The Grass Crown (49 page)

From the Forum Romanum, Sulla walked swiftly in the direction of the Esquiline Gate. Almost completely covering the Campus Esquilinus outside the Servian Walls lay Rome’s necropolis, a veritable city of tombs—some humble, some splendid, most in between—housing the ashes of Rome’s inhabitants, citizens and non-citizens, slaves and free, native and foreign.

On the eastern side of a great crossroads some hundreds of paces from the Servian Walls stood the temple of Venus Libitina, she who ruled the extinction of the life force. Surrounded by a large grove of cypresses, it was a beautiful building, painted a rich green with purple columns, their Ionic capitals picked out in gold and red, and a yellow roof to its portico. The many steps were paved with a deep pink terrazzo, and the pediment portrayed the gods and goddesses of the Underworld in vivid colors; atop the peak of the temple roof was a wonderful gilded statue of Venus Libitina herself, riding in a car drawn by mice, harbingers of death.

Here amid the cypress grove the Guild of Undertakers set up their stalls and touted for business, not a doleful or sad or hushed activity. Prospective customers were grabbed at, harangued, coaxed, badgered, cajoled, prodded and pushed and pulled, for undertaking was a business like any other, and this was the marketplace of the servants of death. Sulla passed like a ghost among the booths, his uncanny knack of repelling people keeping even the most importunate at bay until he came to the firm which buried the Cornelii, and made his arrangements.

The actors would be sent to his house for instructions on the following day, and all would be splendidly readied for the funeral, to be held on the third day; a Cornelius, Young Sulla would be inhumed rather than cremated, as was the family tradition. Sulla paid in full with a promissory note for twenty silver talents at his bank, the price of a funeral Rome would talk about for days, and did not count the cost, he who normally squeezed every sestertius so carefully, so ungenerously.

At home again, he sent Aelia and Cornelia Sulla out of the room where Young Sulla lay and sat in Aelia’s chair, staring at his devastated son. He didn’t know what he felt, how he felt. The grief, the loss, the finality of it all sat within him like a huge lead boulder; to carry the burden was as much as he could manage, he had nothing left over with which to explore his feelings. There before him lay the ruin of his house, there lay all that was left of his dearest friend, the companion of his old age, the heir to his name, his fortune, his reputation, his public career. Vanished in the space of thirty hours, a decision of no god, not even a whim of fate. The cold had worsened, the lungs had become inflamed, and the heart squeezed dry of animation. The story of a thousand illnesses. No one’s fault, no one’s design. An accident. For the boy, who could know nothing, feel nothing, it was simply the end of life, suffered to conclusion. For those left behind, knowing all, feeling all, it was the prelude to an emptiness in the midst of life that would not cease until life was over. His son was dead. His friend was gone forever.

When Aelia came back two hours later he went to his study, and sat to write a note to Metrobius.

My son is dead. The last time you came to my house, my wife died. Given your trade, you ought to be precursor of joy, the deus ex machina of the play. Instead, you are the veiled one, precursor of sorrow.

Never come to my house again. I see now that my patroness, Fortuna, does not permit rivals. For I have loved you with that same space inside me she regards as exclusively her own. I have set you up like an idol. To me, you have become the personification of perfect love. But she demands to be that. And she is female, both beginning and end of every man.

If a day should come when Fortune finishes with me, I shall call to you. Until that day, nothing. My son was a good son, a fitting and proper son. A Roman. Now he is dead, and I am alone. I do not want you.

He sealed it carefully, summoned his steward, and instructed him as to whereabouts it was to be sent. Then stared at the wall whereon—how strange life was!—Achilles sat on the edge of a bier, holding Patroclus within his arms. Obviously influenced by the tragic masks of the great plays, the artist had put a look of gape-mouthed agony upon the face of Achilles that seemed to Sulla utterly wrong, a presumptuous incursion into a world of private pain never to be shown to the motley. He clapped his hands, and when his steward returned, said, “Tomorrow, find someone to remove that painting there.”

“Lucius Cornelius, the undertakers have been. The lectus funebris is set up in the atrium ready to receive your son for his lying in state,” said the steward, weeping.

