1. First Man in Rome Page 4

  3

  The trouble with being an anointed sovereign visiting the city of Rome was that one could not cross its pomerium, its sacred boundary. So Jugurtha, King of Numidia, was forced to spend his New Year's Day kicking his heels in the outrageously expensive villa he was renting on the higher slopes of the Pincian Hill, overlooking the huge bend in the Tiber which enclosed the Campus Martius. The agent who had secured the villa for him had raved about its outlook, the view into the distance of the Janiculum and the Vatican Hill, the green sward of both the little Tiber-bounded plains, Martius and Vaticanus, the broad blue band of the big river. Bet there were no rivers the size of dear old Father Tiber in Numidia! the presumptuous little agent had burbled, all the while concealing the fact that he was acting for a senator who professed undying loyalty to Jugurtha's cause, yet was mighty anxious to close a deal for his villa that would keep him well supplied with the most costly of freshwater eels for months to come. Why did they think any man let alone a king! who was not a Roman was automatically a fool and a dupe? Jugurtha was well aware of who owned the villa, well aware too that he was being swindled in the matter of its rent; but there were times and places for frankness, and Rome at the moment when he closed the deal for the villa was not a place or a time for frankness. From where he sat on the loggia in front of the vast peristyle-garden, his view was unimpeded. But to Jugurtha it was a small view, and when the wind was right the stench of the nightsoil fertilizing the market gardens of the outer Campus Martius around the Via Recta was strong enough to make him wish he had elected to live further out, somewhere around Bovillae or Tusculum. Used to the enormous distances of Numidia, he thought the fifteen-mile ride from Bovillae or Tusculum into Rome a mere trifle. And since it turned out he could not enter the city anyway what was the point in being housed close enough to spit over their accursed sacred boundary? If he turned ninety degrees he could, of course, see the back cliffs of the Capitol and the wrong end of the mighty temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in which, at this very moment, his agents assured him, the new consuls were holding the first senatorial meeting of their year in office. How did one deal with the Romans? If he only knew that, he wouldn't be the worried man he admitted to himself he was.

  In the beginning it had seemed simple enough. His grandfather had been the great Masinissa, who had forged the Kingdom of Numidia out of the wreckage left strewn up and down two thousand miles of North African coast by Rome's defeat of Punic Carthage. At first Masinissa's gathering of power to himself had been with the open connivance of Rome; though later, when he had grown uncomfortably powerful and the Punic flavor of his organization gave Rome flutters of disquiet about the rise of a new Carthage, Rome turned somewhat against him. Luckily for Numidia, Masinissa had died at the right moment, and, understanding only too well that a strong king is always succeeded by a weakling, he left Numidia to be divided by Scipio Aemilianus among his three sons. Clever Scipio Aemilianus! He didn't carve up Numidia's territory into thirds; he carved up the kingly duties instead. The eldest got custody of the treasury and the palaces; the middle son was appointed Numidia's war leader; and the youngest inherited all the functions of law and justice. Which meant the son with the army didn't have the money to foment rebellion, the son with the money didn't have the army to foment rebellion, and the son with the law on his side had neither money nor army to foment rebellion. Before time and accumulating resentment might have fomented rebellion anyway, the two younger sons died, leaving the oldest son, Micipsa, to rule on alone. However, both his dead brothers had left children to complicate the future: two legitimate sons, and a bastard named Jugurtha. One of these young men would ascend the throne when Micipsa died but which one? Then late in his life the hitherto childless Micipsa produced two sons of his own, Adherbal and Hiempsal. Thus did the court seethe with rivalries, for the ages of all these potential heirs were skewed exactly the wrong way around. Jugurtha the bastard was the oldest of them all, and the sons of the reigning King were mere babies. His grandfather Masinissa had despised Jugurtha, not so much because he was a bastard as because his mother was of the humblest stock in the kingdom: she was a nomad Berber girl. Micipsa inherited Masinissa's dislike of Jugurtha, and when he saw what a fine-looking and intelligent fellow Jugurtha had grown into, he found a way to eliminate this oldest potential contender for the throne. Scipio Aemilianus had demanded that Numidia send auxiliary troops to assist him at the siege of Numantia, so Micipsa dispatched his military levy under the command of Jugurtha, thinking Jugurtha would die in Spain. It didn't turn out that way. Jugurtha took to war