The Grass Crown (97 page)

“Here it comes,” said Catulus Caesar.

Sulpicius turned to level his finger at Sulla, who stood in the forefront of the crowd atop the Senate steps, his looks singling him out. “There is the senior consul! Elected senior consul by his peers, not yours! How long is it since even the Third Class was needed to cast a ballot in the consular elections?”

Seeming to realize that he was in danger of drifting from his point, Sulpicius paused, came back to it. “The senior consul was given the command in a war so vital to the future of Rome that if that war is not conducted by the best man in Rome, Rome may well cease to exist. So who gave the command of the war against King Mithridates of Pontus to the senior consul? Who decided he was the best man in Rome to do the job? Why, the Senate and their secret masters of the Ordo Equester! Putting up their own, as always! Willing to jeopardize Rome in order to see a patrician nobleman put on the trappings of the general! For who is this Lucius Cornelius Sulla? What wars has he won? Do you know him, sovereign People? Well, I can tell you who he is! Lucius Cornelius Sulla stands there because he rode on Gaius Marius’s back! Everything he has achieved he achieved by riding on Gaius Marius’s back! He is said to have won the war against the Italians! But we all know that it was Gaius Marius dealt the first and hardest blows—had Gaius Marius not, then this man Sulla couldn’t have gone on to victory!”

“How dare he!” gasped Crassus Censor. “It was you and no one but you, Lucius Cornelius! You won the Grass Crown! You brought the Italians to their knees!” He drew in a great breath to shout this at Sulpicius, but shut his mouth when Sulla twisted his arm.

“Leave be, Publius Licinius! If we start shouting at them, they’ll turn on us and lynch us. I want this mess cleared up in a legal and peaceful way,” said Sulla.

Sulpicius was still hammering his point home. “Can this Lucius Cornelius Sulla address you, sovereign People? Of course he can’t! He’s a patrician! Too good for the likes of you! In order to give this precious patrician the command of the war against Mithridates, the Senate and the Ordo Equester passed over a far more qualified and able man! They passed over none other than Gaius Marius! Saying he was sick, saying he was old! But I ask you, sovereign People!—who have you seen every single day for the past two years walking through this city forcing himself to get well? Exercising, looking better every day? Gaius Marius! Who might be old, but is no longer sick! Gaius Marius! Who might be old, but is still the best man in Rome!”

The cheering had broken out again, but not for Sulpicius. The crowd parted to reveal Gaius Marius walking down to the bottom of the Comitia well, briskly and on his own; Gaius Marius no longer needed to lean on his boy, who was not with him.

“Sovereign People of Rome, I ask you to approve of a fourth law in my program of legislation!” Sulpicius shouted, beaming at Gaius Marius. “I propose that the command of the war against King Mithridates of Pontus be stripped away from the haughty patrician Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and given to your own Gaius Marius!”

Sulla waited to hear no more. Asking that Scaevola Pontifex Maximus and Merula flamen Dialis accompany him, he walked home.

Ensconced in his study, Sulla looked at them. “Well, what do we do?” he asked.

“Why Lucius Merula and me?” was Scaevola’s answer.

“You’re the heads of our religion,” said Sulla, “and you know the law as well. Find me a way to prolong Sulpicius’s campaign in the Comitia until the crowd gets tired of it—and him.”

“Something soft,” said Merula thoughtfully.

“Soft as kitten’s fur,” said Sulla, tossing back a cup of unwatered wine. “If it came to a pitched battle in the Forum, he’d win. He’s no Saturninus! Sulpicius is a much cleverer man. He beat us to the violent alternatives. I did a rough count of the number in his guard, and came up with a figure not much short of four thousand. And they’re armed. Clubs on the surface, but I suspect swords underneath. We can’t field a civilian force capable of teaching them a lesson in a space as confined as the Forum Romanum.” Sulla stopped, grimaced as if he tasted something sour and bitter; his pale cold eyes looked into nothing, “If I have to, Pontifex Maximus, flamen Dialis, I will pile Pelion on top of Ossa before I see our rightful privileges overturned! Including my own position! But let us first see if we can’t defeat Sulpicius with his own weapon—the People.”

“Then,” said Scaevola, “the only thing to do is to declare all the Comitial days between now and whenever you wish as feriae.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea!” said Merula, face lightening.

Sulla frowned. “Is it legal?”

