The Grass Crown (5 page)

“I don’t have the money for curule aedile.”

“Gaius Marius would give it to you.”

“I won’t ask. Whatever I have, at least I can say I got it for myself. No one gave it to me—I took it.”

Words which caused Rutilius Rufus to remember the rumor Scaurus had circulated about Sulla during his campaign to be elected a praetor; that in order to obtain enough money to qualify as a knight, he had murdered his mistress, and then to obtain a senatorial census, he had murdered his stepmother. Rutilius Rufus’s inclination had been to dismiss the rumor along with all the other usual rubbish about carnal knowledge of mothers and sisters and daughters, interfering sexually with little boys, and making meals out of excrement. But sometimes Sulla said such things! And then—one wondered…

There was a stir on the tribunal; Marcus Antonius Orator was coming to an end.

“Here before you is no ordinary man!” he shouted. “Here before you is a Roman of the Romans, a soldier—and a gallant one!—a patriot, a believer in Rome’s greatness! Why should a man like this pilfer pewter plate from peasants, steal sorrel soup from servants and bad bread from bakers? I ask you, gentlemen of the jury! Have you heard any stories of gargantuan peculations, of murder and rape and misappropriation? No! You’ve had to sit and listen to a shady collection of mean little men, all sniveling at the loss of ten bronze coins, or a book, or a catch of fish!”

He drew a breath and made himself look even bigger, blessed with the wonderful physique of all the Antonians, the curly auburn hair, the reassuringly unintellectual face. Every last member of the jury was fascinated by him.

“He’s got them,” said Rutilius Rufus placidly.

“I’m more interested in what he intends to do with them,” said Sulla, looking alert.

There was a gasp, a cry of amazement. Antonius Orator strode up to Manius Aquillius and assaulted him! He ripped the toga away, then took the neck of Aquillius’s tunic in both hands, tore it as easily as if it had been tacked together, and left Manius Aquillius standing on the tribunal clad in nothing more than a loincloth.

“Look!” thundered Antonius. “Is this the lily-white, plucked hide of a saltatrix tonsa? Do you see the flab and paunch of a stay-at-home glutton? No! What you see are scars. War scars, dozens of them. This is the body of a soldier, a brave and very gallant man, a Roman of the Romans, a commander so trusted by Gaius Marius that he was given the task of going behind enemy lines and attacking from the rear! This is the body of one who didn’t stagger screaming off the battlefield when a sword nicked him, or a spear skinned his thigh, or a stone knocked the wind out of him! This is the body of one who bound up serious wounds as mere nuisances and got on with the job of killing enemy!” The advocate’s hands waved in the air, flopped down limply. “Enough. that’s enough. Give me your verdict,” he said curtly.

They gave their verdict. ABSOLVO.

“Poseurs!” sniffed Rutilius Rufus. “How can the jurors fall for it? His tunic shreds like paper, and there he stands in a loincloth, for Jupiter’s sake! What does that tell you?”

“That Aquillius and Antonius cooked it up beforehand,” said Marius, smiling broadly.

“It tells me that Aquillius doesn’t have enough to risk standing there without a loincloth,” said Sulla.

After the laugh which followed, Rutilius Rufus said to Marius, “Lucius Cornelius says he’s going to Nearer Spain with Titus Didius. What do you think?”

“I think it’s the best thing Lucius Cornelius can do,” said Marius calmly. “Quintus Sertorius is standing for election as a tribune of the soldiers, so I daresay he’ll go to Spain as well.”

“You don’t sound very surprised,” said Sulla.

“I’m not. The news about Spain will be general knowledge tomorrow anyway. There’s a meeting of the Senate called for the temple of Bellona. And we’ll give Titus Didius the war against the Celtiberians,” said Marius. “He’s a good man. A sound soldier and a general of some talent, I think. Especially when he’s up against Gauls of one description or another. Yes, Lucius Cornelius, it will do you more good in the elections to go to Spain as a legate than to rattle all over Anatolia with a privatus.”

