1. First Man in Rome Read online

  1. First Man in Rome

  Colleen Mccullough

  Colleen McCullough THE FIRST MAN IN ROME

  THE FIRST YEAR (110 B.C)

  IN THE CONSULSHIP OF MARCUS MINUCIUS RUFUS AND SPURIUS POSTUMIUS ALBINUS

  Having no personal commitment to either of the new consuls, Gaius Julius Caesar and his sons simply tacked themselves onto the procession which started nearest to their own house, the procession of the senior consul, Marcus Minucius Rufus. Both consuls lived on the Palatine, but the house of the junior consul, Spurius Postumius Albinus, was in a more fashionable area. Rumor had it Albinus's debts were escalating dizzily, no surprise; such was the price of becoming consul. Not that Gaius Julius Caesar was worried about the heavy burden of debt incurred while ascending the political ladder; nor, it seemed likely, would his sons ever need to worry on that score. It was four hundred years since a Julius had sat in the consul's ivory curule chair, four hundred years since a Julius had been able to scrape up that kind of money. The Julian ancestry was so stellar, so august, that opportunities to fill the family coffers had passed the succeeding generations by, and as each century finished, the family of Julius had found itself ever poorer. Consul? Impossible! Praetor, next magistracy down the ladder from consul? Impossible! No, a safe and humble backbencher's niche in the Senate was the inheritance of a Julius these days, including that branch of the family called Caesar because of their luxuriantly thick hair. So the toga which Gaius Julius Caesar's body servant draped about- his left shoulder, wrapped about his frame, hung about his left arm, was the plain white toga of a man who had never aspired to the ivory curule chair of high office. Only his dark red shoes, his iron senator's ring, and the five-inch-wide purple stripe on the right shoulder of his tunic distinguished his garb from that of his sons, Sextus and Gaius, who wore ordinary shoes, their seal rings only, and a thin purple knight's stripe on their tunics. Even though dawn had not yet broken, there were little ceremonies to usher in the day. A short prayer and an offering of a salt cake at the shrine to the gods of the house in the atrium, and then, when the servant on door duty called out that he could see the torches coming down the hill, a reverence to Janus Patulcius, the god who permitted safe opening of a door. Father and sons passed out into the narrow cobbled alley, there to separate. While the two young men joined the ranks of the knights who preceded the new senior consul, Gaius Julius Caesar himself waited until Marcus Minucius Rufus passed by with his lictors, then slid in among the ranks of the senators who followed him.

