The First Man in Rome (118 page)

Aurelia had learned a great deal since she moved to the Subura; everyone from Lucius Decumius to the freedmen thronging the top two floors talked to her. And things happened—things the landlady was involved in whether she liked it or not—things which would have shocked her husband to his core did he only know. Abortion. Witchcraft. Murder. Robbery with violence. Rape. Delirium tremens and worse addictions. Madness. Despair. Depression. Suicide. It all went on in every insula, and concluded itself the same way; no taking these cases to the tribunal of the
praetor urbanus!
They were solved by the inhabitants, and a rough justice was dealt out in the most summary fashion. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.

So as she listened Aurelia pieced together a composite picture of Lucius Cornelius Sulla that was not so very far from the truth. Alone among the aristocrats of Rome who knew him, she understood from whence he had come, and understood too the terrible difficulties his nature and his upbringing had thrust upon him. He had claimed his birthright, but he was permanently branded with the stews of Rome too.

And as Sulla talked about one thing, his mind wandered among other things he didn't dare say to his listener: how desperately he had wanted her, Scaurus's little pregnant child-wife, and not entirely for the flesh or the mind. She was ideal for his purposes. But she was married
confarreatio
to Scaurus, and he was committed to splendid boring Aelia. Not
confarreatio
this time! It was too hideous a business to divorce; Dalmatica simply pointed up a lesson he had already learned in that respect. Women. He was never going to have the luck with women, he knew it in his bones. Was it because of the other side to himself? That wonderful beautiful glorious relationship with Metrobius! And yet he didn't want to live with Metrobius any more than he had wanted to live with Julilla. Perhaps that was it—he did not want to share himself. Too dangerous by far. Oh, but he had hungered for Caecilia Metella Dalmatica, wife of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus! Disgusting. Not that he normally objected to old men and child-brides. This was
personal.
He was in love with her, therefore she was special.

"Did she—Dalmatica—like you, Lucius Cornelius?" Aurelia asked, breaking into his thoughts.

Sulla didn't hesitate. "Oh, yes! No doubt of it."

"What are you going to do, then?"

He writhed. "I've come too far, I've paid too much! I can't stop
now,
Aurelia! Even for Dalmatica—if I had an affair with her, the
boni
would make it their business to ruin me. I don't have much money yet, either. Just enough to get by in the Senate. I made a bit out of the Germans, but no more than my proper share. And I'm not going to climb the rest of the way easily. They feel about me the way they feel about Gaius Marius, even though for different reasons. Neither of us conforms to their wretched ideals. Yet they can't work out why we have the ability and they don't. They feel used, abused. I'm definitely luckier than Gaius Marius. At least I have the blood. But it's tainted with the Subura. Actors. Low life. I'm not really one of the Good Men." He drew a breath. "Yet—I'm going to go right past them, Aurelia! Because I'm the best horse in the race."

"And what happens when the prize isn't worth it?"

He opened his eyes wide, astonished at her denseness. "It's never worth the effort! Never! That's not why we do it, any of us. When they harness us up to do our seven laps of the course, we race against ourselves. What other challenge could there be for a Gaius Marius? He's the best horse in the field. So he races against himself. So do I. I can do it. I'm going to do it! But it only really matters to
me."

And she blushed at her denseness. "Of course." Rising to her feet, she held out her hand. "Come, Lucius Cornelius! It's a lovely day in spite of the heat. The Subura will be entirely left to itself—all those who can afford to leave Rome for the summer are gone. Only the poor and the crazed are left! And I. Let's go for a walk, and when we come back, we'll have dinner. I'll send a message to Uncle Publius to join us—I think he's still in town." She pulled a face. "I have to be careful, you understand, Lucius Cornelius. My husband trusts me as much as he loves me, which is a great deal. But he wouldn't like me to cause gossip, and I try to be an old-fashioned kind of wife. He would be horrified to think I
didn't
invite you to eat dinner with me— and yet if Uncle Publius can come, Gaius Julius will commend me."

Sulla eyed her affectionately. "What nonsense men cherish about their wives! You're not even remotely like the creature Gaius Julius moons about over military dinners in camp."

"I know," she said. "But he doesn't."

