The Grass Crown (33 page)

Silo accompanied him to his horse, a fresh beast from the stables of Mutilus, and discovered he was quite unattended.

“Marcus Livius, it’s dangerous to ride alone!” said Silo.

“It’s more dangerous to bring someone with me, even a slave. People talk, and I can’t afford to give Caepio an opportunity to accuse me of being in Bovianum plotting treason,” said Drusus, accepting a leg up.

“Even though none of us leaders registered as citizens, I dare not venture into Rome,” said Silo, gazing up at his friend, head haloed from the sun.

“Definitely do not,” said Drusus, and grimaced. “For one thing, we have an informant in our house.”

“Jupiter! I hope you crucified him!”

“Unfortunately I must bear with this informant, Quintus Poppaedius. She’s my nine-year-old niece Servilia, who is Caepio’s daughter—and his creature.” Shadowed though his face was, it became discernibly red. “We discovered that she invaded your room during your last visit—which is why Caepio was able to name Gaius Papius as one of the innovators of mass registration, in case you wondered. You may tell him this news, so that he too will know how divided this issue makes all of us who live in Italy. Times have changed. It isn’t Samnium against Rome anymore, truly. What we have to achieve is a peaceful union of all the peoples of this peninsula. Otherwise Rome cannot advance any more than the Italian nations can.”

“Can’t you pack the brat off to her father?” Silo asked.

“He doesn’t want her at any price, even the betrayal of my house guests—though I think she thought he would,” said Drusus. “I have her muzzled and tethered, but there’s always the chance that she’ll slip her leash and get to him. So don’t come near Rome or my house. If you need to see me urgently, send a message to me and I’ll meet you in some out-of-the-way place.”

“Agreed.” Hand raised to slap Drusus’s horse on the flank, Silo stayed it for one last message. “Give my warmest regards to Livia Drusa, Marcus Porcius, and of course dear Servilia Caepionis.”

Pain washed over Drusus’s face just as Silo’s hand came down and the horse jolted into motion. “She died not long ago!” he called back over his shoulder. “Oh, I miss her!”

The quaestiones provided for by the lex Licinia Mucia were set up in Rome, Spoletium, Cosa, Firmum Picenum, Aesernia, Alba Fucentia, Capua, Rhegium, Luceria, Paestum, and Brundisium, with provision that as soon as those parts of each region had been scoured, the respective court would move to a fresh location. Only Latium ended in not having a court; the lands of the Marsi were felt to be more important, so to Alba Fucentia was the tenth place given.

But on the whole, the Italian leaders who met at Grumentum seven days after Drusus visited Silo and Mutilus at Bovianum had succeeded in removing their spurious citizens from all those Roman and Latin colony towns. Of course there were some who refused to believe they would suffer, as well as some who perhaps did believe but were just too well entrenched to consider fleeing. And upon these men the full wrath of the quaestiones fell.

As well as its consular president and two other senators as judges, each court had a staff of clerks, twelve lictors (the president had been empowered with a proconsular imperium) and an armed mounted escort of a hundred militiamen culled from the ranks of retired cavalry troopers and those ex-gladiators who could ride well enough to turn a horse at the gallop.

The judges had been chosen by lots. Neither Gaius Marius nor Publius Rutilius Rufus drew a lot, no surprise—most likely their wooden marbles hadn’t even been put inside the closed jar of water—so how, when the jar was spun like a top, could their marbles possibly have popped out of the little side spout?

Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar drew Aesernia, and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus drew Alba Fucentia; Scaurus Princeps Senatus wasn’t chosen but Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Nasica was, drawing Brundisium, a location which didn’t please him in the least. Metellus Pius the Piglet and Quintus Servilius Caepio were among the junior judges, as was Drusus’s brother-in-law, Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus. Drusus himself didn’t draw a lot, a result pleasing him profoundly, as he would have had to announce to the Senate that his conscience would not permit of his serving.

“Someone blundered,” said Marius to him afterward. “If they had the sense they were presumably born with, they would have ensured that you draw a lot, thus forcing you to declare your feelings very publicly. Not good for you in this present climate!”

“Then I’m glad they don’t have the sense they were presumably born with,” said Drusus thankfully.