  It was Marcia who murmured a reverence to Janus Clusivius, the god who presided over the closing of a door, Marcia who dismissed the yawning servants to other duties. The men gone, she could see to her own little expedition. Where were the girls? A laugh gave her the answer, coming from the cramped little sitting room the girls called their own; and there they sat, her daughters, the two Julias, breakfasting on bread thinly smeared with honey. How lovely they were! It had always been said that every Julia ever born was a treasure, for the Julias had the rare and fortunate gift of making their men happy. And these two young Julias bade fair to keep up the family tradition. Julia Major called Julia was almost eighteen. Tall and possessed of grave dignity, she had pale, bronzy-tawny hair pulled back into a bun on the nape of her neck, and her wide grey eyes surveyed her world seriously, yet placidly. A restful and intellectual Julia, this one. Julia Minor called Julilla was half past sixteen. The last child of her parents' marriage, she hadn't really been a welcome addition until she became old enough to enchant her softhearted mother and father as well as her three older siblings. She was honey-colored. Skin, hair, eyes, each a mellow gradation of amber. Of course it had been Julilla who laughed. Julilla laughed at everything. A restless and unintellectual Julia, this one. "Ready, girls?" asked their mother. They crammed the rest of their sticky bread into their mouths, wiggled their fingers daintily through a bowl of water and then a cloth, and followed Marcia out of the room. "It's chilly," said their mother, plucking warm woolen cloaks from the arms of a servant. Stodgy, unglamorous cloaks. Both girls looked disappointed, but knew better than to protest; they endured being wrapped up like caterpillars into cocoons, only their faces showing amid fawn folds of homespun. Identically swaddled herself, Marcia formed up her little convoy of daughters and servant escort, and led it through the door into the street. They had lived in this modest house on the lower Germalus of the Palatine since Father Sextus had bestowed it upon his younger son, Gaius, together with five hundred iugera of good land between Bovillae and Aricia a sufficient endowment to ensure that Gaius and his family would have the wherewithal to maintain a seat in the Senate. But not, alas, the wherewithal to climb the rungs of the cursus honorum, the ladder of honor leading up to the praetorship and consulship. Father Sextus had had two sons and not been able to bear parting with one; a rather selfish decision, since it meant his property already dwindled because he too had had a sentimental sire and a younger brother who also had to be provided for was of necessity split between Sextus, his elder son, and Gaius, his younger son. It had meant that neither of his sons could attempt the cursus honorum, be praetor and consul. Brother Sextus had not been as sentimental as Father Sextus; just as well! He and his wife, Popillia, had produced three sons, an intolerable burden for a senatorial family. So he had summoned up the necessary steel to part with his eldest boy, given him up for adoption to the childless Quintus Lutatius Catulus, thereby making a fortune for himself as well as ensuring that his eldest son would come into a fortune. Old Catulus the adopter was fabulously wealthy, and very pleased to pay over a huge sum for the chance to adopt a boy of patrician stock, great good looks, and a reasonable brain. The money the boy had brought Brother Sextus his real father had been carefully invested in land and in city property, and hopefully would produce sufficient income to allow both of Brother Sextus's younger sons a chance at the senior magistracies. Strong-minded Brother Sextus aside, the whole trouble with the Julius Caesars was their tendency to breed more than one son, and then turn sentimental about the predicament more than one son embroiled them in; they were never able to rule their hearts, give up some of their too-profuse male offspring for adoption, and see that the children they kept married into lots of money. For this reason had their once-vast landholdings shrunk with the passing of the centuries, progressively split into smaller and smaller parcels to provide for two and three sons, and some of it sold to provide dowries for daughters. Marcia's husband was just such a Julius Caesar a sentimentally doting parent, too proud of his sons and too enslaved by his daughters to be properly, Romanly sensible. The older boy should have been adopted out and both girls should have been promised in marriage to rich men years ago; the younger son should also have been contracted to a rich bride. Only money made a high political career possible. Patrician blood had long become a liability.