The privatus left for Tarentum and the packet to Patrae the following week, a little confused and disorientated at first because he took his wife and son with him, and this was a mode of travel he had never before experienced. The soldier barked orders at his noncombatants and traveled as lightly as he could as quickly as he could. But wives, as Gaius Marius discovered, had other ideas. Julia had elected to take half the household with them, including a cook who specialized in children’s food, and Young Marius’s pedagogue, and a girl who performed miracles with Julia’s hair. All of Young Marius’s toys had been packed, his schoolbooks and the pedagogue’s private library, clothes for every occasion, and items Julia feared she would not be able to get outside Rome.

“The three of us have more baggage and attendants than the King of the Parthians moving from Seleuceia-on-Tigris to Ecbatana for the summer,” Marius growled after three days on the Via Latina saw them no further along than Anagnia.

However, he put up with it until some three weeks later they arrived in Venusia on the Via Appia, prostrated by the heat and unable to find an inn large enough to accommodate all their servants and baggage.

“I’ll have an end to it!” roared Marius after the less needed servants and baggage had been sent to another hostelry, and he and Julia were as alone as a busy posting-house on the Via Appia permitted. “Either you streamline your operation, Julia, or you and Young Marius can go back to Cumae, spend the summer there. We are not going to be in uncivilized parts for months to come, so there’s no need for half this clutter! And no need for so many people! A cook for Young Marius! I ask you!”

Julia was hot, exhausted, and close to tears; the wonderful holiday was a nightmare from which she could not awaken. Upon hearing the ultimatum, her first instinct was to seize upon the chance to go back to Cumae; then she thought about the years during which she would not see Marius, the years during which he would not see his son. And the possibility that, somewhere unsafe and strange, he might suffer another stroke.

“Gaius Marius, I have never traveled before, except to our villas at Cumae and Arpinum. And when Young Marius and I go to Cumae or Arpinum, we go in the same state as we are now. I see your point. And I wish I could oblige you.” She put her head on her hand, furtively brushed at a tear. “The trouble is, I do not have the faintest idea how to go about it.”

Never had Marius thought to hear his wife admit something was beyond her! Understanding how hard it was for her to say it, he gathered her into a hug, and kissed the top of her head. “Never mind, I’ll do it,” he said. “But if I do, there’s one thing I shall have to insist upon.”

“Anything, Gaius Marius, anything!”

“Whatever you find you need but I’ve thrown out, whomever you find you need but I’ve sent home, not a word, Julia! Not—one—word. Understood?”

Sighing with pleasure and squeezing him hard, Julia closed her eyes. “Understood,” she said.

After that they got along speedily and well, with, as Julia discovered, surprising comfort. Where possible the Roman nobility on the road stayed in privately owned villas, either belonging to friends or opened by a letter of introduction; it was a form of hospitality sure to be repaid, and therefore not felt to be an imposition. But beyond Beneventum they had mostly to avail themselves of inns, none of which, Julia now realized, could have accommodated them in their old state.

The heat continued remorselessly, for the southern end of the peninsula was dry and largely lacking in shade along the main roads, but the quicker pace at which the party traveled at least varied the monotony and offered a watery solace more often—a swimming hole in a river, or some flat-roofed, mud-brick town with sufficient business acumen to offer baths.

So the Greek-colonized fertility of the coastal plains around Tarentum was very welcome, Tarentum even more so. It was still a town more Greek than Roman, of less importance than of yore, when it had been the terminus of the Via Appia. Now most traffic went to Brundisium, the main point of departure between Italy and Macedonia. Whitewashed and austere, a dazzling contrast to the blue of sea and sky, the green of fields and forests, the rusts and greys of mountain crags, Tarentum professed itself delighted to greet the great Gaius Marius. They stayed in the comfortable coolness of the house of the chief ethnarch, though these days he was a Roman citizen, and pretended he was more at ease being called a duumvir than an ethnarch.

As at many other places along the Via Appia, Marius and the town’s more important men gathered to speak of Rome, and of Italy, and of the strained relations at present existing between Rome and her Italian Allies. Tarentum was a Latin Rights colony, its senior magistrates—the two men called duumviri—entitled to assume the full Roman citizenship for themselves and their posterity. But its roots were Greek, it was as old or older than Rome; it had been an outpost of Sparta, and in culture and habits, the old Spartan mores persisted still.