Inspecting the bier, which was beautifully carved and gilded, with black cloth and black pillows upon it, Sulla nodded his approval. He carried his son to it himself, feeling the beginning of the rigor of death; the pillows were piled up and the boy placed in a sitting position, his arms held up by more pillows. Here in the atrium he would remain until eight black-clad bearers picked up the lectus funebris and carried it in the funeral procession. Its head was aligned with the door to the peristyle-garden, its foot with the outside door, on the street side of which cypress branches were fixed.

On the third day, the funeral of Young Sulla took place. As a mark of courtesy toward one who had been praetor urbanus and would in all likelihood be consul, public business in the Forum Romanum had been suspended; those who would have been engaged in it waited instead for the cortege to appear, all clad in the toga pulla, the black toga of mourning. Because of the chariots, the procession originating at Sulla’s house wended its way down the Clivus Victoriae to the Velabrum, turned into the Vicus Tuscus, and entered the Forum Romanum between the temple of Castor and Pollux and the Basilica Sempronia. First came two undertakers in black togas, then came black-clad musicians playing straight military trumpets, curved horns, and flutes made from the shinbones of Roman enemies slain in battle. The dirges were solemn, owning little melody or grace. With the musicians came the black-clad women who earned their livings as proper professional mourners, keening their own dirges and beating their breasts, every last one of them weeping genuine tears. A group of dancers followed, twisting and turning in ritual movements older than Rome herself, waving cypress branches. And after them came the actors wearing the five wax masks of Sulla’s ancestors, each riding in a black chariot drawn by two black horses; then came the bier, held on high by eight black-garbed freedmen who had once belonged to Sulla’s stepmother, Clitumna, and had passed into Sulla’s clientele when she freed them in her will. Sulla walked in the rear of the lectus funebris, his black toga pulled up to veil his head; with him walked his nephew, Lucius Nonius, Gaius Marius, Sextus Julius Caesar, Quintus Lutatius Caesar and his two brothers, Lucius Julius Caesar and Gaius Julius Caesar Strabo, all with their heads veiled; and behind the men walked the women, dressed in black but bareheaded, hair in disarray.

At the rostra the musicians, professional mourners, dancers, and undertakers assembled in the Forum below the back wall, while the actors wearing the wax masks were guided by attendants up the steps to the top of the rostra and seated upon ivory curule chairs. They wore the purple-bordered toga of Sulla’s ancestors’ high rank, that Sulla who had been flamen Dialis robed in his priestly garments. The bier was put upon the rostra, and the mourning relatives—all save Lucius Nonius and Aelia attached in some way to the Julian house—ascended it to stand and hear the eulogy. Sulla delivered it himself, very briefly.

“Today I bury my only son,” he said to the silent crowd which had gathered. “He was a member of the gens Cornelia, of a branch two hundred and more years old, containing consuls and priests, most venerable men. In December he too would have become a Cornelian man. But it was not to be. At the time of his death, he was almost fifteen years old.”

He turned to look at the family mourners, Young Marius in a black toga with his head veiled, for he had put on the toga of manhood; his new status placed him well away from Cornelia Sulla, who gazed at him sorrowfully from out of a torn and swollen face. Aurelia was there, and Julia, but while Julia wept and physically supported Aelia, Aurelia stood erect and tearless, looking more grim than sad.

“My son was a beautiful fellow, well loved and well cared for. His mother died when he was very young, but his stepmother has been all that his real mother might have been. Had he lived, he would have proven a true scion of a noble patrician house, for he was educated, intelligent, interested, courageous. When I traveled to the East to interview the Kings of Pontus and Armenia, he went with me, and survived all the dangers foreign places entail. He saw my meeting with the Parthian envoys, and would have been the logical man of his generation for Rome to send to deal with them. He was my best companion, my loyalest follower. That illness should cut him down inside Rome was his fate. Rome will be the poorer, as I and all my family are the poorer. I bury him now with great love and greater sorrow, and offer you gladiators for his funeral games.”

The ceremonies on the rostra were now concluded; everyone got up, the cortege reassembled to wend its way toward the Capena Gate, for Sulla had procured his son a tomb upon the Via Appia, where most of the Cornelii were buried. At the door of the tomb Young Sulla was lifted by his father from his funeral couch, and placed inside a marble sarcophagus mounted upon skids. The lid was levered into position, it was pushed into the tomb by the freedmen who had carried the boy’s bier, and the skids removed. Sulla closed the great bronze door. And closed a part of himself inside as well. His son was gone. Nothing could ever be the same again.