“Most definitely. The consuls, the Pontifex Maximus, and the Colleges of Pontifices are at complete liberty to set days of rest and holiday during which the Assemblies cannot meet.”

“Then post the declaration of feriae this afternoon on rostra and Regia, and have the heralds proclaim days of rest and holiday between now and the Ides of December.” Sulla grinned nastily. “His term as a tribune of the plebs finishes three days before that. And the moment he’s out of office, I’ll have Sulpicius up on charges of treason and inciting violence.”

“You’ll have to try him quietly,” said Scaevola, shivering.

“Oh, for Jupiter’s sake, Quintus Mucius! How can it be done quietly?” asked Sulla. “I shall haul him up and try him, that’s all! If he can’t woo the crowds with lovely words, he’ll be helpless enough. I’ll drug him.”

Two pairs of startled eyes flew to Sulla’s face; it was when he said things like drugging a man that he was most alien, least able to be understood.

Sulla convened the Senate next morning and announced that the consuls and pontifices had declared a period of feriae during which no meetings in the Comitia could be held. It fetched a round of quiet cheers, as Gaius Marius was not in the House to object.

Catulus Caesar walked out of the chamber afterward with Sulla. “How dared Gaius Marius place the State in jeopardy, all for the sake of a command he’s not fit to take up?” demanded Catulus Caesar.

“Oh, because he’s old, he’s afraid, his mind’s not what it was, and he wants to be consul of Rome seven times,” said Sulla wearily.

Scaevola Pontifex Maximus, who had left ahead of Sulla and Catulus Caesar, suddenly came running back. “Sulpicius!” he cried. “He’s ignoring the proclamation of feriae, he’s calling it a ploy devised by the Senate and going ahead in contio!”

Sulla didn’t look surprised. “I imagined that was what he would do,” he said.

“Then what was the point of it?” asked Scaevola indignantly.

“It puts us in the position of being able to declare any laws he discusses or passes during the period of feriae invalid,” said Sulla. “that’s the only virtue feriae has.”

“If he passes his law expelling everyone in debt from the Senate,” said Catulus Caesar, “we’ll never be able to declare his laws invalid. There won’t be enough senators left to make a quorum. And that means the Senate will cease to exist as a political force.”

“Then I suggest that we get together with Titus Pomponius, Gaius Oppius, and other bankers and arrange for the cancellation of all senatorial debts—unofficially, of course.”

“We can’t!” wailed Scaevola. “The senatorial creditors are insisting on their money, and there isn’t any money! No senator borrows from respectable lenders like Pomponius and Oppius! They’re too public! The censors would get to know!”

“Then I’ll charge Gaius Marius with treason and take the money from his estates,” said Sulla, looking ugly.

“Oh, Lucius Cornelius, you can’t!” moaned Scaevola. “The ’sovereign People’ would tear us apart!”

“Then I’ll open my war chest and pay the Senate’s debts with that!” said Sulla through his teeth.

“You can’t, Lucius Cornelius!”

“I am getting very tired of being told I can’t,” said Sulla. “Let myself be beaten by Sulpicius and a pack of gullible fools who think he’s going to cancel their debts? I won’t! Pelion on top of Ossa, Quintus Mucius! I will do whatever I have to do!”

“A fund,” said Catulus Caesar. “A fund set up by those of us not in debt to salvage those who face expulsion.”

“To do that, we would have needed to see into the future,” said Scaevola miserably. “It would take at least a month. I’m not in debt, Quintus Lutatius. Nor are you, I imagine. Nor Lucius Cornelius. But ready money? I don’t have any! Do you? Can you scrape up more than a thousand sesterces without selling property?”

“I can, but only just,” said Catulus Caesar.

“I can’t,” said Sulla.

“I think we should put a fund together,” said Scaevola, “but it will require the sale of property. Which means it will come too late. Those senators in debt will have been expelled. However, as soon as they’re out of debt, the censors can reinstall them.”

“You don’t think Sulpicius will permit that, do you?” asked Sulla. “He’ll do some more legislating.”

“Oh, I hope I get a chance to lay my hands on Sulpicius some dark night!” said Catulus Caesar savagely. “How can he dare to do all this at a time when we can’t even fund a war we have to win?”

“Because Publius Sulpicius is clever and committed,” said Sulla. “And I suspect Gaius Marius put him up to it.”

“They’ll pay,” said Catulus Caesar.

“Be careful, Quintus Lutatius. It’s they might make you pay,” said Sulla. “Still, they fear us. And with good reason.”