There was, Marius discovered, much resentment of the newer Brundisium, and this in turn had led to a great deal of sympathy for the Italian Allied citizens within the lower strata of the town.

“Too many Italian Allied soldiers have died serving in Roman armies commanded by military imbeciles,” said the ethnarch heatedly to Marius. “Their farms are untended, their sons unsired. And there’s an end to money in Lucania, in Samnium, in Apulia! The Italian Allies are obliged to equip their legions of auxiliaries, and then pay to keep them in the field on Rome’s behalf! For what, Gaius Marius? So that Rome can keep a road between Italian Gaul and Spain open? What use is that to an Apulian or a Lucanian? When is he ever likely to use it? So that Rome can bring wheat from Africa and Sicily to feed Roman mouths? How much grain in time of famine is put into a Samnite mouth? It is many years since a Roman in Italy paid any kind of direct tax to Rome. But we of Apulia and Calabria, Lucania and Bruttium, never cease to pay Roman taxes! I suppose we should thank Rome for the Via Appia—or Brundisium should, at any rate. But how often does Rome appoint a curator of the Via Appia who keeps it in any sort of decent fettle? There’s one section—you must have passed over it—where a flash flood washed out the very roadbed twenty years ago! But has it been repaired? No! And will it be repaired? No! Yet Rome tithes us and taxes us, and takes our young men from us to fight in her foreign wars, and they die, and the next thing we know, some Roman landlord has his foot in our door, and our lands are being gobbled up. He brings slaves in to tend his huge flocks, chains them to work, locks them in barracks to sleep, and buys more when they die. Nothing does he spend with us, nothing does he invest with us. We don’t see one sestertius of the money he rakes in, nor does he use our people as employees. He decreases our prosperity rather than increases it. The time has come, Gaius Marius, for Rome to be more generous to us, or let us go!”

Marius had listened impassively to this long and very emotional speech, a more articulate version of the same theme he had heard everywhere along the Via Appia.

“I will do what I can, Marcus Porcius Cleonymus,” he said gravely. “Indeed, I’ve been trying to do something for a number of years. That I’ve had little success is mostly due to the fact that many members of the Senate, those in senior government in Rome, neither travel the way I do, nor speak to local people—nor, Apollo help them!—use their eyes to see. You do certainly know that I have spoken up time and time again about the unforgivable wastage of lives in our Roman armies. And it would seem, I think, that the days when our armies were commanded by military imbeciles are largely over. If no one else taught the Senate of Rome that, I did. Since Gaius Marius the New Man showed all those noble Roman amateurs what generalship is all about, I notice that the Senate is more eager these days to give Rome’s armies to New Men of proven military worth.”

“All well and good, Gaius Marius,” said Cleonymus gently, “but it cannot raise the dead from their ashes, nor put sons on our neglected farms.”

“I know.”

And as their ship put out to sea and spread its big square sail, Gaius Marius leaned on the rail watching Tarentum and its inlet disappear to a blue smudge, and then a nothing. And thought again about the predicament of the Italian Allies. Was it because he had so often been called an Italian—a non-Roman? Or was it because, for all his faults and weaknesses, he did own a sense of justice? Or was it rather that he simply couldn’t bear the bungling inefficiency behind it all? One thing of which he was utterly convinced: the day would come when Rome’s Italian Allies would demand a reckoning. Would demand the full Roman citizenship for every last man of the whole Italian peninsula, and maybe even Italian Gaul as well.

A shout of laughter broke into his thoughts; he lifted himself off the rail and turned to find his son demonstrating that he was a good sailor, for the ship was moving in the teeth of a stiff breeze, and a poor sailor would by now have been retching miserably. Julia too was looking well and confident.

“Most of my family settle down at sea,” she said when Marius joined her. “My brother Sextus is the only poor sailor, probably because of his wheezes.”