The heat of the Vicus Patricii settled down on their heads like a stifling blanket; Aurelia gasped and ducked back inside. "Well, that settles that! I didn't think it was hot! Eutychus can run to the Carinae for Uncle Publius, he can do with the exercise. And we'll sit in the garden." She led the way, still talking. "Cheer up, Lucius Cornelius, do! It will all turn out in the end, I'm sure. Go back to Circei and that nice, boring wife. In time you'll like her more, I promise. And it will be better for you if you don't see Dalmatica at all. How old are you now?"

The trapped feeling was beginning to lift; Sulla's face lightened, his smile more natural. "A milestone this year, Aurelia. I turned forty last New Year's Day."

"Not an old man yet!"

"In some ways I am. I haven't even been praetor yet, and I'm already a year past the usual age."

"Now, now, you're looking gloomy again, and there really is no need. Look at our old war-horse Gaius Marius! His first consulship at fifty, eight years over the age. Now if you saw
him
poled up for the Mars race, would you pick him as the best horse in it? Would you bet that he'd be the October Horse? Yet all his greatest deeds he did after he turned fifty."

"That's very true," said Sulla, and did feel more cheerful, in spite of himself. "What lucky god prompted me to come and see you today? You're a good friend, Aurelia. A help."

"Well, perhaps one day I'll turn to
you
for help."

"All you have to do is ask." His head went up, he took in the naked balconies of the upper floors. "You are courageous! No screens? And they don't abuse the privilege?"

"Never."

He laughed, a throaty chuckle of genuine amusement. "I do believe you have the Subura hard cases all wrapped up in the palm of your little hand!"

Nodding, smiling, she rocked gently back and forth on her garden seat. "I like my life, Lucius Cornelius. To be honest, I don't care if Gaius Julius never gets the money together to buy that house on the Palatine. Here in the Subura I'm busy, fruitful, surrounded by all sorts of interesting people. I'm running a race of my own, you see."

"With only one egg in the cup and only one dolphin down," Sulla said, "you've got a very long way to go yet."

"So have you," said Aurelia.

Julia knew of course that Marius would never spend the whole summer at Cumae, though he had talked as if he would not return to Rome until the beginning of September; the moment his equilibrium began to right itself, he would be itching to get back to the fray. So she counted her blessings a day at a time, glad that the moment Marius returned to a rural setting, he shed both political
toga praetexta
and military cuirass, and became for a little while a country squire like all his ancestors. They swam in the sea off the little beach below their magnificent villa, and gorged themselves on fresh oysters, crabs, shrimp, tunnyfish; they walked the sparsely populated hills amid welters of roses cloying the air with perfume; they did little entertaining, and pretended to be out whenever people called. Marius built a boat of sorts for Young Marius, and got almost as much fun out of its instant imitation of a bottom fish as Young Marius did. Never, thought Julia, had she been quite so happy as during that halcyon summer at Cumae. Counting her blessings one day at a time.

But Marius did not return to Rome. Painless and subtle, the little stroke happened during the first night of the Dog Star month of Sextilis; all Marius noticed when he woke in the morning was that his pillow was wet where apparently he had drooled in his sleep. When he came to break his fast and found Julia on the open terrace looking out to sea, he gazed at her in bewilderment as she gazed at him with an expression he had never before seen on her face.

"What's the matter?" he mumbled, his tongue feeling thick and clumsy, a most peculiar non-sensation.

"Your face—" she said, her own whitening.

His hands went up to touch it, his left fingers as awkward as his tongue felt. "What
is
it?" he asked.

"Your face—it's dropped on the left side," she said, and choked on her breath as understanding dawned. "Oh, Gaius Marius! You've had a stroke!"

But because he felt no pain and no direct consciousness of any alteration, he refused to believe her until she brought him a big polished silver mirror and he could look at himself for himself. The right side of his face was firm, uplifted, not very lined for a man of his age, where the left side looked as if it were a wax mask melting in the heat of some nearby torch, running, drooping, slipping away.

"I don’t
feel
any different!" he said, stunned. "Not inside my mind, where one is supposed to feel an illness. My tongue won't move around my words properly, but my head knows how to say them, and you're understanding what I say and I'm understanding what you say, so I haven't lost my faculty of speech! My left hand fumbles, yet I can move it. And there is no pain, no pain of any kind!"

When he refused with trembling anger to have a physician sent for, Julia gave in for fear that opposition would make his condition worse; all that day she watched him herself, and was able to tell him as she persuaded him to go to bed shortly after nightfall that the paralysis appeared to be about the same as it had been at dawn.