Marcus Antonius Orator the censor had drawn the lot for the presidency of the quaestio inside the city of Rome. This delighted him, as he knew his transgressors would be more difficult to find than the mass registrants of the country, and he enjoyed conundrums. Also, he could look forward to earning millions of sesterces in fines thanks to the efforts of informers, already milling eagerly with long lists of names.

The catch varied considerably from place to place. Aesernia failed to please Catulus Caesar one little bit; the town was situated in the middle of Samnium, Mutilus had succeeded in persuading all but a handful of the guilty to leave, and the Roman citizen and Latin residents had no information to offer—nor could the Samnites be subverted into betraying their own for any amount of money. However, those who remained were summarily dealt with in an exemplary manner (at least according to Catulus Caesar’s lights), the President of the court having found a particularly brutal fellow among his escort to perform the floggings. The days were boring nonetheless, the procedure calling for the reading out of every citizen name new to the rolls; it took time to discover that each name when read off was no longer resident within Aesernia. Perhaps once every three or four days a name would produce a man, and these encounters Catulus Caesar looked forward to eagerly. Never lacking in courage, he ignored the rumbles of outrage, the boos and hisses with which he was greeted wherever he went, the furtive little sabotages which plagued not only him but his two more junior judges, the clerks and lictors, even the troopers of his escort. Girths snapped on saddles and riders went crashing to the ground, water had a habit of becoming mysteriously fouled, every insect and spider in Italy had seemingly been rounded up and put in their quarters, snakes slid out of chests and cupboards and bedclothes, little togate dolls all smeared with blood and feathers were found everywhere, as were dead cockerels and cats, and episodes of food poisoning became so rife the President of the court was obliged in the end to force-feed slaves some hours before every meal as well as putting guards to watch the food constantly.

Oddly enough, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus in Alba Fucentia proved a heartening President; like Aesernia, most of the guilty were long gone, so it took the court six days of sessions to unearth its first victim. No one informed, but the man was well off enough to afford to pay his fine, and stood with head held high while Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus ordered the immediate confiscation of all his property within Alba Fucentia. The trooper deputed to administer the lash enjoyed his task too much; white-faced, the President of the court ordered the flogging stopped when blood began to spatter everyone within ten paces of the hapless victim. When the next culprit came to light, a different man plied the knout so delicately that the guilty back showed scarcely a laceration. Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus also found in himself an unsuspected distaste for informers, of whom there were not many, but who were—perhaps in consequence—particularly loathsome. There was nothing he could do save pay the reward, but he then would turn around and subject an informer to such a lengthy and unpleasant inquisition about his own citizen status that informers ceased to present themselves. On one occasion when the accused false citizen was revealed to have three deformed and retarded children, Ahenobarbus secretly paid the fine himself and firmly refused to allow the man to be ejected from the town, in which his poor children fared better than they would have in the country.

So whereas the Samnites spat contemptuously at the mere mention of Catulus Caesar, Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus grew to be quite well liked in Alba Fucentia, and the Marsi were treated more gently than the Samnites. As for the rest of the courts, some presidents were ruthless, some steered a middle course, and some emulated Ahenobarbus. But the hatred grew, and the victims of this persecution were enough in number to steel the Italian nationals in their determination to be rid of the Roman yoke if they died trying. Not one of the courts found itself with the backbone to send its militiamen into the rural fastnesses in search of those who had fled the towns.

The only judge who got himself into legal trouble was Quintus Servilius Caepio, who had been seconded to the court at Brundisium, under the presidency of Gnaeus Scipio Nasica. That sweltering and dusty seaport pleased Gnaeus Scipio Nasica so little after he actually arrived there that a minor illness (later discovered to be haemorrhoids, much to the mirth of the local people) caused him to scurry back to Rome for treatment. His quaestio he left under the aegis of Caepio as President, assisted by none other than Metellus Pius the Piglet. As in most places, the guilty had fled before the court went into session, and informers were scarce. The list of names was read out, the men could not be found, and the days went by fruitlessly—until an informer produced what seemed like ironclad evidence against one of Brundisium’s most respected Roman citizens. He was not of course a part of the concerted mass enrollment, the informer testifying that his illegal usurpation of the citizenship went back over twenty years. As industrious as a dog unearthing rotting meat, Caepio went about making an example of this man, even to the extent that he ordered his questioning under torture. When Metellus Pius grew afraid and protested, Caepio refused to listen, so sure was he that this ostensible pillar of the community was guilty. But then evidence was brought forward proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that the man was what he purported to be—a Roman citizen in high standing. And the moment he was vindicated, he sued Caepio. It took a hasty trip to Rome and an inspired speech by Crassus Orator to secure Caepio’s acquittal, but clearly he could not return to Brundisium. A snarling Gnaeus Scipio Nasica was obliged to go in his stead, mouthing imprecations against all Servilii Caepiones. As for Crassus Orator., obliged to undertake the defense of a man he disliked heartily, the fact that he won the case was scant comfort.

