The Grass Crown

THE GRASS CROWN

Collen McCullough

For

Frank Esposito

with love, thanks,

admiration and respect

Italia

Mundus Romanus

Conquests of Mithridates 113-110

Marius’s Journey East

Sulla’s Expedition to the East

The Homelands of the Italian Insurgents

Central Italy

Movements of Mithridates in 88

Sulla’s Invasion of Rome

The Flight of Gaius Marius

The Siege of Rome

Gaius Marius

“The most exciting thing that’s happened during the last fifteen months,” said Gaius Marius, “is the elephant Gaius Claudius showed at the ludi Romani.”

Aelia’s face lit up. “Wasn’t it wonderful?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair to reach the dish of huge green olives imported from Further Spain. “To be able to stand on its back legs and walk! And dance on all four legs! And sit on a couch and feed itself with its trunk!”

Turning a contemptuous face to his wife, Lucius Cornelius Sulla said very coldly, “Why is it people are charmed to see animals aping men? The elephant is the noblest creature in the world. Gaius Claudius Pulcher’s beast I found a double travesty—of man and elephant both.”

The pause which followed was infinitesimal, though everyone present in the dining room was uncomfortably aware of it; then Julia diverted all eyes from the blighted Aelia by laughing merrily. “Oh, come, Lucius Cornelius, it was the absolute favorite of the whole crowd!” she said. “I know I admired it—so clever and busy!—and when it lifted its trunk and trumpeted in time to the drum—amazing! Besides,” she added, “no one hurt it.”

“Well, I liked its color,” said Aurelia, thinking it wise to contribute her mite. “Pink!”

All of which Lucius Cornelius Sulla ignored by swiveling on his elbow and talking to Publius Rutilius Rufus.

Eyes sad, Julia sighed. “I think, Gaius Marius,” she said to her husband, “that it’s time we women withdrew and let you men enjoy your wine. Would you excuse us?”

Out went Marius’s hand across the narrow table between his couch and Julia’s chair; she lifted her own hand to clasp it warmly, and tried not to feel even sadder at the sight of his warped smile. So long now! Yet still his face bore the evidence of that insidious stroke. But what the loyal and loving wife could not admit, even to herself, was that the stroke had wrought a tiny havoc within Gaius Marius’s mind; the temper that now flared too easily, the increased emphasis he placed upon largely imagined slights, a hardening in his attitude toward his enemies.

She rose, disengaged her hand from Marius’s with a very special smile for him, and put the hand upon Aelia’s shoulder. “Come, my dear,” she said, “we’ll go down to the nursery.”

Aelia got up. So did Aurelia. The three men did not, though their conversation ceased until the women had gone from the room. A gesture from Marius sent the servants scurrying to clear the women’s chairs from the dining room after which they too vanished. Now only the three couches remained, forming a U; to make conversation easier, Sulla shifted from where he had lain beside Marius to the vacant couch facing Rutilius Rufus. Both of them were then able to see Marius as well as they could each other.

“So Piggle-wiggle is to come home at last,” said Lucius Cornelius Sulla when he was sure his detested second wife was out of earshot.

Marius shifted restlessly on the middle couch, frowning, but less direfully than of yore, for the lingering paralysis gave the left half of the grimace a mournful quality.

“What do you want to hear from me by way of answer, Lucius Cornelius?” Marius asked finally.

Sulla laughed shortly. “Why should I want anything but an honest answer? Though, you know, I did not phrase what I said as a question, Gaius Marius.”

“I realize that. But it required an answer nonetheless.”

“True,” said Sulla. “All right, I’ll rephrase it. How do you feel about Piggle-wiggle’s being recalled from exile?”

“Well, I’m not singing paeans of joy,” said Marius, and gave Sulla a piercing glance. “Are you?”

They have drifted subtly apart, thought Publius Rutilius Rufus, reclining on the second couch. Three years ago—or even two years ago—they could not have had such a tensely wary conversation. What happened? And whose fault is it?

“Yes and no, Gaius Marius.” Sulla stared down into his winecup. “I’m bored!” he said then through clenched teeth. “At least when Piggle-wiggle returns to the Senate, things might take an interesting turn. I miss those titanic battles you and he used to have.”

“In which case, Lucius Cornelius you’re going to be disappointed. I’m not going to be here when Piggle-wiggle arrives in Rome.”

Both Sulla and Rutilius Rufus sat up.

“Not going to be in Rome?” asked Rutilius Rufus, squeaking.

“Not going to be in Rome,” said Marius again, and grinned in sour satisfaction. “I’ve just remembered a vow I made to the Great Goddess before I beat the Germans. That if I won, I’d make a pilgrimage to her sanctuary at Pessinus.”

