The Grass Crown (72 page)

And—as if one wasn’t bad enough!—there is now a Pontic puppet upon the throne of Cappadocia. Mithridates and Tigranes rode in tandem to Eusebeia Mazaca and installed yet another son of Mithridates on the throne. This one is another Ariarathes, but probably not the Ariarathes whom Gaius Marius interviewed. However, King Ariobarzanes was just as nimble as King Nicomedes of Bithynia. He skipped off too, well ahead of his pursuers. And he will reach Rome with a petition in his hands not long after Nicomedes. Alas, he is much poorer!

Lucius Cornelius, there is sore trouble brewing for our Asia Province, I am convinced of it. And there are many in Asia Province who have not forgotten the heyday of the publicani. Many who loathe the word Rome. Thus is King Mithridates being actively wooed in some quarters here. I very much fear that if—or more likely when—he makes a move to steal our Asia Province, he will be welcomed with open arms.

All this is not your problem, I know. It will fall to Scaurus. Who is not very well, he tells me.

By now you will be hard at your war games in Campania. I agree with you, the course is turning. The poor, poor Italians! Citizenship or not, they will remain unforgiven for many generations to come.

Do let me know how things turn out for your girl. I predict that Love will take its course.

Rather than try to explain Publius Rutilius Rufus’s ploy to his wife, Sulla simply sent that section of the letter to Aelia in Rome with an accompanying note advising her to do exactly as Rutilius Rufus directed—provided she could make head from tail of it.

Apparently Aelia had no trouble understanding her orders. When Sulla arrived in Rome with Lucius Caesar, he found his house redolent with domestic harmony, a beaming and affectionate daughter, and wedding plans.

“It all turned out exactly as Publius Rutilius said it would,” said Aelia happily. “Young Marius was a brute to her when she saw him. Poor little thing! She went with me to Gaius Marius’s house consumed with love and pity and sure Young Marius would fall onto her breast to cry upon her shoulder. Instead, she found him furious because he had been ordered by the cadet committee of the Senate to remain on the staff of his old command. Presumably the general replacing Gaius Marius will be one of the new consuls, and Young Marius hates both of them. I believe he tried to get himself posted to you, but got a very cold refusal from the committee.”

“Not as cold as his welcome would have been had he come to me,” said Sulla grimly.

“I think what was making him angriest was the fact that no one wanted him. Of course he’s blaming his father’s unpopularity for that, but in his heart I rather think he suspects it’s due to his own shortcomings.” Aelia jigged in a small triumph. “He didn’t want Cornelia’s sympathy and he didn’t want adolescent adoration. So he was—if I am to believe Cornelia—utterly vile to her.”

“So she decided to marry young Quintus Pompeius.”

“Not at once, Lucius Cornelius! I let her weep for two days first. Then I said that, since it seemed there would be no pressure from you about marriage to young Quintus Pompeius, she might like to go to dinner at his house. Just to see what he was like. Just to satisfy her curiosity.”

Sulla was grinning. “What happened?”

“They looked at each other and liked what they saw. At dinner they were opposite each other, and talked away like old friends.” So delighted was she that Aelia took her husband’s hand, squeezed it. “You were wise not to let Quintus Pompeius know our daughter was an unwilling bride. The whole family was delighted with her.”

Sulla snatched his hand away. “The wedding’s set?”

Face clouding, Aelia nodded. “As soon as the elections are over.” She gazed up at Sulla with big sad eyes. “Dear Lucius Cornelius, why don’t you like me? I try so hard!”

His expression darkened, he moved away. “Frankly, Aelia, for no other reason than you bore me.”

And he was gone. She stood quite still, conscious only of a troubled joy; he hadn’t said he wanted to divorce her. Stale bread was definitely preferable to no bread.

The news that Aesernia had finally surrendered to the Samnites came not long after Lucius Caesar and Sulla arrived in Rome. The city had literally starved, reduced to eating every dog, cat, mule, donkey, horse, sheep and goat it owned before capitulating. Marcus Claudius Marcellus had handed Aesernia over personally, then disappeared, no one knew where. Except the Samnites.

“He’s dead,” said Lucius Caesar.

“You’re probably right,” said Sulla.

Lucius Caesar, of course, would not be returning to the field. His term as consul was drawing to an end and he was hoping to stand for censor in the spring, so had no ambition to continue as a legate to the new commander-in-chief of the southern theater.