as born warriors do; besides which, he made immediate friends among the Romans, two of whom he was to prize as his best and dearest friends. They were junior military tribunes attached to the staff of Scipio Aemilianus, and their names were Gaius Marius and Publius Rutilius Rufus. All three were the same age, twenty-three. At the close of the campaign, when Scipio Aemilianus summoned Jugurtha into his command tent to deliver a homily on the subject of dealing honorably with Rome rather than with any particular Romans, Jugurtha managed to keep a straight face. For if his exposure to Romans during the siege of Numantia had taught him anything about them, it was that almost all Romans who aspired to high public office were chronically short of money. In other words, they could be bought. On his return to Numidia, Jugurtha carried a letter from Scipio Aemilianus to King Micipsa. It extolled the bravery, good sense, and superior intelligence of Jugurtha so much that old Micipsa put away the dislike he had inherited from his father. And about the time that Gaius Sempronius Gracchus died in the Grove of Furrina beneath the Janiculan Hill, King Micipsa formally adopted Jugurtha and raised him to senior status among the heirs to the Numidian throne. However, he was careful to indicate that Jugurtha must never become king; his role was to assume the guardianship of Micipsa's own sons, now entering their early adolescence. Almost as soon as he had set this situation up, King Micipsa died, leaving two underage heirs to his throne and Jugurtha as regent. Within a year Micipsa's younger son, Hiempsal, was assassinated at Jugurtha's instigation; the older son, Adherbal, escaped Jugurtha's net and fled to Rome, where he presented himself to the Senate and demanded that Rome settle the affairs of Numidia and strip Jugurtha of all authority.

  "Why are we so afraid of them?" Jugurtha demanded, turning from his thoughts back to the present moment, the veil of soft rain drifting across the exercise fields and market gardens and obscuring the far bank of the Tiber completely. There were some twenty men on the loggia, but all save one were bodyguards. These were not gladiatorial hirelings, but Jugurtha's own men of Numidia the same men, in fact, who had brought Jugurtha the head of young Prince Hiempsal seven years before, and followed up that gift five years later with the head of Prince Adherbal. The sole exception and the man to whom Jugurtha had addressed his question was a big, Semitic-looking man not far short of Jugurtha in size, sitting in a comfortable chair alongside his king. An outsider might have deemed them closely related by blood, which in actual fact they were; though it was a fact the King preferred to forget. Jugurtha's despised mother had been a simple nomad girl from a backward tribe of the Gaetuli Berbers, a mere nothing of a girl who by some quirk of fate had owned a face and a body akin to Helen of Troy's. And the King's companion on this miserable New Year's Day was his half brother, son of his humble mother and the court baron to whom Jugurtha's father had married her for the sake of convenience. The half brother's name was Bomilcar, and he was very loyal. "Why are we so afraid of them?" Jugurtha asked again, more urgently, more despairingly. Bomilcar sighed. "The answer's simple, I would think," he said. "It wears a steel helmet a bit like a basin turned upside down, a brownish-red tunic, and over that a long shirt of knitted chain mail. It carries a silly little short sword, a dagger almost as big, and one or two tiny-headed spears. It isn't a mercenary. It isn't even a pauper. It's called a Roman infantryman." Jugurtha grunted, ended in shaking his head. "Only a part of the answer, Baron. Roman soldiers are perishable; they die." "They die very hard," said Bom
ilcar. "No, there's more to it than that. I don't understand! You can buy them like bread in a bakery, and that ought to mean they're as soft inside as bread. But they aren't." "Their leaders, you mean?" "Their leaders. The eminent Conscript Fathers of the Senate. They are utterly corrupt! Therefore they ought to be crawling with decay. Soft to melting, insubstantial. But they aren't. They're as hard as flint, as cold as ice, as subtle as a Parthian satrap. They never give up. Take hold of one, tame him to servility, and the next moment he's gone, you're dealing with a different face in a different set of circumstances." "Not to mention that all of a sudden there's one you need whom you can't buy not because he doesn't have a price, but because whatever his price is, you don't have it and I'm not referring to money," said Bomilcar. "I loathe them all," said Jugurtha between his teeth. "So do I. Which doesn't get rid of them, does it?" "Numidia is mine!" cried its king. "They don't even want it, you know! All they want to do is interfere. Meddle!" Bomilcar spread out his hands. "Don't ask me, Jugurtha, because I don't know. All I do know is that you are sitting here in Rome, and the outcome is on the laps of the gods." Indeed it is, thought the King of Numidia, returning to his thoughts.

