The First Man in Rome (9 page)

But, since they certainly didn't have the money to fight a prolonged war, they fought a civilian war. They never gave battle. Instead, they fought by ambush, raid, assassination, and devastation of all Enemy property. That is, Roman property. Never appearing where they were expected, never marching in column, never banding together in any numbers, never identifiable by the wearing of uniforms or the carrying of arms. They just—pounced. Out of nowhere. And then vanished without a trace into the formidable crags of their mountains as if they had never been. Ride in to inspect a small town which Roman intelligence positively stated was involved in some clever minor massacre, and it would be as idle, as innocent, as unimpeachable as the most docile and patient of asses.

A fabulously rich land, Spain. As a result, everyone had had a go at owning it. The original Iberian indigenes had been intermingling with Celtic elements invading across the Pyrenees for a thousand years, and Berber-Moor incursions from the African side of the narrow straits separating Spain from Africa had further enriched the local melting pot.

Then a thousand years ago came the Phoenicians from Tyre and Sidon and Berytus on the Syrian coast, and after them came the Greeks. Two hundred years ago had come the Punic Carthaginians, themselves descendants of the Syrian Phoenicians who had founded an empire based on African Carthage; and the relative isolation of Spain was finished. For the Carthaginians came to Spain to mine its metals. Gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper, and iron. The Spanish mountains were loaded with all of them, and everywhere in the world the demand for goods made out of some and wealth made out of others was rapidly increasing. Punic power was based upon Spanish ore. Even tin came from Spain, though it wasn't found there; mined in the fabled Cassiterides, the Tin Isles somewhere at the ultimate limit of the livable globe, it arrived in Spain through little Cantabrian ports and traveled the Spanish trade routes down to the shores of the Middle Sea.

The seagoing Carthaginians had owned Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica too, which meant that sooner or later they had to run foul of Rome, a fate that had overtaken them 150 years before. And three wars later—three wars which took over a hundred years to fight—Carthage was dead, and Rome had acquired the first of its overseas possessions. Including the mines of Spain.

Roman practicality had seen at once that Spain was best governed from two different locations; the peninsula was divided into the two provinces of Nearer Spain—Hispania Citerior—and Further Spain—Hispania Ulterior. The governor of Further Spain controlled all the south and west of the country from a base in the fabulously fertile hinterlands of the Baetis River, with the mighty old Phoenician city of Gades near its mouth. The governor of Nearer Spain controlled all the north and east of the peninsula from a base in the coastal plain opposite the Balearic Isles, and shifted his capital around as the whim or the need dictated. The lands of the far west—Lusitania—and the lands of the northwest—Cantabria—remained largely untouched.

Despite the object lesson Scipio Aemilianus had made out of Numantia, the tribes of Spain continued to resist Roman occupation by ambush, raid, assassination, and devastation of property. Well now, thought Gaius Marius, coming on this most interesting scene when he arrived in Further Spain as its new governor, I too can fight by ambush, raid, assassination, and devastation of property! And proceeded to do so. With great success. Out thrust the frontiers of Roman Spain into Lusitania and the mighty chain of ore-bearing mountains in which rose the Baetis, Anas, and Tagus rivers.

It was really not an exaggeration to say that as the Roman frontier advanced, the Roman conquerors kept tripping over richer and richer deposits of ore, especially silver, copper, and iron. And naturally the governor of the province—he who achieved the new frontiers in the name of Rome—was in the forefront of those who acquired grants of ore-bearing land. The Treasury of Rome took its cut, but preferred to leave the mine owning and actual mining in the hands of private individuals, who did it far more efficiently and with a more consistent brand of exploitative ruthlessness.

Gaius Marius got rich. Then got richer. Every new mine was either wholly or partly his; this in turn brought him sleeping partnerships in the great companies which contracted out their services to run all kinds of commercial operations—from grain buying and selling and shipping, to merchant banking and public works—all over the Roman world, as well as within the city of Rome itself.