The incoming tribunes of the plebs were somewhat stronger than of recent years, perhaps because all Rome was now talking about the enfranchisement law Lucius Caesar was rumored to be going to introduce; they were, however, on the progressive side, and mostly in favor of lenient treatment for the Italians. The President of the College was a Lucius Calpurnius Piso who had a second cognomen, Frugi, to distinguish his part of the Calpurnius Piso clan from the Calpurnii Pisones who had allied themselves in marriage with Publius Rutilius Rufus, and bore the second cognomen Caesoninus. A forceful man of pronounced conservative leanings, Piso Frugi had already announced that he would on principle oppose the two most radical tribunes of the plebs, Gaius Papirius Carbo and Marcus Plautius Silvanus, if they tried to ignore the limitations of Lucius Caesar’s bill and give the citizenship to Italians actively engaged in war as well; that he had agreed not to oppose Lucius Caesar’s bill was thanks to the persuasive talking of Scaurus and others he respected. Thus interest in Forum doings, almost nonexistent since the beginning of the war, started to revive; the coming year promised to contain interesting political contention.

More depressing by far were the Centuriate elections, at least at the consular level. The two leading contenders had been accepted for two months as the winners, and now came in the winners; that Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo was senior consul and Lucius Porcius Cato Licinianus his junior everyone attributed to the fact that Pompey Strabo celebrated a triumph scant days before the elections.

“These triumphs are pathetic,” said Scaurus Princeps Senatus to Lucius Cornelius Sulla. “First Lucius Julius, now Gnaeus Pompeius, if you please! I feel very old.”

He also looked very old, thought Sulla, and experienced a frisson of alarm; if the lack of Gaius Marius promised torpid and unimaginative activity on the battlefield, what would the lack of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus do to that other battlefield, the Forum Romanum? Who for instance would look after those minuscule yet ultimately very important foreign matters Rome always found herself embroiled in? Who would put conceited fools like Philippus and arrogant upstarts like Quintus Varius in their places? Who would face up to whatever came so fearlessly, so sure of his own ability and superiority? The truth was that ever since Gaius Marius’s stroke Scaurus had visibly diminished; scrap and snarl though they had for over forty years, they needed each other.

“Marcus Aemilius, look after yourself!” said Sulla with sudden urgency, visited by a premonition.

The green eyes twinkled. “We all have to go some time!”

“True. But in your case, not yet. Rome needs you. Otherwise we’ll be left to the tender mercies of Lucius Julius Caesar and Lucius Marcius Philippus—what a fate!”

Scaurus started to laugh. “Is that the worst fate can befall Rome?” he asked, and put his head to one side like a skinny, ancient, plucked fowl. “In some ways I approve of you tremendously, Lucius Cornelius. Yet in other ways I have a feeling Rome might fare worse at your hands than at Philippus’s.” He wiggled the fingers of one hand. “You may not be a natural Military Man, but most of your years in the Senate have been spent in the army. And I have noticed that many years of military service make autocrats out of senators. Like Gaius Marius. When they attain high political office, they become impatient of the normal political restraints.”

They were standing outside the Sosius bookshop on the Argiletum, where one of Rome’s best food stalls had been sitting for decades. So as they talked they were eating tarts filled with raisins and honeyed custard; a bright-eyed urchin watched them closely, ready to be ready with an offer of a basin of warm water and a cloth—the tarts were juicy and sticky.

“When my time comes, Marcus Aemilius, how Rome fares at my hands depends upon what sort of Rome she is. One thing I can promise you—I will not see Rome disgrace our ancestors. Nor will I see Rome dominated by the likes of a Saturninus,” said Sulla harshly.

Scaurus finished his food, demonstrating to the urchin that he was aware of his presence by snapping sticky fingers before the urchin could rush forward unsolicited. Paying strict attention to the process, he washed and dried his hands, and gave the boy a whole sestertius. Then, while Sulla followed suit (and gave the boy a much smaller coin), he resumed talking.

“Once I had a son,” he said without a tremor, “but that son was unsatisfactory. A weakling and a coward, for all he was in nature a nice young man. Now I have another son, too young to know what stuff he’s made of. Yet my first experience taught me one thing, Lucius Cornelius. No matter how illustrious our ancestors might have been, in the end we still come to depend upon our progeny.”

Sulla’s face twisted. “My son is dead too, but I have no other,” he said.

“In which case, it was meant.”

“Do you not think it is all random, Princeps Senatus?”

“No, I do not. I have been here to contain Gaius Marius. Rome needed me to do that—and here I was, Rome’s to command. These days I see you more as a Marius than as a Scaurus, somehow. And there is no one I can see on the horizon to contain you. Which might prove more dangerous to the mos maiorum than a thousand like Saturninus,” said Scaurus.