Several days after Young Sulla was laid to rest, the lex Livia agraria was passed. It went to the Plebeian Assembly with the stamp of the Senate’s approval upon it, despite the impassioned opposition of Caepio and Varius in the House, and met unexpectedly bitter resistance in the Comitia. What Drusus had not counted on was opposition from the Italians, but opposition from the Italians he had aplenty. Though the lands in question were not theirs, Italian lands mostly bordered Roman ager publicus, and surveying had fallen far behind need for surveying. Many a little white boundary stone had been surreptitiously moved, many an Italian-owned estate incorporated land it ought not. A huge resurveying would now take place as part of the dividing of the public lands into ten-iugera plots, and discrepancies would automatically be rectified. Those public lands in Etruria seemed to be most affected, probably because Gaius Marius was one of the biggest latifundia proprietors in the area, and Gaius Marius didn’t worry much if his Italian Etrurian neighbors filched a little of the edges of Roman State land. Umbria too was restive, though Campania lay low and said little.

Drusus, however, was very pleased, and could write to Silo in Marruvium that all was looking good; Scaurus, Marius, and even Catulus Caesar had been impressed by Drusus’s reasoning about the ager publicus, and between them managed to persuade the junior consul, Philippus, to be quiet. No one could shut Caepio up, but his words fell on largely deaf ears, partly due to his minimal skill as an orator, and partly due to a highly effective whispering campaign about people who inherited masses of gold—no one in Rome would ever forgive the Servilii Caepiones for that.

So please, Quintus Poppaedius, see what you can do to persuade the Etrurians and the Umbrians to cease complaining. The last thing I need is a fuss from those who originally owned the lands I am trying to give away.

Silo’s answer was not encouraging.

Unfortunately, Marcus Livius, I have little clout either in Umbria or Etruria. They’re an odd lot in both places, you know—very convinced of their own autonomy, and wary of Marsi. Be prepared for two incidents. One is fairly publicly bruited in the north. The other I heard of by sheer chance, and am far more concerned about.

The first incident first. The larger Etrurian and Umbrian landowners are planning to march in deputation to Rome, to protest the breaking up of the Roman ager publicus. Their excuse (of course they cannot admit they’ve been tampering with the boundaries!) is that the Roman ager publicus of Etruria and Umbria has been in existence now for so long that it has altered both the economy and the populace. To suffer an influx of smallholders, they argue, will ruin Etruria and Umbria. The towns, they argue, do not now contain the kind of shops and markets smallholders would patronize—the shops have become warehouses because latifundia owners and managers buy in bulk. Also, they argue, the latifundia proprietors would simply free their slave workers without bothering about the consequences. With the result that thousands of liberated slaves would be wandering the regions getting into trouble, perhaps robbing and marauding. Thus, they argue, it would be Etruria and Umbria would have to foot the bill to ship these slaves home. And on, and on, and on. Be prepared for the deputation!

The second incident is potentially more dangerous. Some of our hotheads from Samnium have decided there is no hope of either citizenship or peace with Rome, and are going to show Rome the depth of their discontent during the celebration of the festival of Jupiter Latiaris on the Alban Mount. They plan to murder the consuls Sextus Caesar and Philippus. The scheme is well worked out—they will fall upon the consuls as they return to Rome from Bovillae, in sufficient numbers to overcome all the celebrants on this peaceful journey.

You had better do what you can to calm down the Umbrian and Etrurian landowners, and crush the assassination attempt before it can possibly take place. More cheering news is that everyone I have approached to swear the oath of personal allegiance to you has done so with great good will. The pool of potential clients for Marcus Livius Drusus grows ever wider.

That at least was good news! Frowning, Drusus bent his mind to the less entrancing contents of Silo’s letter. About the Italians from Etruria and Umbria he could do little save compose a stunning speech for use upon their advent in the Forum. About the plan to assassinate the consuls, he had no choice but to warn the consuls. Who would then press him as to the source of his information, and not be pleased at evasive answers—especially Philippus.

Consequently Drusus decided to see Sextus Caesar rather than Philippus, and make no secret of his sources.