“There are times, Quintus Mucius,” he told his cousin and boon companion Scaevola, “that I wish anyone but us had been consuls in this hideous year!”

Publius Rutilius Rufus was writing these days to Lucius Cornelius Sulla in Nearer Spain, having received a missive from that news-starved senior legate begging for a regular diary of Roman events; Rutilius Rufus seized upon the invitation eagerly.

For I swear, Lucius Cornelius, that there is no one abroad among my friends to whom I can be bothered penning a single line. To be writing to you is wonderful, and I promise I will keep you well informed of the goings-on.

To start with, the special quaestiones of the most famous law in many years, the lex Licinia Mucia. So unpopular and perilous to those conducting them did they become by the end of this summer that not one person connected to them did not long for any excuse to wind their enquiries down. And then luckily an excuse popped up out of nowhere. The Salassi, the Brenni, and the Rhaeti began to raid Italian Gaul on the far side of the Padus River, and created some slight degree of havoc between Lake Benacus and the Vale of the Salassi—middle and western Italian Gaul-across-the-Padus, in other words. Quick as you can say Lucius Tiddlypuss, the Senate declared a state of emergency and wound down the legal operations against the illegal Italian citizens. All the special judges flocked back to Rome, intensely grateful for the respite. And—perhaps in retaliation—voted to send none other than poor Crassus Orator to Italian Gaul with an army to put down the rebellious tribes—or at least eject them from civilized parts. This Crassus Orator did most effectively in a campaign lasting less than two months.

Not many days ago Crassus Orator arrived back in Rome and put his army into camp on the Campus Martius because, he said, his troops had hailed him as imperator on the field, and he wanted to celebrate a triumph. Cousin Quintus Mucius Scaevola, left to govern Rome, received the encamped general’s petition and called a meeting of the Senate in the temple of Bellona immediately. But there was no discussion about the requested triumph!

“Rubbish!” said Scaevola roundly. “Ridiculous rubbish! A piddling campaign against several thousand disorganized savages, worthy of a triumph? Not while I’m in the consul’s curule chair, it’s not! How can we award a single shared triumph to two generals of the caliber of Gaius Marius and Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar, then turn round and award an unshared triumph to a man who didn’t even wage a war, let alone win a proper battle? No! He can’t have his triumph! Chief lictor, go and tell Lucius Licinius to dismiss his troops back to their Capuan barracks and get his fat carcass back inside the pomerium, where he can at least make himself useful for a change!”

Ow, ow, ow! I daresay Scaevola had fallen out of the wrong side of the bed—or his wife had kicked him out of it, which amounts to the same thing, I suppose. Anyway, Crassus Orator dismissed his troops and hustled his fat carcass back across the pomerium, but not to make himself useful for a change! All that concerned him was to give Cousin Scaevola a piece of his mind. But he got short shrift.

“Rubbish!” said Scaevola roundly. You know, Lucius Cornelius, there are definitely times when Scaevola reminds me irresistibly of the younger Scaurus Princeps Senatus! “Dear and all to me though you might be, Lucius Licinius,” Scaevola went on to say, “I will not condone quasi-triumphs.”

The result of this brouhaha is that the cousins have ceased to speak. Which is making life in the Senate rather difficult these days, as they are fellow consuls. Still, I have known fellow consuls who were on far worse terms with each other than Crassus Orator and Scaevola could ever be. It will all blow over in time. Personally I consider it a great pity that they didn’t stop speaking to each other before they dreamed up the lex Licinia Mucia!