“I promise you, Marcus Aemilius, that Rome stands in no danger from me.” Sulla thought about that statement, and qualified it. “Your Rome, I mean. Not Saturninus’s.”

“I sincerely hope so, Lucius Cornelius.”

They moved off in the direction of the Senate.

“I gather Cato Licinianus has elected to run things in Campania,” said Scaurus. “He’s a more difficult man to deal with than Lucius Julius Caesar—just as insecure, but more overbearing.”

“He won’t trouble me,” said Sulla tranquilly. “Gaius Marius called him a pea, and his campaign in Etruria pea-sized. I know how to deal with a pea.”

“How?”

“Squash it.”

“They won’t give you the command, you know. I did try.”

“It doesn’t matter in the least,” said Sulla, smiling. “I’ll take the command when I squash the pea.”

From another man it might have sounded vainglorious; Scaurus would have whooped with laughter. From Sulla it sounded ominously prescient; Scaurus shuddered instead.

Knowing he would turn seventeen on the third day of January, Marcus Tullius Cicero took his thin body to the military service registration booth on the Campus Martius just after the Centuriate elections. The pompously self-confident adolescent who had been so friendly with Young Sulla had recently become much quieter; at almost seventeen he was sure his star had already set, a brief brilliance on the horizon blotted out by the terrible blaze of civil war. Where once he had stood, the focus of a large and admiring crowd, no one now stood. And perhaps no one would ever stand again. Every court except Quintus Varius’s was closed. The urban praetor, who ought to have been in charge of them, was governing Rome in the absence of the consuls. With the Italians doing so well, it seemed highly likely the courts would never open again. Save for Scaevola the Augur, in his nineties now and not active, all Cicero’s mentors and preceptors had vanished; Crassus Orator was dead and the rest sucked into the military maelstrom, legal oblivion.

What frightened Cicero most was that no one seemed a scrap interested in him or his fate. The few great men he knew who were still living in Rome were just too busy to bother—oh, he had indeed bothered them, considering his plight and his self unique—but he hadn’t succeeded in securing an interview with anyone from Scaurus Princeps Senatus to Lucius Caesar. He was too small a fish after all, a flashy Forum freak not yet seventeen years old. Why indeed should the great men be interested in him? As his father (now the client of a dead man) had said, forget about a special posting, go without complaint to do whatever comes.

When he arrived at the booth on the Via Lata side of the Campus Martius he saw not one face he knew; these were elderly backbencher senators conscripted to do a job as onerous as important, a job they clearly didn’t enjoy. The chairman of the group was the only one to look up when Cicero’s turn came—the rest were busy with huge rolls of paper—and he eyed Cicero’s under-developed physique (which always looked odder because of that huge, gourd-shaped head) without a scrap of enthusiasm.

“First name and family name?”

“Marcus Tullius.”

“Father’s first name and family name?”

“Marcus Tullius.”

“Grandfather’s first name and family name?”

“Marcus Tullius.”

“Tribe?”

“Cornelia.”

“Cognomen, if any?”

“Cicero.”

“Class?”

“First—eques.”

“Father got the Public Horse?”

“No.”

“Can you afford to buy your own gear?”

“Of course.”

“Read and write?”

“Of course!”

“Your tribe is rural. What district?”

“Arpinum.”

“Oh, Gaius Marius country! Who’s your father’s patron?”

“Lucius Licinius Crassus Orator.”

“No one at the moment?”

“Not at the moment, no.”

“Done any preliminary military training?”

“No.”

“Tell one end of a sword from the other?”

“If by that you mean can I use one, no.”

“Ride a horse?”

“Yes.”

The chairman finished making his notes, then looked up again with a sour smile. “Come back two days before the Nones of January, Marcus Tullius, and you will be given your military duty.”

And that was that. He had been ordered to report back on his birthday, of all days. Cicero got himself away from the booth, utterly humiliated. They hadn’t even realized who he was! Surely they had seen or heard his feats in the Forum! But if they had they hid it perfectly. Obviously they intended he should do military work. To have begged for clerical duties would have branded him a coward in their eyes, he was more than intelligent enough to see that. So he had kept silent, wanting no black mark against his name some rival candidate for the consulship could dredge up years later.

