Nerva if he went on freeing their slaves that ranged from emasculation to litigation. Nerva panicked at sight of this spitting cat, and shut down his tribunal at once. No more slaves were to be freed. This directive reached his quaestor in Lilybaeum a little too late, unfortunately, for his quaestor had grown tired of waiting, and set up his tribunal in the marketplace. Now, having barely got started, he too shut down. The slaves lined up in the marketplace were quite literally mad with rage, and went home to do murder.

The result was an outright revolt at the western end of the island. It started with the murder of a couple of wealthy brothers who farmed a huge grain property near Halicyae, and it went on from there. All over Sicily slaves in hundreds and then thousands left their farms, some of them only after murdering their overseers and even their owners, and converged on the Grove of the Palici, which lies, I believe, some forty miles southwest of Mount Aetna. Nerva called up his militia, and thought he had crushed the revolt when he stormed and took an old citadel filled with refugee slaves. So he disbanded his militia, and sent them all to their various homes.

But the revolt was only just beginning. It flared up next time near Heracleia Minoa, and when Nerva tried to get his militia together again, everyone became extremely deaf. He was forced to fall back on a cohort of auxiliaries stationed at Enna, quite a distance from Heracleia Minoa, but the closest force of any size nonetheless. This time Nerva didn't win. The whole cohort perished, and the slaves acquired arms.

While this was going on, the slaves produced a leader, predictably an Italian who had not been freed before Nerva closed down his tribunals. His name is Salvius, and he's a member of the Marsi. His profession when a free man, it seems, was a snake-charming flute player, and he was enslaved because he was caught playing the flute for women involved in the Dionysiac rites which so worried the Senate a few years ago. Salvius now calls himself a king, but being an Italian, his idea of a king is Roman, not Hellenic. He wears the
toga praetexta
rather than a diadem, and is preceded by lictors bearing
the fasces,
complete with axes.

At the far end of Sicily, somewhere around Lilybaeum, a second slave-king then appeared, a Greek this time, named Athenion, and he too raised an army. Both Salvius and Athenion converged on the Grove of the Palici, and there had a conference. The result of this is that Salvius (who now calls himself King Tryphon) has become the ruler of the whole lot, and has chosen for his headquarters an impregnable place called Triocala, in the lap of the mountains above the coast opposite Africa, about halfway between Agrigentum and Lilybaeum.

Right at this moment, Sicily is a very
Iliad
of
woes. The harvest is lying trampled into the ground aside from what the slaves harvested to fill their own bellies, and Rome will get no grain from Sicily this year. The cities of Sicily are groaning at the seams to contain the enormous numbers of free refugees who have sought shelter within the safety of walls, and starvation and disease are already stalking the streets. An army of over sixty thousand well-armed slaves—and five thousand slave cavalry—is running wild anywhere it likes from one end of the island to the other, and when threatened, retires to this impregnable fortress of Triocala. They have attacked and taken Murgantia, and all but succeeded in taking Lilybaeum, which fortunately was saved by some veterans who heard about the trouble and sailed across from Africa to help.

And here comes the ultimate indignity. Not only is Rome looking at a drastic grain shortage, but it very much seems that someone attempted to manipulate events in Sicily to
manufacture
a grain shortage! The slave uprising has turned what would have been a spurious shortage into a real one, but our esteemed Princeps Senatus, Scaurus, is nose-down on a trail leading, he hopes, to the culprit or culprits. I suspect he suspects our despicable consul Fimbria and Gaius Memmius. Why would a decent and upright man like Memmius ally himself with the likes of Fimbria? Well, yes, I can answer that one, I think. He should have been praetor years ago but has only just got there now, and he doesn't have the kind of money to run for consul. And when lack of money keeps a man out of the chair he thinks he's entitled to sit in, he can do many imprudent things.

Gaius Marius laid the letter down with a sigh, pulled the official dispatches from the Senate toward him, and read those too, comfortably alone, and therefore able to labor aloud over the hopeless fusion of words at the top of his lungs if he so wished. Not that there was any disgrace in it, everyone read aloud; but everyone else was assumed to know Greek.

Publius Rutilius was right, as always. His own extremely long letter was infinitely more informative than the dispatches, though they contained the text of Nerva's letter, and were full of statistics. They just weren't as compelling nor as newsy. Nor could they put a man right in the middle of the picture the way Rutilius did.

He had no trouble in imagining the consternation in Rome. A drastic grain shortage meant political futures at stake, and a growling Treasury, and aediles scrambling to find alternative sources of grain. Sicily was the breadbasket, and when Sicily didn't deliver a good harvest, Rome stared famine in the face. Neither Africa nor Sardinia sent half as much grain to Rome as Sicily did.
Combined
they didn't! This present crisis would see the People blaming the Senate for sending an inadequate governor to Sicily, and the Head Count would blame both the People and the Senate for their empty bellies.