Seventeen days had to elapse between the first contio at which a law was discussed and the meeting of the Assembly voting that law into being; Publius Sulpicius Rufus continued to hold his contiones while the days dripped away and the time for ratification came ever closer, seemed more inevitable.

On the day before the first pair of Sulpicius’s laws were to be put to the vote, young Quintus Pompeius Rufus and his friends who were the sons of senators and knights of the First Class decided to put a stop to Sulpicius in the only way now possible—by force. Without the knowledge of their fathers or of the curule magistrates, young Pompeius Rufus and some others gathered over a thousand men aged between seventeen and thirty. They all owned armor and arms, they had all until very recently been in the field against the Italians. As Sulpicius conducted the contio applying the finishing touches to the actual drafting of his first pair of laws, a thousand heavily armed young men of the First Class marched into the Forum Romanum and immediately attacked the men attending Sulpicius’s meeting.

The invasion caught Sulla completely unprepared; one moment he and his colleague Quintus Pompeius Rufus were observing Sulpicius from the top of the Senate steps, surrounded by other senior senators, and the next moment the whole of the lower Forum was a battlefield. He could see young Quintus Pompeius Rufus wreaking havoc with a sword, heard the father standing beside him cry out in anguish, and held the father’s arm so strongly he couldn’t move.

“Leave it, Quintus Pompeius. There’s nothing you can do,” said Sulla curtly. “You’d never even get to his side.”

Unfortunately the crowd was so large it extended far beyond the actual Comitia well. No general, young Pompeius Rufus had deployed his men thinly spread out rather than kept them in a wedge. Had he done so, he might have driven through the middle of the pack; as it was, Sulpicius’s guard had no difficulty in uniting.

Fighting bravely, young Pompeius Rufus himself succeeded in working his way around the rim of the Comitia well and reached the rostra. Intent upon Sulpicius as he scrambled up to the rostra platform, he never even saw the burly middle-aged fellow who had obviously retired from the gladiatorial ring until his sword was wrenched down. Young Pompeius Rufus tumbled from the rostra into Sulpicius’s guard below, and was clubbed to death.

Sulla heard the father’s scream, felt rather than saw several senators drag him away, and himself realized that the guard, now victorious over the ranks of the young elite, would turn next to the Senate steps. Like an eel he wriggled through the throng of panicked senators and dropped off the edge of the Senate House podium into the pandemonium below, his toga praetexta abandoned. A deft twist of his hand plucked a chlamys cloak from some Greek freedman trapped by the fight; Sulla threw it over his telltale head and pretended he too was a Greek freedman only intent upon removing himself from the turmoil. He ducked beneath the colonnade of the Basilica Porcia, where frantic merchants were trying to disassemble their stalls, and worked his way into the Clivus Argentarius. The crowd grew less, the fighting nonexistent; Sulla headed up the hill and through the Porta Fontinalis.

He knew exactly where he was going. To see the prime mover in all this. To see Gaius Marius, who wanted to command a war and get himself elected consul a seventh time.

He threw the chlamys away and knocked on Marius’s door clad only in his tunic. “I want to see Gaius Marius,” he said to the porter in tones which implied he was clad in all his regalia.

Unwilling to deny entry to a man he knew so well, the porter held the door open and admitted Sulla to the house.

But it was Julia who came, not Gaius Marius.

“Oh, Lucius Cornelius, this is terrible!” she said, and turned to a servant. “Bring wine.”

“I want to see Gaius Marius,” said Sulla through his teeth.

“You can’t, Lucius Cornelius. He’s asleep.”

“Then wake him, Julia. If you don’t, I swear I will!”

Again she turned to a servant. “Please ask Strophantes to wake Gaius Marius and tell him Lucius Cornelius Sulla is here to see him on urgent business.”

“Has he gone completely mad?” asked Sulla, reaching for the water flagon; he was too thirsty to drink wine.

“I don’t know what you mean!” cried Julia, looking defensive.

“Oh, come, Julia! You’re the Great Man’s wife! If you don’t know him, no one does!” snarled Sulla. “He’s deliberately engineered a series of events he thinks will bring him the command against Mithridates, he’s cultivated the lawless career of a man who is determined to tear down the mos maiorum, he’s turned the Forum into a shambles and caused the death of the son of the consul Pompeius Rufus—not to mention the deaths of hundreds of others!”

Julia closed her eyes. “I cannot control him,” she said.