Attracted as he was to friends older than himself, there was no one he could seek out to confide in. They were all on military service somewhere outside Rome, from Titus Pomponius to various nephews and great-nephews of his deceased patron and his own cousins. Young Sulla, the only friend he might have hoped to find, was dead. Nowhere to go save home. He turned his feet in the direction of the Vicus Cuprius and began to plod toward his father’s house on the Carinae, looking—and feeling—the epitome of despair.

Every male Roman citizen at seventeen was required to register for his campaign duty—even, these days, the Head Count—but, until the war with the Italians had broken out, it had not occurred to Cicero that he would ever actually be called upon to do any genuine soldiering; he had intended to use his Forum preceptors to secure for him an appointment where his literary talents would shine, and he would never need to don a mail-shirt or sword except on parade. But he did not have the luck, so much was clear now, and he knew in his slight bones that he was going to be subjected to a regimen he detested. That he would die.

Never really happy or comfortable in Rome, his father had gone back to Arpinum to ready his extensive lands for the winter. He would not, Cicero knew, be back in Rome until after his elder son was inducted into the army. Cicero’s younger brother, Quintus, now eight years old, had gone home with his father; he lacked Marcus’s brilliance and secretly preferred life in the country. Thus it was Cicero’s mother, Helvia, who had been obliged to stay behind in Rome to keep the house there going for her son, and she resented it.

“You’re nothing but a nuisance!” she said to him when he came in, lonely and unhappy enough to seek her out in the hope that she would lend him a sympathetic ear. “If it wasn’t for you I’d be at home with your father and we wouldn’t have to pay for this ridiculously expensive house. There’s not a slave in this entire city who isn’t a thief and a rogue, with the result that what time I don’t spend checking their accounts books I have to spend watching their every move. They water the wine, bill me for the best olives, then only serve the worst, buy half the amount of bread and oil we’re charged for, and eat and drink far too much themselves. I shall have to do all the shopping myself.” She paused for breath. “It’s all your fault, Marcus! These insane ambitions! Know your place, that’s what I always say. Not that anyone listens to me. You deliberately encourage your father to waste far too much of our precious money on your fancy education—you’ll never be another Gaius Marius, you know! A clumsier boy I’ve never met—and what’s the use of Homer and Hesiod, tell me that? You can’t make a meal out of paper. And you can’t make a career out of paper either. Yet here I’m stuck, all because—”

He didn’t wait to hear more. Marcus Tullius Cicero fled, hands over his ears, to his study.

That he owned a study was thanks to his father, who had given over what should have been his room for the exclusive use of his brilliant, extraordinarily promising son. Originally it had been the father possessed the ambition, though he had soon passed it on to the son. Keep such a prodigy at home in Arpinum? Never! Until the birth of Cicero, Gaius Marius had been Arpinum’s only famous man, and the Tullii Cicerones regarded themselves as a distinct cut above the Marii because the Marii were not as intelligent. Therefore let the Marii produce a man of war, of action—the Tullii Cicerones would produce a man of thought. Men of action came and went. Men of thought lasted forever.

The embryonic man of thought shut his study door and bolted it against his mother, then burst into tears.

On his birthday Cicero returned to the booth on the Campus Martius, knees shaking, and underwent a much shorter version of the original questioning.

“Whole name including cognomen?”

“Marcus Tullius Cicero Junior.”

“Tribe?”

“Cornelia.”

“Class?”

“First.”

The scrolls of orders for those reporting today were told over and his scroll found; it would be given to him to present to his commanding officer. The practical Roman mind did not overlook the possibility that verbal orders might be ignored. A copy would already be on its way to the recruitment officers in Capua.

The chairman of the committee laboriously read the fairly extensive remarks written on Cicero’s orders, then looked up coldly.

“Well, Marcus Tullius Cicero Junior, there’s been a timely intercession on your behalf,” said the chairman. “Originally we had placed you for service as a legionary and you would have gone to Capua. However, a special request has come from the Princeps Senatus that you be seconded to staff duties with one of the consuls. Accordingly, you have been posted to the staff of Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo. Report to him at his house at dawn tomorrow for his instructions. This committee notes that you have undergone no sort of preliminary training, and suggests therefore that you put in all your time until you take up your duties on the exercise fields of the Campus Martius. That is all. You are dismissed.”

Cicero’s knees shook even harder as the relief flooded through him. He took the precious scroll and hurried off. Staff duties! Oh, all the gods favor you, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus! Thank you, thank you! I will prove myself invaluable to Gnaeus Pompeius—I’ll act as his army historian or compose his speeches and I’ll never need to draw a sword!