“Gaius Marius, you can’t do that!” said Rutilius Rufus.

“Publius Rutilius, I can! And I will!”

Sulla flopped on his back, laughing. “Shades of Lucius Gavius Stichus!” he said.

“Who?” asked Rutilius Rufus, always ready to be sidetracked if there was a possibility of gossip.

“My late lamented stepmother’s late lamented nephew,” said Sulla, still grinning. “Many years ago he moved into my house—it belonged to my late lamented stepmother then. His aim was to get rid of me by destroying Clitumna’s fondness for me, and his thinking was that if the two of us were there together in Clitumna’s house, he’d show me up. So I went away. Right away from Rome. With the result that he had nobody to show up except himself—which he did very effectively. Clitumna was fed up in no time.” He rolled over, belly down now. “He died not long afterward,” Sulla said reflectively, and heaved a stagey sigh through the middle of his smile. “I ruined all his plans!”

“Here’s hoping then that Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle finds his return a hollow victory,” said Marius.

“I’ll drink to that,” said Sulla, and did.

A silence fell that was not easy to break, for the old accord was missing, and Sulla’s answer had not brought it back. Perhaps, thought Publius Rutilius Rufus, that old accord was a matter of expedience and the battlefield, rather than a truly deep-seated friendship. Only how can they forget all those years when together they fought Rome’s foreign enemies? How can they let this Rome-induced discontent blot out all that’s gone before? The tribunate of Saturninus was the end of the old life. Saturninus, who had wanted to be king of Rome—and that unfortunate stroke of Marius’s. Then, said he to himself, Nonsense, Publius Rutilius Rufus! They’re both men who have to be up and doing important things, they’re just not the sort to like sitting at home—and being out of office when they are at home. Give them another war to fight together, or a Saturninus inciting revolution, and they’d be purring like a pair of cats washing each other’s faces.

Time got away, of course. He and Gaius Marius were in their sixtieth year, and Lucius Cornelius Sulla was forty-two. Not being addicted to peering into the uneven depths of a mirror, Publius Rutilius Rufus wasn’t sure how he himself had weathered the vicissitudes of age, but there was nothing wrong with his eyes at the distance from which he now viewed Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla.

Gaius Marius was sufficiently heavier these days to warrant the making of new togas; a big man always—but a fit and well-proportioned one—his extra weight was distributed on shoulders, back, hips and thighs as well as a rather muscular-looking paunch; and to some extent this additional burden he carried had smoothed out his face, which was bigger, rounder, higher in the forehead thanks to receding hair. Deliberately Rutilius Rufus ignored the left-sided paresis, dwelt instead upon those amazing eyebrows, as huge and bushy and undisciplined as ever. Oh, what storms of artistic consternation Gaius Marius’s brows had raised in many a sculptor’s breast! Commissioned to take the Marian portrait in stone for some town or guild or vacant plot just crying for a statue, those sculptors who lived in Rome or Italy knew before they set eyes on Gaius Marius what they had to contend with. But the look of horror on the face of some much-vaunted Greek sent by Athens or Alexandria to do a likeness of the most sculpted man since Scipio Africanus when he saw the Marian brows—! Each artist did what he could; yet even painted on a piece of board or linen, Gaius Marius’s face ended up as mere background for his eyebrows.

Whereas the best portrait of his old friend that Rutilius Rufus had ever seen had been a crude drawing in some black substance upon the outside wall of Rutilius Rufus’s own house. Just a few lines was all—a single voluptuous curve to suggest that full lower lip, a sort of glitter for the eyes—how could whoever did it make black seem a glitter?—and no more than ten lines for each eyebrow. Yet it was Gaius Marius to the life, with all the pride, the intelligence, the indomitability, the sheer character. Only how did one describe it, that form of art? Vultum in peius fingere… A face fashioned out of malice. But so good that the malice had turned into truth. Alas, before Rutilius Rufus could work out how he might remove the piece of plaster without its crumbling into a thousand fragments, there had been a heavy fall of rain, and Gaius Marius’s best likeness was no more.

No backstreet scrawler upon walls could ever do that to Lucius Cornelius Sulla, however. Without the magic of color, Sulla could have been any of a thousand fairly handsome men. Regular face, regular features, a proper Romanness about him that Gaius Marius could never own. Yet seen in color, he was unique. At forty-two he showed no signs of thinning hair—such hair! Neither red, nor gold. Thick, waving, worn perhaps a little too long. And eyes like the ice in a glacier, the palest of blues, ringed around with a blue as dark as a thundercloud. Tonight his thin, upcurving brows were a good brown, as were his long thick lashes. But Publius Rutilius Rufus had seen him in more urgent circumstances, and knew that tonight, as was his wont, he had applied stibium to them; for in reality, Sulla’s brows and lashes were so fair they only showed at all because his skin was a pallid, almost unpigmented white.