The Head Count was not a political body; it was not interested in governing any more than it was interested in being governed. The sum total of its participation in public life was seats at the games and free handouts at the festivals. Until its belly was empty. And then the Head Count was a force to be reckoned with.

Not that the Head Count got its grain free; but the Senate through its aediles and quaestors made sure the Head Count was sold grain at a reasonable price, even if in times of shortage that meant buying expensive grain and letting it go at the same reasonable price, much to the chagrin of the Treasury. Any Roman citizen resident within Rome could avail himself of the State's price-frozen grain ration, no matter how rich he was, provided he was willing to join the huge line at the aedile's desk in the Porticus Minucia and obtain his chits; these, when presented at one of the State granaries lining the Aventine cliffs above the Port of Rome, would permit him to buy his five
modii
of cheap grain. That few of means bothered was purely convenience; it was so much easier to shop in the grain market of the Velabrum and leave it to the merchants to fetch the grain from the privately owned granaries lining the bottom of the Palatine cliffs on the Vicus Tuscus.

Knowing himself caught in what could be a precarious political position, Gaius Marius frowned his wonderful eyebrows together. The moment the Senate asked the Treasury to open its cobwebbed vaults to buy in expensive grain for the Head Count, the howling would begin; the chiefs of the
tribuni aerarii
—the Treasury bureaucrats—would start expostulating that they couldn't possibly afford to pay out huge sums for grain when a Head Count army six legions strong was currently employed in Gaul-across-the-Alps doing public works! That in turn would shift the onus onto the Senate, which would have to do hideous battle with the Treasury to get the extra grain; and then the Senate would complain to the People that, as usual, the Head Count were a mighty costly nuisance.

Wonderful! How was he going to get himself elected consul
in absentia
for a second year in a row, when he led a Head Count army, and Rome was at the mercy of a hungry Head Count? May Publius Licinius Nerva rot! And every grain speculator along with him!

*    *    *

Only Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus had sensed something wrong ahead of the crisis; with a fresh harvest due, the grain price within Rome normally fell a little at the end of summer. Whereas this year it had steadily risen. The reason seemed apparent; the freeing of the Italian grain slaves would limit the amount of planted grain being harvested. But then the grain slaves had not been freed, and the harvest was predicted normal. At which point, the price should have fallen dramatically. But it didn't. It kept on rising.

To Scaurus, the evidence pointed conclusively to a grain manipulation stemming from the Senate, and his own observations pointed to the consul Fimbria and the urban praetor Gaius Memmius, who had been desperately raising money throughout the spring and summer. To buy grain cheaply and sell it at an enormous profit, Scaurus concluded.

And then came the news of the slave uprising in Sicily. Whereupon Fimbria and Memmius began frantically selling everything they owned aside from their houses on the Palatine and sufficient land to ensure that they remained on the senatorial census. Therefore, Scaurus deduced, whatever the nature of their business venture might have been, it could not have had anything to do with the grain supply.

His reasoning was specious, but pardonably so; had the consul and the urban praetor been involved in the escalation of the grain price, they would now be sitting back picking their teeth contentedly rather than chasing their tails to find the cash to pay back loans. No, not Fimbria and Memmius! He must look elsewhere.

After Publius Licinius Nerva's letter confessing the extent of the crisis in Sicily reached Rome, Scaurus began to hear one senatorial name bruited about among the grain merchants; his sensitive proboscis smelled fresher—and gamier—game than the false scent of Fimbria and Memmius. Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. The quaestor for the port of Ostia. Young and new to the Senate, but holding the most sensitive position a new young senator could, if he was interested in grain prices. For the quaestor at Ostia supervised grain shipment and storage, knew and conversed with everybody involved with the whole gamut of the grain supply, was privy to all kinds of information well ahead of the rest of the Senate.

Further investigations convinced Scaurus that he had found his culprit, and he struck his blow for the good name of the Senate at a meeting of that body early in October. Lucius Appuleius Saturninus was the prime mover behind the premature rise in the price of grain which had prevented the Treasury's acquiring additional stocks for the State granaries at anything like a reasonable price, said Scaurus Princeps Senatus to a hushed House. And the House had found its scapegoat; amid great indignation, the senators voted overwhelmingly to dismiss Lucius Appuleius Saturninus from his post as quaestor, thereby depriving him of his seat in the House, and leaving him open to massive prosecutions for extortion.

Summoned from Ostia to appear in the House, Saturninus could do little more than deny Scaurus's charges. Of actual proof there was none—either for or against—and that meant the issue boiled down to which one of the men involved was more worthy of being believed.