  It was not a very auspicious sort of New Year's Day. Cold, windy, blowing a fine mist of rain that slicked the cobbles dangerously and intensified the stale stench of an old burning in the air. Dawn had come, late because sunless, and this was one Roman holiday the ordinary people would prefer to spend in a cramped confinement indoors, lying on their straw pallets playing the ageless game they called Hide the Sausage. Had the weather been fine, the streets would have been thronged with people from all walks of life going to a favorite vantage point from which to view the pomp in the Forum Romanum and on the Capitol; as it was, Marcia and her daughters found it easy walking, their servant escort not needing to use brute force in making a way for the ladies. The tiny alley in which the house of Gaius Julius Caesar lay opened onto the Clivus Victoriae not far above the Porta Romulana, the ancient gate in the ancient Palatine city's walls, vast blocks of stone laid down by Romulus h
imself, now overgrown or built upon or carved up with the graffitic initials of six hundred years of tourists. Turning right to ascend the Clivus Victoriae toward the corner where the Palatine Germalus looked down upon the Forum Romanum, the ladies reached their destination five minutes later, a piece of vacant land occupying the best spot of all. Twelve years earlier one of the finest houses in Rome had stood there. Nowadays the site bore little evidence of its previous dwelling, just an occasional stone half-buried in grass. The view was splendid; from where the servants set up campstools for Marcia and the two Julias, the women had an unobstructed vista before them of Forum Romanum and Capitol, with the seething declivity of the Subura adding definition to the northern hills of the city's horizon. "Did you hear?" asked that Caecilia who was the wife of the merchant banker Titus Pomponius. Very pregnant, she was sitting nearby with her Aunt Pilia; they lived next but one down the street from the Caesars. "No, what?" asked Marcia, leaning forward. "The consuls and priests and augurs started just after midnight, to make sure they'd finish the prayers and rites in time " "They always do that!" said Marcia, interrupting. "If they make a mistake, they have to start all over again." "I know, I know, I'm not that ignorant!" said Caecilia tartly, annoyed because she knew she was being put in her place by a praetor's daughter. "The thing is, they didn't make a mistake! The auspices were bad. Lightning four times on the right, and an owl inside the augural place screeching as if being murdered. And now the weather it's not going to be a good year, or a good pair of consuls.'' "Well, I could have told you that without benefit of owls or lightning," said Marcia, whose father had not lived to be consul, but as praetor urbanus had built the great aqueduct which brought sweet fresh water into Rome, and kept his memory green as one of the all-time greats in government. "A miserable assortment of candidates to begin with, and even then the electors couldn't pick the best of such a shabby lot. I daresay Marcus Minucius Rufus will try, but Spurius Postumius Albinus! They've always been inadequate." "Who?" asked Caecilia, who wasn't very bright. "The Postumius Albinus clan," said Marcia, her eyes darting to her daughters to make sure they were all right; they had spotted four girls belonging to two of the Claudius Pulchers such a tribe of them, it was never possible to keep them all straight! And they usually weren't straight. But these girls gathered on the site of the Flaccus house had all gone to school together as children, and it was impossible to erect social barriers against a caste almost as aristocratic as the Julius Caesars. Especially when the Claudius Pulchers also perpetually battled the enemies of the old nobility, too many children allied to dwindling land and money. Now her two Julias had moved their campstools down to where the other girls sat unsupervised where were their mothers? Oh. Talking to Sulla. Shady! That settled it. "Girls!" Marcia called sharply. Two draped heads turned to look at her. "Come back here," she said, and added, "at once." They came. "Mama, please can't we stay with our friends?" asked young Julilla, eyes pleading. "No," said Marcia, in the tone which indicated That Was That. Down below in the Forum Romanum the procession was forming, as the long crocodile which had wended its way from the house of Marcus Minucius Rufus met up with the equally long crocodile originating at the house of Spurius Postumius Albinus. The knights came first, not as many as on a fine sunny New Year's Day, but a respectable enough gathering of seven hundred or so; as the light improved but the rain grew a trifle harder, they moved off up the slope of the Clivus Capitolinus to where, at the first bend in this short and hilly track, the priests and slaughtermen waited with two flawless white bulls on spangled halters, their horns gilded and their dewlaps garlanded. At the rear of the knights strolled the twenty-four lictors of the new consuls. After the lictors came the consuls themselves, and after them the Senate, those who had held senior magistracies in purple-bordered togas, the rest of the House in plain white togas. And last of all came those who did not by rights belong there, sightseers and a host of the consuls' clients. Nice, thought Marcia. Perhaps a thousand men walked slowly up the ramp toward the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the Great God of Rome, rearing its impressive bulk in highest place of all on the more southerly of the two hills constituting the Capitol. The Greeks built their temples on the ground, but the Romans built theirs on lofty platforms with many steps, and the steps which led up to Jupiter Optimus Maximus were indeed many. Nice, thought Marcia again as the sacrificial animals and their escort joined the procession, and all went on together until at last they clustered as best they could in the restricted space before the great temple on high. Somewhere among them were her husband and her two sons, a part of the governing class of this mightiest of all cities of the world.

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  Somewhere among them too was Gaius Marius. As an ex-praetor, he wore the purple-bordered toga praetexta, and on his dark red senatorial shoes he wore the crescent-shaped buckle his praetorship permitted. Yet it wasn't enough. He had been a praetor five years earlier, should have been consul three years ago. But he knew now that he would never be allowed to run for the consulship. Never. Why? Because he wasn't good enough. That was the only reason why. Who had ever heard of a family called Marius? No one.