He came back from Spain having been voted
imperator
by his troops, which meant that he was entitled to apply to the Senate for permission to hold a triumph; considering the amount of booty and tithes and taxes and tributes he had added to the general revenues, the Senate could not do else than comply with the wishes of his soldiers. And so he drove the antique triumphal chariot along its traditional route in the triumphal parade, preceded by the heaped-up evidence of his victories and depredations, the floats depicting tableaux and geography and weird tribal costumes; and dreamed of being consul in two years' time. He, Gaius Marius from Arpinum, the despised Italian hayseed with no Greek, would be consul of the greatest city in the world. And go back to Spain and complete its conquest, turn it into a peaceful, prosperous pair of indisputably Roman provinces. But it was five years since he had returned to Rome.
Five years!
The Caecilius Metellus faction had finally won: he would never be consul now.

"I think I'll wear the Chian outfit," he said to his body servant, standing waiting for orders. Many men in Marius's position would have lain back in the bath water and demanded that they be scrubbed, scraped, and massaged by slaves, but Gaius Marius preferred to do his own dirty work, even now. Mind you, at forty-seven he was still a fine figure of a man. Nothing to be ashamed of about his physique! No matter how ostensibly inert his days might be, he got in a fair amount of exercise, worked with the dumbbells and the closhes, swam if he could several times across the Tiber in the reach called the Trigarium, then ran all the way back from the far perimeter of the Campus Martius to his house on the flanks of the Capitoline Arx. His hair was getting a bit thin on top, but he still had enough dark brown curls to brush forward into a respectable coiffure. There. That would have to do. A beauty he never had been, never would be. A good face—even an impressive one—but no rival for Gaius Julius Caesar's!

Interesting. Why was he going to so much trouble with hair and dress for what promised to be a small family meal in the dining room of a modest backbencher senator? A man who hadn't even been aedile, let alone praetor. The
Chian
outfit he had elected to wear, no less! He had bought it several years ago, dreaming of the dinner parties he would host during his consulship and the years thereafter when he would be one of the esteemed ex-consuls, the consulars as they were called.

It was permissible to attire oneself for a purely private dinner party in less austere clothes than white toga and tunic, a bit of purple stripe their only decoration; and the Chian tapestry tunic with long drape to go over it was a spectacle of gold and purple lavishness. Luckily there were no sumptuary laws on the books at the moment that forbade a man to robe himself as ornately and luxuriously as he pleased. There was only a
lex Licinia,
which regulated the amount of expensive culinary rarities a man might put on his table— and no one took any notice of that. Besides which, Gaius Marius doubted that Caesar's table would be loaded down with licker-fish and oysters.

Not for one moment did it occur to Gaius Marius to seek out his wife before he departed. He had forgotten her years ago—if, in fact, he ever had remembered her. The marriage had been arranged during the sexless limbo of childhood and had lingered in the sexless limbo of an adult lack of love or even affinity for twenty-five childless years. A man as martially inclined and physically active as Gaius Marius sought sexual solace only when its absence was recollected by a chance encounter with some attractive woman, and his life had not been distinguished by many such. From time to time he enjoyed a mild fling with the attractive woman who had taken his eye (if she was available and willing), or a house girl, or (on campaign) a captive girl.

But Grania, his wife? Her he had forgotten, even when she was there not two feet from him, reminding him that she would like to be slept with often enough to conceive a child. Cohabitating with Grania was like leading a route march through an impenetrable fog. What you felt was so amorphous it kept squeezing itself into something different yet equally unidentifiable; occasionally you were aware of a change in the ambient temperature, patches of extra moistness in a generally clammy substrate. By the time his climax arrived, if he opened his mouth at all it was to yawn.

He didn't pity Grania in the least. Nor did he attempt to understand her. Simply, she was his wife, his old boiling fowl who had never worn the plumage of a spring chicken, even in her youth. What she did with her days—or nights— he didn't know, didn't worry about. Grania, leading a double life of licentious depravity? If someone had suggested to him that she might, he would have laughed until the tears came. And he would have been quite right to do so. Grania was as chaste as she was drab. No Caecilia Metella (the wanton one who was sister to Dalmaticus and Metellus Piggle-wiggle, and wife to Lucius Licinius Lucullus) about Grania from Puteoli!