"That's a good sign, I'm sure," she said. "You'll get better in time. You'll just have to rest, stay here longer."

"I can't! They'll think I'm not game to face them!"

"If they care to visit you—which I'm sure they will!— they'll be able to see for themselves what's wrong, Gaius Marius. Whether you like it or not, here you stay until you get better," said Julia with a note of authority quite new to her voice. "No, don't argue with me! I'm right, and you know I am! What do you think you can accomplish if you go back to Rome in this condition, beyond having another stroke?"

"Nothing," he muttered, and fell back on the bed in despair. "Julia, Julia, how can I recover from something that makes me feel more ugly than ill? I must recover! I
can't
let them beat me, not now I have so much at stake!"

"They won't beat you, Gaius Marius," she said strongly. "The only thing that will ever beat you is death, and you're not going to die from this little stroke. The paralysis will improve. And if you rest, you exercise sensibly, you eat in moderation, you don't drink any wine, and you don't worry about what's happening in Rome, it will happen much faster."

4

The spring rains didn't fall in Sicily or Sardinia, and in Africa they were scanty. Then when what wheat had come up started to form ears, the rains came in torrents; floods and blights utterly destroyed the crop. Only from Africa would a tiny harvest find its way to Puteoli and Ostia. Which meant that Rome faced her fourth year of high grain prices, and a shortage in quantity spelling famine.

The junior consul and
flamen Martialis,
Lucius Valerius Flaccus, found himself with empty granaries beneath the cliffs of the Aventine adjacent to the Port of Rome, and the private granaries along the Vicus Tuscus held very little. This very little, the grain merchants informed Flaccus and his aediles, would sell for upward of fifty sesterces per
modius,
a mere thirteen pounds in weight. Few if any Head Count families could afford to pay a quarter so much. There were other and cheaper foods available, but a shortage of wheat sent all foodstuffs up in price because of increased consumption and limited production. And bellies used to good bread found no satisfaction in thin gruel and turnips,  which became the staples of the lowly in times of famine; the strong and healthy survived, but the old, the weak, the very young, and the sickly all too often died.

By October the Head Count was growing restive; thrills of fear began to run through the ordinary residents of the city. For the Head Count of Rome deprived of food was a prospect no one living cheek by jowl with them could face without a thrill of fear. Many of the Third and Fourth Class citizens, who would find it difficult anyway to buy such costly grain, began to lay in weapons to defend their larders from the depredations of those owning even less.

Lucius Valerius Flaccus conferred with the curule aediles—responsible for grain purchases on behalf of the State as well as for the storage and sale of State grain—and applied to the Senate for additional funds to buy in grain from anywhere it could be obtained, and of any kind— barley, millet, emmer wheat as well as bread wheat. However, few in the Senate were really worried; too many years and too much insulation from the lower classes of citizens separated them from the last Head Count famine riots.

To make matters worse, the two young men serving as Rome's Treasury quaestors were of the most exclusive and unpitying kind of senator, and thought little of the Head Count at the best of times. Both when elected quaestor had asked for duty inside Rome, declaring that they intended to “arrest the unwarranted drains upon Rome's Treasury"—an impressive way of saying that they had no intention of releasing money for Head Count armies—or Head Count grain. The urban quaestor—more senior of the two—was none other than Caepio Junior, son of the consul who had stolen the Gold of Tolosa and lost the battle of Arausio; the other was Metellus Piglet, the son of the exiled Metellus Numidicus. Both had scores to settle with Gaius Marius.

It was not senatorial practice to run counter to the recommendations of the Treasury quaestors. Questioned in the House as to the state of fiscal affairs, both Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet said flatly there was no money for grain. Thanks to the massive outlays it had been called upon to make for a number of years outfitting and paying and feeding Head Count armies, the State was broke. Neither the war against Jugurtha nor the war against the Germans had brought in anything like enough money in spoils and tributes to rectify the State's negative financial balance, said the two Treasury quaestors. And produced their tribunes of the Treasury and their account books to prove their point. Rome was broke. Those without the money to pay the going price for grain would have to starve. Sorry, but that was the reality of the situation.

By the beginning of November the word had reached all of Rome that there would be no reasonably priced State grain, for the Senate had refused to vote funds for its purchase. Couched in the form of rumor, the word didn't mention crop failures or cantankerous Treasury quaestors; it simply stated that there would be no cheap grain.