  Gaius Marius was an upstart from the rural nowhere, a Military Man, someone who was said to have no Greek, and who still could be trapped by excitement or anger into putting upcountry inflections on his native Latin. It didn't matter that he could buy and sell half the Senate; it didn't matter that on a battlefield he could outgeneral both halves of the Senate. What did matter was blood. And his just wasn't good enough. Gaius Marius hailed from Arpinum not so many miles away from Rome really, but dangerously close to the border between Latium and Samnium, and therefore a trifle suspect in its loyalties and leanings; the Samnites were still Rome's most obdurate enemies among the Italians. Full Roman citizenship had come late to Arpinum only seventy-eight years ago and the district still did not enjoy proper municipal status. Ah, but it was so beautiful! Huddled in the foothills of the high Apennines, a fruitful valley cupping both the Liris and the Melfa rivers, where the grape grew with wonderful results for table as well as vintage, where the crops returned a hundred-and-fifty-fold, and the sheep were fat and the wool surprisingly fine. Peaceful. Green. Sleepy. Cooler than expected in summer, warmer than expected in winter. The water in both rivers was full of fish; the dense forests on the mountains ringing Arpinum's bowl around still yielded superb timber for ships and buildings. And there were pitch pines and torch pines, oaks to litter the ground with acorns for the pigs in autumn, fat hams and sausages and bacon fit to grace any noble table in Rome which they often did. Gaius Marius's family had been in Arpinum for centuries, prided itself upon its Latinity. Was Marius a Volscian name, a Samnite name? Did it have an Oscan ring to it, just because there were Samnites and Volsci called Marius? No! Marius was Latin. He, Gaius Marius, was as good as any of those lofty-nosed, haughty nobles who so delighted in putting him down. In fact and this was what really hurt! he was much better than any of them. His feeling told him so. How could a man explain away a feeling? A feeling he hosted like a guest who refused to leave, no matter how inhospitably he behaved? It was a long, long time since that feeling had first moved inside his mind, time enough and more for the events of the ensuing years to have shown it its futility, prod it into moving out in despair. Yet it never had. It lived inside his mind today as vividly and indomitably as it had in the beginning, fully half a lifetime ago.

  How strange the world was! thought Gaius Marius, looking closely into the glazed faces of the men wearing purple-bordered togas all around him in that dreary, mizzling hour after dawn. No, not a Tiberius or a Gaius Sempronius Gracchus among them! Pluck out Marcus Aemilius Scaurus and Publius Rutilius Rufus, and you were left with a gaggle of very little men. Yet all of them looked down on him Gaius Marius as a bumptious nobody with more gall than grace. Simply because they had the right blood in their veins. Any one of them knew if the right circumstances came into being, he might be entitled to call himself the First Man in Rome. Just as Scipio Africanus, Aemilius Paul
lus, Scipio Aemilianus, and perhaps a dozen others over the centuries of the Republic had been so called. The First Man in Rome was not the best man; he was the first among other men who were his equals in rank and opportunity. And to be the First Man in Rome was something far better than kingship, autocracy, despotism, call it what you would. The First Man in Rome held on to that title by sheer pre-eminence, perpetually aware that his world was stuffed with others eager to supplant him others who could supplant him, legally and bloodlessly, by producing a superior brand of pre-eminence. To be the First Man in Rome was more than being consul; consuls came and went at the rate of two a year. Where as the centuries of the Roman Republic passed, only the smallest handful of men would come to be hailed as the First Man in Rome. At the moment Rome had no First Man; indeed, there had been no First Man since the death of Scipio Aemilianus nineteen years before. Marcus Aemilius Scaurus undoubtedly came closest, but he didn't have quite enough power auctoritas they called it, a blend of power, authority, and fame peculiar to Rome to merit the title, nor was the title applied to him. Save by himself!