  When young Adherbal had escaped and gone to Rome six years ago, Jugurtha had known what to do, and had done it quickly. Off to Rome went a team of his ambassadors bearing gold, silver, jewels, works of art, whatever was likely to tickle a Roman noble's fancy. Interesting, that you could never bribe them with women or boys. Only with negotiable goods. The outcome of his embassage had been reasonably satisfactory, given the circumstances. They were obsessed with committees and commissions, the Romans, and enjoyed nothing better than to send off a small party of officials to the remotest ends of the earth, there to investigate, pontificate, adjudicate, ameliorate. Anyone else would just march in at the head of an army, but the Romans would turn up in togas escorted only by lictors, nary a soldier within emergency call; they would proceed to issue their orders, and expect to be obeyed just as if they had arrived at the head of an army. And mostly they were obeyed. Which returned him to his original question: why are we so afraid of them? Because we are. We are. But why? Maybe because there's always a Marcus Aemilius Scaurus among them? It had been Scaurus who prevented the Senate from deciding in favor of Jugurtha when Adherbal had gone bleating to Rome. A lone voice in a body of three hundred men! Yet he had prevailed, kept hammering away at them until he, the lone voice, actually won the lot of them over to his side. Thus it had been Scaurus who forced a compromise acceptable neither to Jugurtha nor to Adherbal: a committee of ten Roman senators led by the consular Lucius Opimius was to travel to Numidia and there after investigations made on the spot decide what to do. So what did the committee do? It divided the kingdom. Adherbal got the eastern end with Cirta as his capital, more closely populated and commercialized than, yet not as rich as, the western end. The western end had gone to Jugurtha, who found himself sandwiched between Adherbal and the Kingdom of Mauretania. Pleased with their solution, the Romans went home. Jugurtha promptly settled down to watch his mouse Adherbal, waiting his moment to pounce. And to protect himself on his west, he married the daughter of the King of Mauretania. He waited patiently for four years, then attacked Adherbal and his army between Cirta and its seaport. Beaten, Adherbal fell back on Cirta and organized its defense, assisted by the large and influential contingent of Roman and Italian merchants who formed the backbone of the business sector in Numidia. There was nothing odd about their presence in the country; wherever you went in the world, you would find a contingent of Roman and Italian businessmen running the local commercial sector, even in places with little connection to Rome and no protection. Of course the news of the outbreak of war between Jugurtha and Adherbal had reached the ears of the Senate in short order; the Senate responded by dispatching a committee of three charming young sons of senators (it would give the younger generation a bit of valuable experience; there was nothing very important in this squabble) to rap the Numidian knuckles. Jugurtha got to them first, maneuvered them out of any contact with Adherbal or the inhabitants of Cirta, and sent them home laden with expensive gifts. Then Adherbal managed to smuggle a letter out to Rome, a letter begging for help; always on Adherbal's side, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus immediately set out himself for Numidia, at the head of yet another committee of investigation. But so dangerous was the situation they found in all Africa that they were forced to remain inside the boundaries of the Roman African province, and eventually were obliged to return to Rome without interviewing either of the rivals for the throne, or influencing the course of the war. Jugurtha then went ahead and captured Cirta. Understandably, Adherbal was executed at once. Less understandably, Jugurtha took out his spleen at Rome by executing the Roman and Italian businessmen of Cirta down to the last man; for in so doing, he outraged Rome beyond any hope of conciliation. News of the massacre of the Romans and Italians resident in Cirta had reached Rome fifteen months ago, during autumn. And one of the tribunes-elect of the plebs, Gaius Memmius, created such a howl in the Forum that no amount of bribing by Jugurtha could avert catastrophe. The junior consul-elect, Lucius Calpurnius Bestia, was ordered to go to Numidia at the beginning of his term in office to show Jugurtha that he could not freely slaughter Romans and Italians. But Bestia had been a bribable man, so Jugurtha bribed, with the result that six months ago he had managed to