The Forum Romanum immediately began to fill up with crowds of a nature not usually seen there, while the normal Forum frequenters melted away or tacked themselves onto the back of the newcomers. These crowds were Head Count and the Fifth Class, and their mood was ugly. Senators and other togate men found themselves hissed by thousands of tongues as they walked what they regarded as their traditional territory, but at first were not easily cowed; then the hissing became showers of pelted filth—faeces, manure, stinking Tiber mud, rotten garbage. Whereupon the Senate extricated itself from these difficulties by suspending all meetings, leaving unfortunates like bankers, knight merchants, advocates, and tribunes of the Treasury to suffer the besmirching of their persons without senatorial support.

Not strong enough to take the initiative, the junior consul, Flaccus, let matters drift, while Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet congratulated themselves upon a job well done. If the winter saw a few thousand Head Count Romans die, that meant there would be fewer mouths to feed.

At which point the tribune of the plebs Lucius Appuleius Saturninus convoked the Plebeian Assembly, and proposed a grain law to it. The State was to buy immediately every ounce of wheat, barley, and millet in Italy and Italian Gaul and sell it for the ridiculously cheap price of one sestertius per
modius.
Of course Saturninus made no reference to the impossible logistics of shipping anything from Italian Gaul to regions south of the Apennines, nor the fact that there was almost no grain to buy anywhere south of the Apennines. What he wanted was the crowd, and that meant placing himself in the eyes of the crowd as its sole savior.

Opposition was almost nonexistent in the absence of a convened Senate, for the grain shortage affected everyone in Rome below the level of the rich. The entire food chain and its participants were on Saturninus's side. So were the Third and Fourth Classes, and even many of the centuries of the Second Class. As November edged over the hump of its middle and down the slope toward December, all Rome was on Saturninus's side.

"If people can't afford to buy wheat, we can't afford to make bread!" cried the Guild of Millers and Bakers.

"If people are hungry, they don't work well!" cried the Guild of Builders.

“If people can't afford to feed their children, what's going to happen to their slaves?" cried the Guild of Freedmen.

"If people have to spend their money on food, they won't be able to pay rent!" cried the Guild of Landlords.

"If people are so hungry they start pillaging shops and overturning market stalls, what will happen to us?" cried the Guild of Merchants.

"If people descend on our allotments in search of food, we won't have any produce to sell!" cried the Guild of Market Gardeners.

For it was not the simple matter of a famine killing off a few thousand of the Head Count; the moment Rome's middle and poorer citizens could not afford to eat, a hundred and one kinds of businesses and trades suffered in their turn. A famine, in short, was an economic disaster. But the Senate wasn't coming together, even in temples off the beaten track, so it was left to Saturninus to propose a solution, and his solution was based upon a false premise; that there was grain for the State to buy. He himself genuinely thought there was, deeming every aspect of the crisis a manufactured one, and the culprits an alliance between the Policy Makersof the Senate and the upper echelons of the grain barons.

Every one of the thousands of faces in the Forum turned to him as heliotropes to the sun; working himself into a passion through the force of his oratory, he began to believe every single word he shouted, he began to believe every single face his eyes encountered in the crowd, he began to believe in a new way to govern Rome. What did the consulship really matter? What did the Senate really matter, when crowds like these made it shove its tail between its legs and slink home? When the bets were on the table and the moment to throw the dice arrived,
they
were all that mattered, these faces in this enormous crowd.
They
held the real power; those who thought they held it did so only as long as the faces in the crowd permitted it.

So what did the consulship really matter? What did the Senate really matter? Talk, hot air, a nothing! There were no armies in Rome, no armies nearer to Rome than the recruit training centers around Capua. Consuls and Senate held their power without force of arms or numbers to back them up. But here in the Forum was true power, here were the numbers to back that true power. Why did a man have to be consul to be the First Man in Rome? It wasn't necessary! Had Gaius Gracchus too realized that? Or was he forced to kill himself before he could realize it?

I, thought Saturninus, gobbling up the vision of the faces in his mighty crowd, shall be the First Man in Rome! But not as consul. As tribune of the plebs. Genuine power lay with the tribunes of the plebs, not with the consuls. And if Gaius Marius could get himself elected consul in what promised to be perpetuity, what was to stop Lucius Appuleius Saturninus's getting himself elected tribune of the plebs in perpetuity?