  There was a sudden reflexive stir and murmur among the crowd of senators; the senior consul, Marcus Minucius Rufus, was about to offer his white bull to the Great God, only it wasn't behaving itself, must have had the prescience to avoid its last manger of drugged fodder. Not a good year, everyone was saying it already. Poor omens during the night watch of the consuls, a miserable day, and now the first of the two victims was snorting and plunging, had half a dozen sacerdotal underlings hanging on to his horns and ears silly fools, they should have put a ring through his nose as a precaution. Stripped to the waist like the other attendants, the acolyte carrying the stunning hammer didn't wait for the raising of the head toward the sky, followed by the dipping of the head toward the earth; it could always be argued successfully later that the beast had lifted and lowered its head dozens of times during its fight to survive. He stepped in and swung his iron weapon up and down so quickly its shape was a blur. The dull crack of the blow was followed immediately by another, the noise of the bull's knees hitting the stone paving as it came down, all sixteen hundred pounds of it. Then the half-naked axeman brought his double-bladed instrument down into the neck and the blood was pouring everywhere, some of it caught in the sacrificial cups, most of it a steaming sticky river coursing off to nowhere, melting and thinning amid the rain-soaked ground. You could tell much about a man from how he reacted to the shedding of blood, thought Gaius Marius, clinically remote, a half smile curling the corners of his full mouth as he saw this one step hastily aside, that one indifferent to the fact his left shoe was filling up, another trying to pretend he wasn't on the verge of puking. Ahhhhhh! There was the man to watch! The young yet fully mature fellow on the outskirts of the knights, togate, yet minus even a knight's stripe on the right shoulder of his tunic; he hadn't been there long, and now he moved off again down the slope of the Clivus Capitolinus toward the Forum. But not before Gaius Marius had seen his extraordinary grey-white eyes glisten, flare, drink up the sight of the blood redly, greedily. Positive he had never seen the fellow before, Gaius Marius wondered who he was; not a nobody, certainly. The kind of looks called epicene, a beauty as much feminine as masculine, and such amazing coloring! Skin as white as milk, hair like the rising sun. Apollo incarnate. Was that who he had been? No. The god never existed with eyes like the mortal man who had just left; his were the eyes of someone who suffered, and there was no point in being a god if you had to suffer, was there? Though the second bull was better drugged, it fought too, even harder. This time the hammerman didn't manage to strike true the first time, and the poor maddened creature turned in blind rage to charge. Then some thinking fellow grabbed the swaying bag of its scrotum, and in the single frozen instant his action afforded the slaughtermen, the hammerman and the axeman swung together. Down went the bull, spraying everyone within two dozen paces with blood, including both the consuls: Spurius Postumius Albinus was saturated; so was his younger brother, Aulus, standing just behind and to one side of him. Gaius Marius eyed them askance, wondering if the omen was what he thought it was. Bad news for Rome, anyway. And still his unwelcome guest, the feeling, refused to go away; in fact, of late it had greatly increased in strength. As if the moment approached. The moment in which he, Gaius Marius, would become the First Man in Rome. Every particle of common sense in him and there were many screamed that his feeling was a traitor, a trap which would betray him and lead to ignominy and death. Yet he went on experiencing it, the ineradicable feeling that he would become the First Man in Rome. Ridiculous! argued the man of eminent good sense: he was forty-seven years old, he had limped in sixth and last among the six men elected as praetors five years ago, he was too old now to seek the consulship without benefit of name and a host of clients. His time had gone. Gone, gone, gone. The consuls were finally being inaugurated; that pompous ass Lucius Caecilius Metellus Dalmaticus who rejoiced in the title of Pontifex Maximus was rattling off the concluding prayers, and soon the senior consul, Minucius Rufus, would have the herald call the Senate to meet inside the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. There they would fix the date of the Latin Festival on the Alban Mount; discuss which of the provinces must receive new governors, and