Women lost sanity, virtue, judgment over Sulla. They threw caution to the winds, outraged their husbands and fathers and brothers, gushed and giggled if he so much as glanced at them in passing. Such an able, intelligent man! A superlative soldier, an efficient administrator, brave as any man could hope to be, little short of perfection at organizing himself or others. And yet women were his downfall. Or so thought Publius Rutilius Rufus, whose nice but homely face and ordinary mousy coloring had never distinguished him from a myriad other men. Not that Sulla was a philanderer, or even an occasional ladykiller; as far as Rutilius Rufus knew, he behaved with admirable rectitude. But there was no doubt that a man who hungered to reach the top of the Roman political ladder stood a much better chance of doing so if he did not have a face like Apollo’s; handsome men who were enormously attractive to women were generally mistrusted by their peers, dismissed as lightweights, or as effeminate fellows, or as potential cuckolders.

Last year, thought Rutilius Rufus, his reminiscences meandering on, Sulla had run for election as a praetor. Everything seemed to be in his favor. His war record was splendid—and well advertised, for Gaius Marius had made sure the electors knew how invaluable Sulla had been to him, as quaestor, tribune, and finally legate. Even Catulus Caesar (who had no real cause to love Sulla, the author of his embarrassment in Italian Gaul, when Sulla, by instigating a mutiny, had saved Catulus Caesar’s army from annihilation) had come forth and praised his services in Italian Gaul, the year the German Cimbri had been defeated. Then, during the few short days when Lucius Appuleius Saturninus had threatened the State, it had been Sulla, tirelessly energetic and efficient, who had enabled Gaius Marius to put an end to the business. For when Gaius Marius had issued an order, it had been Sulla who implemented it. Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus—he whom Marius, Sulla and Rutilius Rufus called Piggle-wiggle—had been assiduous before he went into exile in explaining to everyone he knew that in his opinion, the successful conclusion of the war in Africa against King Jugurtha was entirely due to Sulla, that Marius had claimed the credit unfairly. For it had been thanks to Sulla’s solo efforts that Jugurtha himself had been captured, and everyone knew that until Jugurtha was captured, the war in Africa would drag on. When Catulus Caesar and some of the other ultra-conservative leaders in the Senate agreed with Piggle-wiggle that the credit for the Jugurthine War should by rights go to Sulla, Sulla’s star seemed sure to rise, his election as one of the six praetors a certainty. To all of which had to be added Sulla’s own conduct in the matter—admirably modest, deprecating, fair-minded. Until the very end of the electoral campaign, he had insisted that his capture of Jugurtha must be attributed to Marius, as he himself had only been acting under Marius’s orders. This kind of conduct the voters usually appreciated; loyalty to one’s commander in the field or the Forum was highly prized.

And yet, when the Centuriate electors assembled in the saepta on the Campus Martius and the Centuries one by one gave their choices, the name of Lucius Cornelius Sulla—so aristocratic and acceptable in itself—was not among the six successful candidates; to add insult to injury, some of the men who were elected were as mediocre in achievement as in their ability to show the proper ancestors.

Why? Immediately after polling day, that was the question everyone attached to Sulla asked, though he said nothing. However, he knew why; a little later, Rutilius Rufus and Marius learned what Sulla already knew. The reason for his failure had a name, and was not physically very large. Caecilia Metella Dalmatica. Barely nineteen years old. And the wife of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus, he who had been consul in the year the Germans first appeared, censor in the year Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle had gone off to Africa to fight Jugurtha, and Leader of the House since his consulship, now seventeen years in the past. It had been Scaurus’s son who was contracted to marry Dalmatica, but he had killed himself after Catulus Caesar’s retreat from Tridentum, a self-confessed coward. And Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle, guardian of his seventeen-year-old niece, promptly gave her in marriage to Scaurus himself, though there were forty years between husband and wife.

No one, of course, had asked Dalmatica how she felt about the union, and at first she hadn’t been very sure herself. A little dazzled by the immense auctoritas and dignitas her new husband possessed, she was also glad to be free of her uncle Metellus Numidicus’s stormy household, which at that time contained his sister, a woman whose sexual proclivities and hysterical behavior had made her a torment to live with. Dalmatica became pregnant at once (a fact which increased Scaurus’s auctoritas and dignitas even more), and bore Scaurus a daughter. But in the meantime she had met Sulla at a dinner party given by her husband, and the attraction between them had been powerful, mutual, distressing.