negotiate a peace with Rome, and hand over thirty war elephants to Bestia along with a small gift of money for the Roman treasury and a much larger, undisclosed sum which found its way into Bestia's private coffers. Rome appeared to be satisfied; Jugurtha was undisputed King of all Numidia at last. But Gaius Memmius, oblivious to the fact that his term as a tribune of the plebs was finished, never shut up. Day after day he pursued his campaign to have the whole Numidian question gone into under the harshest light; day after day he accused Bestia of extorting money from Jugurtha in return for tenure of the throne; and finally Gaius Memmius achieved his aim, which was to browbeat the Senate into acting. Off to Numidia the Senate sent the praetor Lucius Cassius Longinus, under instructions to bring King Jugurtha in person to Rome, where he was to be made to provide Gaius Memmius with the names of all those he had bribed throughout the years. Had he been required to answer before the Senate, the situation would not have been so perilous; but Jugurtha was to answer before the People. When Cassius the praetor arrived in Cirta and served the King with his summons, Jugurtha could not refuse to accompany him back to Rome. Only why! Why were they all so afraid? What could Rome actually do? Invade Numidia? There were always more Bestias in office than there were Gaius Memmiuses! Why then were they all so afraid? Was it the gall of the Romans, that they could calmly dispatch a single man to snap his fingers at the ruler of a great and rich land, and bring him to heel? Jugurtha had come to heel, meekly packed his trunks, tapped a few barons on the shoulder to accompany him, selected the fifty best men in the Royal Numidian Guard, and taken ship with Cassius the praetor. That had been two months ago. Two months in which very little had happened. Oh, Gaius Memmius had lived up to his word! He had summoned an Assembly of the Plebs in the Circus Flaminius, which lay outside the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city, and therefore constituted a venue Jugurtha the anointed sovereign could attend in person. The purpose of the meeting was to enable every interested Roman from highest to lowest personally to hear the King of Numidia answer Gaius Memmius's questions: whom had he bribed, how much money had he paid over? Everyone in Rome knew exactly the sort of questions Gaius Memmius was going to ask. So the Assembly in the Circus Flaminius was extremely well attended, the arena crowded, with latecomers accommodated in the wooden tiers of seats hoping even at the distance to be able to hear. However, Jugurtha still knew how to go about his defense; Spain and the years since had taught him too well ever to forget. He bought himself a tribune of the plebs. On the face of it, tribunes of the plebs were junior in the magisterial hierarchy and in senatorial rank. Tribunes of the plebs had no imperium now there was a word the Numidian language had no
equivalent for! Imperium! Imperium meant well, the kind of authority a god on earth might possess. It was why a lone praetor could summon a great king to go with him. Provincial governors had imperium. Consuls had imperium. Praetors had imperium. The curule aediles had imperium. But each possessed a different strength or kind of imperium. The only tangible evidence of imperium was the lictor. Lictors were professional attendants who walked ahead of the owner of imperium to clear a path for him, carrying on their left shoulders the fasces, the bundles of rods lashed together with crimson cords. The censors didn't have imperium. Nor did the plebeian aediles. Nor did the quaestors. Nor most important for Jugurtha's purposes did the tribunes of the plebs. These last were the elected representatives of the plebs, that vast bulk of the Roman citizen body unable to claim the high distinction of being a patricius, a patrician. The patrician was the antique aristocrat, one whose family was listed among the Fathers of Rome. Four hundred years ago, when the Republic had been brand new, only the patrician had mattered. But as some plebeians gained money and power, and forced their way into Senate and curule chair, they wanted to be aristocrats too. The result: the nobilis, the nobleman. Thus was the patrician joined by the nobleman in a dual aristocracy. To be a nobleman, all that was necessary was to have a consul in the family, and there was nothing to stop a plebeian's becoming consul. Plebeian honor and ambition were satisfied. The plebs had their own assembly of government; no patrician could attend it, or vote in it. Yet so powerful had the plebs become and so eclipsed the patricians that this young body, the Plebeian