which prorogued governors; draw the lots apportioning the provinces, for the praetors as well as the consuls; some self-serving tribune of the plebs would start raving on about the People; Scaurus would squash the presumptuous fool like a beetle underfoot; and one of the many Caecilius Metelluses would drone interminably about the decline in the moral and ethical standards of Rome's younger generation, until dozens of voices from all around him told him to shut up and pull his head in. Same old Senate same old People same old Rome same old Gaius Marius. Now forty-seven years old. Next year he'd be fifty-seven, the year after that sixty-seven, and then they'd shove him into the middle of a pyre of logs and kindling, and up he'd go in a puff of smoke. Goodbye, Gaius Marius, you upstart from the pigpens of Arpinum, you non-Roman. Sure enough, the herald brayed his summons. Sighing, Gaius Marius began to move, lifting his head to see if there was anyone within footshot he could tread on heavily and feel good about doing so. No one. Of course. At which moment his eye caught the eye of Gaius Julius Caesar, who was smiling as if he knew exactly what Gaius Marius was thinking. Arrested, Gaius Marius gazed back. Only a backbencher, but never mere lobby fodder, this most senior of the Julius Caesars left in the Senate now his older brother, Sextus, was dead. Tall, as erect as if he were a Military Man, wide in the shoulders still, his fine head of silver-gilt hair a fitting crown for his lined, handsome face. He wasn't young, had to be upward of fifty-five years old, but he looked as if he was going to become one of those desiccated ancients the patrician nobility produced with monotonous regularity, tottering off to every meeting of Senate or People at ninety-plus, and continuing to speak praiseworthy good sense. The sort you couldn't kill with a sacrificial axe. The sort who when it was all boiled down made Rome what Rome was, in spite of the plethora of Caecilius Metelluses. Better than the rest of the world put together. "Which Metellus is going to harangue us today?" asked Caesar as they fell in beside each other and began to ascend the many steps of the temple. "One still to earn his extra name," said Gaius Marius, his gigantic eyebrows leaping up and down like millipedes on pins. "Quintus Caecilius plain old Metellus, younger brother of our revered Pontifex Maximus." "Why him?" "Because he's going to run for consul next year, I think. So he's got to start making noises of the right kind now," said Gaius Marius, standing aside to permit the older man to precede him into the earthly dwelling place of the Great God, Jupiter Optimus Maximus Jupiter Best and Greatest. "I do believe you are correct," said Caesar. The vast central room of the temple was reduced to semi-darkness, so poor was the light outside, but the brick-red face of the Great God glowed as if illuminated from within. He was very old, made centuries before by the famous Etruscan sculptor Vulca out of terracotta, though gradually he had been gifted with an ivory robe, gold hair, gold sandals, g
old thunderbolt, even silver skin on his arms and legs, and ivory nails on his fingers and toes. Only his face remained the color of that richly ruddy clay, clean-shaven in the Etruscan fashion Rome had inherited; his brainless shut-mouthed smile curved his lips up almost to his ears, and gave him the air of a fatuous parent determined to ignore the fact that his child was busy setting fire to the nursemaid. On each side of the Great God's room opened another room, the left-hand one to house his daughter Minerva, the right-hand one to house his wife, Juno. Each lady had a wonderful statue of herself in gold and ivory within her cella, and each lady bore with resignation the presence of an uninvited guest, for when the temple was built two of the old gods refused to move out; Romans being Romans, they simply left the old gods there alongside the new. "I wonder, Gaius Marius," said Caesar, "if you would care to share my dinner tomorrow afternoon?" That was surprising! Gaius Marius blinked, using the fraction of time the action brought him to arrive at a conclusion. After something, was he? Undoubtedly. But it wouldn't be shoddy. And one thing no one could say about the Julius Caesars, that they were snobs. A Julius Caesar didn't need to be a snob. If you could trace your lineage straight back in the male line to Iulus, Aeneas, Anchises, and the goddess Venus, you were secure enough to find it no comedown to mix with anyone from a dockside worker to a Caecilius Metellus. "Thank you, Gaius Julius," said Marius. "I would be very pleased to share your dinner."