His silver mines had bought the house high on the Arx of the Capitol just on the Campus Martius side of the Servian Walls, the most expensive real estate in Rome; his copper mines had bought the colored marbles with which its brick-and-concrete columns and divisions and floors were sheathed; his iron mines had bought the services of the finest mural painter in Rome to fill up the plastered spaces between pilasters and divisions with scenes of stag hunts and flower gardens and trompe l'oeil landscapes; his sleeping partnerships in several large companies had bought the statues and the herms, the fabulous citrus-wood tables on their gold-inlaid ivory pedestals, the gilded and encrusted couches and chairs, the gloriously embroidered hangings, the cast-bronze doors; Hymettus himself had landscaped the massive peristyle-garden, paying as much attention to the subtle combination of perfumes as he did to the colors of the blossoms; and the great Dolichus had created the long central pool with its fountains and fish and lilies and lotuses and superb larger-than-life sculptures of tritons, nereids, nymphs, dolphins, and bewhiskered sea serpents.

All of which, truth to tell, Gaius Marius did not give tuppence about. The obligatory show, nothing else. He slept on a camp bed in the smallest, barest room of the house, its only hangings his sword and scabbard on one wall and his smelly old military cape on another, its only splash of color the rather grimy and tattered
vexillum
flag his favorite legion had given him when their campaign in Spain was over. Ah, that was the life for a man! The only true value praetorship and consulship had for Gaius Marius was the fact that both led to military command of the highest order. But consul far more than praetor! And he knew he would never be consul, not now. They wouldn't vote for a nobody, no matter how rich he might be.

He walked in the same kind of weather the previous day had endured, a dreary mizzling rain and an all-pervading dampness, forgetting—which was quite typical—that he had a fortune on his back. However, he had thrown his old campaigning
sagum
over his finery—a thick, greasy, malodorous cape which could keep out the perishing winds of the alpine passes or the soaking days-long downpours of Epirus. The sort of garment a soldier needed. Its reek stole into his nostrils like a trickle of vapor from a bakery, hunger making, voluptuous on the gut, warmly friendly.

"Come in, come in!" said Gaius Julius Caesar, welcoming his guest in person at the door, and holding out his own finely made hands to receive the awful
sagum.
But having taken it, he didn't immediately toss it to the waiting slave as if afraid its smell might cling to his skin; instead, he fingered it with respect before handing it over carefully. "I'd say that's seen a few campaigns," he said then, not blinking an eye at the sight of Gaius Marius in all the vulgar ostentation of a gold-and-purple Chian outfit.

"It's the only
sagum
I've ever owned," said Gaius Marius, oblivious to the fact that his Chian tapestry drape had flopped itself all the wrong way.

"Ligurian?"

"Of course. My father gave it to me brand-new when I turned seventeen and went off to do my service as a cadet. But I tell you what," Gaius Marius went on, not noticing the smallness and simplicity of the Gaius Julius Caesar house as he strolled beside his host to the dining room, "when it came my turn to equip and outfit legions, I made sure my men all got the exact same cape—no use expecting men to stay healthy if they're wet through or chilled to the bone." He thought of something important, and added hastily, "Of course I didn't charge 'em more than the standard military-issue price! Any commander worth his salt ought to be able to absorb the extra cost from extra booty."

"And you're worth your salt, I know," said Caesar as he sat on the edge of the middle couch at its left-hand end, indicating to his guest that he take the place to the right, which was the place of honor.

Servants removed their shoes, and, when Gaius Marius declined to suffer the fumes of a brazier, offered socks; both men accepted, then arranged their angle of recline by adjusting the bolsters supporting their left elbows into comfortable position. The wine steward stepped forward, attended by a cup bearer.

"My sons will be in shortly, and the ladies just before we eat," said Caesar, holding his hand up to arrest the progress of the wine steward. "I hope, Gaius Marius, that you won't deem me a niggard with my wine if I respectfully ask you to take it as I intend to myself, well watered? I do have a valid reason, but it is one I do not believe can be explained away so early. Simply, the only reason I can offer you right now is that it behooves both of us to remain in full possession of our wits. Besides, the ladies become uneasy when they see their men drinking unwatered wine."