Assembly, passed almost all the laws. Ten tribunes of the plebs were elected to look after the interests of the plebs. New ones every year. That was the worst feature of Roman government: its magistrates served for only a year, which meant you could never buy yourself one man who was going to last long enough to be of real service. Every year, you had to buy yourself another man. And usually you had to buy yourself several. No, a tribune of the plebs didn't have imperium, nor was he a senior magistrate; on the surface, he didn't seem to count for much at all. And yet he had managed to make himself the most significant magistrate of the lot. In his hands was true power, for he alone possessed the power of the veto. His veto affected everyone; no one save a dictator was immune from it, and there had not been a dictator in office for nearly a hundred years. A tribune of the plebs could veto a censor, a consul, a praetor, the Senate, his fellow nine tribunes of the plebs, meetings, assemblies, elections you name it, he could veto it and probably had. Also, his person was sacrosanct, which meant he could not be physically impeded in the execution of his duties. Besides which, he made the laws. The Senate could not make a law; all the Senate could do was to recommend that a law be made. Of course it was all designed to impose a system of checks and balances aimed at curbing the potential political power of any one body or any one individual. If the Romans had been a superior breed of political animal, the system would have worked too; but since they were not, it mostly didn't work. For of all the people in the history of the world, the Romans were the most adept at finding ostensibly legal ways around the law. So King Jugurtha of Numidia bought himself a tribune of the plebs a nobody really, not a member of one of the Famous Families, nor a wealthy man. However, Gaius Baebius was a duly elected tribune of the plebs, and when the stream of silver denarii was poured out on the table in front of him, he silently scooped his treasure trove into a dozen big bags and became the property of the King of Numidia. As the old year wore itself down, Gaius Memmius had convened his big meeting in the Circus Flaminius, and haled Jugurtha before it. Then, with the King standing submissively on the Flaminian rostra and the crowd of some thousands utterly silent, Gaius Memmius asked his first question. "Did you bribe Lucius Opimius?" he asked the King. And before the King could answer, Gaius Baebius piped up. "I forbid you to answer Gaius Memmius, King Jugurtha!" was all Gaius Baebius said. He didn't need to say a single word more. It was a veto. Directed by a tribune of the plebs not to answer, Jugurtha could not legally be made to answer. So the Assembly of the Plebs broke up; the disappointed thousands went home muttering; Gaius Memmius was so angry his friends had to lead him away under restraint; and Gaius Baebius trotted off exuding an air of great virtue which fooled no one. Yet the Senate hadn't given Jugurtha permission to return home, so here on New Year's Day he sat on his rented, hideously expensive loggia, cursing Rome, and cursing the Romans. Neither of the new consuls had yet given any indication that he might be interested in accepting a private donation; none of the new praetors was worth the effort of bribing, and the new tribunes of the plebs weren't inspiring either. The trouble with bribery was that it could not just be cast upon the waters; your fish first had to rise to the surface and make gobbling motions, thus assuring you that he was interested in swallowing a gilded bait. If no one swam up to mouth his interest at you, then you had to float your line and sit back and wait with every ounce of patience you could possibly muster. Yet how could he sit back and wait patiently when his kingdom was already the target of several greedy pretenders? Gauda, the legitimate son of Mastanabal, and Massiva, the son of Gulussa, had strong claims, though they were by no means the only claimants. To get home was vital. Yet here he sat, impotent. Were he to leave without the Senate's permission, his departure might be viewed as an act of war. As far as he knew, no one in Rome wanted war, but he didn't have enough evidence to tell him which way the Senate might jump if he did leave. And though it could not pass laws, the Senate had all the say in foreign affairs, from declaring war to governing the Roman provinces. His agents had reported that Marcus Aemilius Scaurus was furious at Gaius Baebius's veto. And Scaurus had enormous clout in the Senate, had once already swung it around single-handedly. Scaurus was of the opinion that Jugurtha boded no good for Rome.