2. The Grass Crown Read online

  They had met on the battlefield of Arausio, Drusus and Silo, after the battle was over and eighty thousand Roman and Italian Allied troops lay dead thanks mainly to Caepio's father. Forged in unforgettable circumstances, their friendship had grown with the years; and with the bond of a mutual concern for the fate of the Italian Allies, a cause to which both men were pledged. They were an unlikely combination, Silo and Drusus, but no amount of complaining on Caepio's part or lecturing on the part of some of the Senate's senior members had so far managed to drive a wedge between them. The Italian Silo looked more Roman, the Roman Drusus looked more Italian. Silo had the right kind of nose, the right kind of middling coloring, the right kind of bearing; a tall man and well built, he was a fine-looking fellow save for his eyes, which were a yellowish green and thus were unseemly, a trifle snakelike because he rarely blinked; however, this was not remarkable in a Marsian, as the Marsi were snake-worshippers and had trained themselves not to blink more than absolutely necessary. Silo's father had been the leading man of the Marsi, and after his death the son took his place, despite his youth. Moneyed and highly educated, Silo ought by rights to have commanded a great deal of respect from just those Romans who if they did not blatantly cut him looked down their noses at him and stooped to patronize him. For Quintus Poppaedius was not a Roman, nor even a holder of the Latin Rights; Quintus Poppaedius Silo was an Italian, and therefore an inferior being. He came from the rich highlands of the central Italian peninsula, not so very many miles from Rome, where the great Fucine Lake rose and fell in mysterious cycles having nothing to do with rivers or precipitation, and the chain of the Apennines divided to hedge the lands of the Marsi around. Of all Italian peoples, the Marsi were the most prosperous and the most numerous. For centuries they had been Rome's loyalest allies; it was the proudest boast of the Marsi that no Roman general had ever triumphed without Marsi in his army, nor triumphed over Marsi. Yet even after the passing of so many centuries, the Marsi like the other Italian nationals were regarded as unworthy of the full Roman citizenship. In consequence, they could not bid for Roman State contracts, or marry Roman citizens, or appeal to Roman justice in the event of any conviction on a capital charge. They could be flogged within an inch of their lives, they could have their crops or their products or their women stolen without redress at law if the thief was a Roman. Had Rome left the Marsi to their own devices in their fertile highlands, all these injustices might have been less intrusive, but as was true in every part of the peninsula that did not belong outright to Rome the lands of the Marsi had a Roman implant in their midst in the guise of the Latin Rights colony called Alba Fucentia. And, of course, the town of Alba Fucentia became a city, then the biggest settlement in the whole region, for it had a nucleus of full Roman citizens able to conduct business freely with Rome, and the rest of its population held the Latin Rights, a kind of second-class Roman citizenship allowing most privileges belonging to the full citizenship, save only that those with the ius Latii could not vote in any Roman election; the city's magistrates automatically inherited the full citizenship for themselves and all their direct descendants when they assumed office. Thus had Alba Fucentia grown at the expense of the old Marsic capital, Marruvium, and sat there as a perpetual reminder of the differences between the Roman and the Italian. In olden days all of Italy had aspired to eventual owning of Latin Rights and then the full citizenship, for Rome under the doughty and brilliant leadership of men like Appius Claudius Caecus had been conscious of the necessity of change, the prudence in seeing all Italy eventually become properly Roman. But then after some Italian nations had sided with Hannibal during the years when he had marched up and down the Italian peninsula, the attitude of Rome hardened, and the awarding of the full citizenship or even the ius Latii ceased. One reason had been the swelling immigration of Italians into Roman and Latin towns and also into Rome herself. Protracted residence in these places brought with it a sharing in the Latin Rights, and even in the full Roman citizenship. The Paeligni had complained of the loss of four thousand of their people to the Latin town of Fregellae, and used this as an excuse not to furnish Rome with soldiers when she demanded them. From time to time Rome attempted to do something about the problem of mass immigration; these efforts had culminated in a law of the tribune of the plebs Marcus Junius Pennus the year before Fregellae revolted. Pennus expelled every non-citizen from the city of Rome and her colony towns, and in so doing uncovered a scandal which rocked the Roman nobility to its foundations. The consul of four years before, Marcus Perperna, was discovered to be an Italian who had never held the Roman citizenship! A wave of reaction inside the ranks of those who governed Rome had immediately occurred; one of the leading opponents of Italian advancement was Drusus's father, Marcus Livius Drusus the Censor, who had connived at the disgrace of Gaius Gracchus and the tearing down of Gaius Gracchus's laws. No one could have predicted that the Censor's son, Drusus who came young into the role of paterfamilias when his father died in office as censor would forsake the attitudes and precepts of Drusus the Censor. Of impeccable plebeian-noble ancestry, a member of the College of Pontifices, enormously wealthy, connected by blood and marriage to the patrician houses of Servilius Caepio, Cornelius Scipio and Aemilius Lepidus, young Marcus Livius Drusus ought to have evolved into a pillar of the ultra-conservative faction which controlled the Senate and therefore controlled Rome. That this had not happened was pure chance; Drusus had been present as a tribune of the soldiers at the battle of Arausio, when the patrician consular Quintus Servilius Caepio had refused to co-operate with the New Man Gaius Mallius Maximus, and in consequence the legions of Rome and her Italian Allies had been annihilated by the Germans in Gaul-across-the-Alps. When Drusus had returned from Gaul-across-the-Alps, he cherished two new factors in his life; one, the friendship of the Marsian nobleman Quintus Poppaedius Silo, and the other, the knowledge that the men of his own class and background in particular his father-in-law Caepio had no appreciation of or respect for the efforts of the soldiers who died at Arausio, be they noble Romans, or Italian auxiliaries, or Roman capite censi. This was not to say, however, that young Marcus Livius Drusus immediately espoused the aims and aspirations of a true reformer; he was too much a product of his class. But he like other Roman noblemen before him had been exposed to an experience which made him think. It was said that the fate of the Brothers Gracchi had been decided when the elder, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus a scion of the highest nobility in Rome had journeyed as a young man through Etruria and seen the public lands of Rome in the control of a mere handful of rich Roman men who grazed it using chain gangs of slaves locked up each night in the infamous barracks known as ergastula. Where, Tiberius Gracchus had asked himself, were the smallholder Romans who ought to be in possession of these lands, earning a fruitful living and breeding sons for the army? Product of his class though he was, Tiberius Gracchus had begun to think and, being a product of his class, he was endowed with a strong sense of right as well as an overwhelming love for Rome.