He had no intention of attending any training exercises on the Campus Martius, for he had tried that in his sixteenth year, only to discover that he lacked neatness of foot, dexterity of hand, quickness of eye, presence of mind. Within a short time of being set to learn the drill with his wooden sword, he had found himself the focus of everybody’s attention. But not—as in the Forum—an admiring, awestruck circle—his antics on the Campus Martius made his audience laugh itself sore in the sides. And as time went on he became every other boy’s butt. His high shrill voice was mocked, his whinnying laugh was copied, his erudition thought beyond a joke, his elderliness worthy of the starring role in a farce. Marcus Tullius Cicero abandoned his military training, vowing never to resume it. No fifteen-year-old enjoys being a laughingstock, but this fifteen-year-old had already basked in the glow of grown men’s approval, and considered himself a special case in every way.

Some men, he had told himself ever since, were not constructed to be soldiers. And he was such a one. It was not cowardice! It was rather an abysmal lack of physical prowess. It couldn’t be marked against him as a weakness of innate character. Boys his own age were stupid, little better than animals, they prized their bodies but never their minds. Didn’t they understand that their minds would be adornments long after their bodies began to creak? Didn’t they want to be different? What was truly so desirable about being able to plug a spear into the exact middle of a target, or whack the head off a straw man? For Cicero was clever enough to see that targets and straw men were a far cry from the battlefield, and that many of these juvenile killers of symbols would loathe the reality.

At dawn the next morning he presented himself, wrapped in his toga virilis, at the house of Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo on the Forum side of the Palatine, wishing his father was with him for company when he saw how many hundreds of men were gathered there. A few recognized him as the rhetorical prodigy, but no one made any attempt to draw him into a conversation; he found himself gradually pushed into the most obscure corner of Pompey Strabo’s vast atrium. There he waited for hours watching the crowd thin and waiting for someone to ask him his business. The new senior consul was Rome’s most important man of the moment and all of Rome wanted a word with him or a favor from him. He also had a veritable army of clients, Picentines all, though Cicero had had no idea how many of these clients were resident in Rome until he experienced the enormous throng in Pompey Strabo’s house.

Perhaps a hundred men were left and Cicero was beginning to hope he would catch the eye of one of the seven secretaries when a lad of his own age or thereabouts sidled up to him and leaned against the wall to look him over. The eyes which flicked up and down were cool, dispassionate, and quite the most beautiful the brown-eyed Cicero had ever seen. So widely opened they seemed permanently to contain an expression of surprise, their color was a pure rich sky blue, vivid enough to deserve the term unique. A tumbled mass of bright gold hair owned two peculiarities; one was the quiff which stood up from the broad brow, the other a peak which grew down into the middle of the broad brow. Beneath this interesting mop there resided a fresh, rather perky face that had nothing Roman about it at all. The mouth was thin-lipped, the cheekbones broad, the nose short and snubbed, the chin dented, the skin pinkish and faintly freckled, the brows and lashes as gold as the hair. It was, however, a most likable face, and its owner after that initial examination of Cicero produced a smile so attractive that Cicero was won over.

“Who might you be?” the lad asked.

“Marcus Tullius Cicero Junior. Who might you be?”

“I’m Gnaeus Pompeius Junior.”

“Strabo?”

Young Pompey laughed without resentment. “Do I look cross-eyed, Marcus Tullius?”

“No. But isn’t it usual to adopt one’s father’s cognomen anyway?” asked Cicero.

“Not in my case,” said Pompey. “I intend to earn a cognomen for myself. I already know what it’s going to be.”

“What?”

“Magnus.”

Cicero emitted one of his neighing laughs. “that’s a bit much, isn’t it? ’Great’? Besides, you can’t give yourself a cognomen. Other people give it to you.”

“I know. But they will.”

No stranger to self-confidence, Pompey’s degree of it took Cicero’s breath away. “I wish you luck,” he said.

“What are you here for?”

“I’ve been posted to your father’s staff as a cadet.”

Pompey whistled. “Oh, Edepol! He won’t like you!”

“Why?”

The eyes lost their friendly gleam, became emotionless again. “You’re a weed.”

“I may be a weed, Gnaeus Pompeius, but what I own by way of intelligence is better than anyone else’s!” snapped Cicero.

“That won’t impress my father,” said the son, looking down complacently at his own well-knit, broad-shouldered body.

His answer reduced Cicero to miserable silence; the depression which from time to time haunted him more mercilessly than it did most people four times his age began to descend. He swallowed, looked at the floor, willed Pompey to go away and leave him alone.