The packet to Patrae plied that same route permanently, and made as much money from passengers as from cargo, so could offer Marius a cabin of sorts on deck; there was no doubt, however, that when Julia disembarked in Patrae, she was glad to do so. As Marius intended to sail down the Gulf of Corinth too, she refused to budge from Patrae until they had journeyed overland to make a pilgrimage to Olympia.

“It’s so odd,” she said, riding a donkey, “that the world’s greatest sanctuary of Zeus should be tucked away in a backwater of the Peloponnese. I don’t know why, but I always used to think Olympia was at the foot of Mount Olympus.”

“That’s the Greeks for you,” said Marius, who itched to get to Asia Province as quickly as possible, but didn’t have the heart to deny Julia these obviously welcome treats. Traveling with a woman was not his idea of an enjoyable time.

In Corinth, however, he brightened up. When Mummius had sacked it fifty years earlier, all its treasures had been spirited back to Rome. The town itself had never recovered. Huddled around the base of the mighty rock called the Acrocorinth, many of its houses lay abandoned and crumbling, doors flapping eerily.

“This is one of the places I had intended to settle my veterans,” Marius said a little grimly as they walked Corinth’s dilapidated streets. “Look at it! Crying for new citizens! Plenty of land fit for growing, a port on the Aegean side and a port on the Ionian side, all the prerequisites of a thriving emporium. And what did they do to me? They invalidated my land bill.”

“Because Saturninus had passed it,” said Young Marius.

“Exactly. And because those fools in the Senate failed to see how important it is to give Head Count soldiers a bit of land when they retire. Never forget, young Marius, that the Head Count have absolutely no money or property! I opened our armies to the Head Count, I gave Rome fresh blood in the form of a class of citizens who never before had been of real use. And the soldiers of the Head Count went on to prove their worth—in Numidia, at Aquae Sextiae, at Vercellae. They fought as well as or better than the old style of soldier, man of substance though he was. But they can’t be discharged and let go back to the stews of Rome! They have to be settled on land. I knew the First Class and the Second Class would never countenance my settling them on Roman public lands within Italy, so I enacted laws to settle them in places like this, hungry for new citizens. Here they would have brought Rome to our provinces, and made us friends in the fullness of time. Unfortunately, the leaders of the House and the leaders of the knights consider Rome to be exclusive, her customs and her way of life not to be disseminated throughout the world.”

“Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus,” said Young Marius in tones of loathing; he had grown up in a house where that name had never been spoken of with love or liking, and usually with the tag Piggle-wiggle attached to it. However, Young Marius knew better than to add the tag in the presence of his mother, who would have been horrified to hear him using such language—Piggle-wiggle was nursery slang for a little girl’s genitalia.

“Who else?” asked Marius.

“Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus, and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, and Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar, and Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica…”

“Very good, enough. They marshaled their clients and they organized a faction too powerful even for me. And then, last year, they took most of Saturninus’s laws off the tablets.”

“His grain law and his land bills,” said Young Marius, who was getting on very well with his father now they were emancipated from Rome, and liked to be praised.

“Except the first land bill, the one to settle my soldiers of the Head Count on the African islands,” said Marius.

“Which reminds me, husband, of something I wanted to say to you,” Julia interrupted.

Marius cast a significant glance down at Young Marius’s head, but Julia sailed on serenely.

“How long do you intend to keep Gaius Julius Caesar on that island? Could he not come home?” she asked. “For the sake of Aurelia and the children, he ought to come home.”

“I need him on Cercina,” said Marius tersely. “A leader of men he is not, but no commissioner ever worked harder or better on any agrarian project than Gaius Julius. As long as he’s there on Cercina, the work goes forward, the complaints are minimal, and the results are splendid.”

“But it’s been so long!” Julia protested. “Three years!”

“And likely to be three more years.” Marius was not about to give in. “You know how slow land commissions are—there’s so much to do, between surveying, interviewing, compensating, sorting out endless confusions—and overcoming local resistance. Gaius Julius does the work with consummate skill. No, Julia! Not one word more! Gaius Julius stays right where he is until the job is finished.”

“I pity his wife and children, then.”