“I have had a letter from my friend Quintus Poppaedius Silo, the Marsian from Marruvium,” he said to Sextus Caesar. “It seems a band of Samnite malcontents have decided that the only way Rome will ever listen to reason about citizenship for all Italy is to demonstrate to Rome how determined all Italy is—through violence. You and Lucius Marcius will be attacked by a large and well-armed number of Samnites somewhere between Bovillae and Rome as you return from the Latin Festival along the Via Appia.”

This was not one of Sextus Caesar’s good days; his wheezing breaths were quite audible, his lips and earlobes faintly blued. However, he was inured to his affliction and had managed to reach the consulship in spite of it—and ahead of his cousin Lucius Caesar, who had been praetor before him.

“I shall accord you a vote of thanks in the House, Marcus Livius,” the senior consul said, “and make sure our Princeps Senatus writes to thank Quintus Poppaedius Silo on behalf of the House.”

“Sextus Julius, I would so much rather you didn’t adopt that course!” said Drusus quickly. “Surely it would be better to say nothing to anyone, borrow a few cohorts of good troops from Capua, and try to trap and capture the Samnites? Otherwise, they will be warned that their plot is discovered, they will not carry it out, and Lucius Marcius your fellow consul is one who will disbelieve there ever was a plot. To safeguard my reputation, I would much rather see the Samnite malcontents apprehended in the act. That way, we can teach Italy a lesson by flogging and executing every last one in the gang. Telling Italy that violence will go nowhere.”

“I see your point, Marcus Livius, and will act accordingly,” said Sextus Julius Caesar.

Thus in the midst of angry Italian landowners and Samnites bent on assassination did Drusus continue his work. The Etrurians and Umbrians came, luckily so truculent and overbearing that they irritated men they might otherwise have wooed, and were dispatched home again with a flea in the ear and scant sympathy from anyone. Sextus Caesar acted exactly as Drusus had requested in respect of the assassination plan, with the result that when the Samnites attacked the peaceful-looking procession outside Bovillae, they were routed by some cohorts of legionaries concealed behind the tombs on the far side of the Via Appia; some died fighting, but many more were taken alive, flogged, executed.

What concerned Drusus was that—predictably, he supposed—his lex agraria had gone into law providing that every single Roman citizen man be allocated ten iugera from the public lands. The Senate and the rest of the First Class were to receive their parcels first, and the capite censi Head Count last of all. Though all told there were millions of iugera of public land in Italy, Drusus very much doubted that by the time the allocating of it got down as low as the Head Count, there would be much land left. And, as everyone knew, it was not wise to antagonize the Head Count. They would have to receive some other compensation in lieu of land. Only one compensation was possible—public grain at a reduced price made stable even during times of famine. Oh, what a battle it would be in the Senate to have a lex frumentaria sanctioned allowing permanently cheap grain to the Head Count!

To compound his troubles, the assassination attempt during the Latin Festival had alarmed Philippus to the point where he began to make enquiries from what friends he had throughout Italy; in May he stood up in the House and announced that Italy was restive, and some men talked of war with Rome. His demeanor was not that of a frightened man, but rather a man who felt the Italians must be given a well-deserved fright. He therefore proposed that two praetors should be deputed to travel—one to the south of Rome, the other to the north of Rome—and discover on behalf of the Senate and People of Rome just what was going on.

Catulus Caesar, who had suffered so in Aesernia during the days when he had chaired his special court of enquiry under the lex Licinia Mucia, thought this was an excellent idea. Of course senators who might not otherwise have been impressed immediately hailed Philippus’s suggestion as an excellent idea. In short order the praetor Servius Sulpicius Galba was instructed to make enquiries south of Rome, and the praetor Quintus Servilius of the Augur’s family was instructed to make enquiries north of Rome. Both men were allowed to choose a legate, they were endowed with a proconsular imperium, and given the money to travel in appropriate state, even to a small force of hired ex-gladiators to serve as bodyguards.

The news that the Senate had deputed two praetors to enquire into what Catulus Caesar insisted on calling “the Italian question” did not please Silo one little bit. Mutilus in Samnium, smarting already because of the flogging and execution of two hundred brave men on the Via Appia, was inclined to call this new indignity an act of war. Frantically Drusus wrote letter after letter to both men, pleading with them to give him a chance, to sit back and wait.