However, Saturninus chose a quiet day to pass his grain bill into law, chiefly because he retained the wisdom to see that senatorial opposition to providing cheap grain must continue to appear high-handed and elitist; therefore no enormous crowd must be present in the Forum to give the Senate an opportunity to accuse the Plebeian Assembly of disorder, riot, violence, and denounce the law as invalid. He was still simmering about the second agrarian bill, Gaius Marius's treachery, Metellus Numidicus's exile; that in fact the law was still engraved on the tablets was his doing, not Gaius Marius's. Which made
him
the real author of land grants for the Head Count veterans.

November was short on holidays, especially holidays on which the Comitia could meet. But his opportunity to find a quiet day came when a fabulously wealthy knight died, and his sons staged elaborate funeral gladiatorial games in their father's honor; the site chosen for the games—normally the Forum Romanum—was the Circus Flaminius, in order to avoid the crowds gathering every day in the Forum Romanum.

It was Caepio Junior who spoiled Saturninus's plans. The Plebeian Assembly was convoked; the omens were auspicious; the Forum was inhabited by its normal frequenters because the crowd had gone off to the Circus Flaminius; the other tribunes of the plebs were busy with the casting of the lots to see which order the tribes were going to vote in; and Saturninus himself stood to the front of the rostra exhorting the groups of tribes forming in the well of the Comitia to vote the way he wanted.

In the conspicuous absence of senatorial meetings, it had not occurred to Saturninus that any members of the Senate were keeping an eye on events in the Forum, barring his nine fellow tribunes of the plebs, who simply did as they were told these days. But there were some members of the Senate who felt quite as much contempt for that body's craven conduct as did Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. They were all young, either in their quaestorian year or at most two years beyond that point, and they had allies among the sons of senators and First Class knights as yet too young to enter the Senate or senior posts in their fathers' firms. Meeting in groups at each other's homes, they were led by Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet, and they had a more mature confidant-adviser to give direction and purpose to what might otherwise have ended up merely a series of angry discussions foundering in an excess of wine.

Their confidant-adviser was rapidly becoming something of an idol to them, for he possessed all those qualities young men so admire—he was daring, intrepid, cool-headed, sophisticated, something of a high liver and womanizer, witty, fashionable, and had an impressive war record. His name was Lucius Cornelius Sulla.

With Marius laid low in Cumae for what seemed months, Sulla had taken it upon himself to watch events in Rome in a way that, for instance, Publius Rutilius Rufus would never have dreamed of doing. Sulla's motives were not completely based on loyalty to Marius; after that conversation with Aurelia, he had looked very detachedly at his future prospects in the Senate, and come to the conclusion that Aurelia was right: he would, like Gaius Marius, be what a gardener would call a late bloomer. In which case it was pointless for him to seek friendship and alliance among those senators older than himself. Scaurus, for instance, was a lost cause. And how convenient that particular decision was! It would keep him out of the way of Scaurus's delectable little child-bride, now the mother of baby Aemilia Scaura; when he had heard the news that Scaurus had fathered a girl, Sulla experienced a shaft of pure pleasure. Served the randy old goat right.

Thinking to safeguard his own political future while preserving Marius's, Sulla embarked upon the wooing of the senatorial younger generation, choosing as his targets those who were malleable, able to be influenced, not very intelligent, extremely rich, from important families, or so arrogantly sure of themselves they left themselves open to a subtle form of flattery. His primary targets were Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet, Caepio Junior because he was an intellectually dense patrician with access to young men like Marcus Livius Drusus (whom Sulla did not even try to woo), and Metellus Piglet because he knew what was going on among the older Good Men. No one knew better than Sulla how to woo young men, even when his purposes held no kind of sexuality, so it was not long before he was holding court among them, his manner always tinged with amusement at their youthful posturings in a way which suggested to them that there was a hope he would change his mind, take them seriously. Nor were they adolescents; the oldest among them were only some seven or eight years his junior, the youngest fifteen or sixteen years his junior. Old enough to consider themselves fully formed, young enough to be thrown off balance by a Sulla. And the nucleus of a senatorial following which in time would be of enormous importance to a man determined to be consul.

At this moment, however, Sulla's chief concern was Saturninus, whom he had been watching very closely since the first crowds began to gather in the Forum, and the harassment of togate dignitaries began. Whether the
lex Appuleia frumentaria
was actually passed into law or not was far from Sulla's main worry; what Saturninus needed, Sulla thought, was a demonstration that he would not have things all his own way.