In the meantime he girded his loins for battle, and proceeded to tell the Senate of his plans to issue a cheaper grain dole. Like the allocation of the ager publicus, cheap grain could never be confined to the lowly. Any Roman citizen prepared to join the long line at the aediles’ booth in the Porticus Minucia could obtain his official chit entitling him to five modii of public wheat, then trek to the State granaries beneath the Aventine cliffs, present his chit, and cart his grain home. There were some, even of great wealth and prestige, who actually did avail themselves of this citizen privilege—about half because they were incurable misers, about half on principle. But on the whole, most men who could afford to drop some coins into the steward’s hand and tell him to buy grain from the privately owned granaries along the Vicus Tuscus were not prone to seek a chit in person just to have cheap grain. Compared to the costs of other aspects of living in the city of Rome—like rent, which was always relatively astronomical—the sum of fifty or a hundred sesterces a month per person for privately vended grain was minute. Thus it was that the vast majority of those who did queue to receive their chits were the needful citizens of the Fifth Class, and the Head Count.

“The land just will not extend to all of them by any means,” said Drusus in the House, “but we must not forget them, or give them reason to assume they have been overlooked yet again. Rome’s manger is sufficiently large, Conscript Fathers, to permit all of Rome’s mouths to feed at it! If we cannot give the Head Count land, then we have to give them cheap grain. At a flat price of five sesterces per modius year in and year out, irrespective of times of shortage or times of surplus. This in itself will make the financial burden somewhat easier for our Treasury to bear—when times see a surplus of wheat, the Treasury buys it for between two and four sesterces the modius. Thus by selling at five, it will still be possible for the Treasury to make a small profit, which will bolster the Treasury’s task during years of scarcity. For that reason, I suggest that a separate account be maintained within the Treasury that can only be used to purchase wheat. We must not make the mistake of dipping into the general revenues to fund this law.”

“And how, Marcus Livius, do you propose to pay for this magnificent largesse?” drawled Lucius Marcius Philippus.

Drusus smiled. “I have it all worked out, Lucius Marcius. As one part of my law, I intend to devalue some of our normal issues of currency.”

The House stirred, murmured; no one liked to hear the word “devaluation” mentioned, for most were intensely conservative when it came to the fiscus. It was not Roman policy to debase the coinage, the device being condemned as a Greek trick. Only during the first and second Punic wars against Carthage had it been resorted to, and then much of it was due to attempts to standardize coin weight. Radical though he was in other ways, Gaius Gracchus had increased the value of silver currency.

Nothing daunted, Drusus went on to explain. “One in every eight denarii will be cast of bronze mixed with a drop of lead to make the weight the same as a silver coin, then silver-plated. I have worked out my calculations in the most ultra-conservative way—namely, I have presumed we will have five poor grain years to every two good ones—which, as you all know, is far too pessimistic. In fact, we enjoy more good years than we do bad. However, one cannot exclude another period of famine like that we endured thanks to the Sicilian slave war. Also, there is more work involved in silver-plating a coin than there is in stamping out pure silver. Consequently I costed my program out at one in every eight denarii, whereas the true figure is more likely to be one in every ten. The Treasury, you perceive, cannot lose. Nor will the measure be burdensome to businessmen who negotiate with paper. The major load will fall upon those limited to using coins, and—the most important factor of all, in my opinion—it avoids the odium of a form of direct taxation.”

“Why go to the trouble of plating one in every eight coins in each issue when you could simply plate one in every eight issues?” asked the praetor Lucius Lucilius, who was (like all his family) very clever with words, but an absolute dunce at arithmetic and practicalities.

“Because,” said Drusus patiently, “it is, I think, vital that most of those using coins not be able to tell the real from the plated. If a whole issue were to be cast in bronze, no one would be willing to spend them.”

Miraculous though it seemed, Drusus got his lex frumentaria. Lobbied by the Treasury (which had done its sums and come out with the same answers Drusus produced, and seen how profitable this debasement might be), the Senate sanctioned its promulgation in the Plebeian Assembly. In that body the most powerful knights were quick to understand how little it would bother them in all transactions not requiring cash. Of course everyone knew it affected everyone, that the distinction between real money and pieces of paper was at best specious; but they were pragmatists, and knew full well that the only true value money of any kind had was the faith of the people who used it, in it.