The First Man in Rome (113 page)

The proceedings took place in the well of the Comitia, with Glaucia presiding from the rostra, and his nine fellow tribunes of the plebs drawing the lots to see which of the thirty-five tribes would vote first through to last, then marshaling each tribe when its turn came to vote.

A lot of money had changed hands, some of it on behalf of Saturninus, but a great deal more on behalf of the anonymous candidates fielded by the Policy Makers. Every rich man on the conservative front benches had dug deep into his cashbox, and votes were bought for men like Quintus Nonius from Picenum, a political nobody of stoutly conservative heart. Though Sulla had had nothing to do with his entering the Senate, nor his standing for the tribunate of the plebs, he was the brother of Sulla's brother-in-law; when Sulla's sister, Cornelia Sulla, had married into the wealthy squirarchical family of Nonius from Picenum, the luster of her name inspired the men of the family of Nonius to try their luck on the
cursus honorum.
Her son was being groomed for the most earnest attempt, but the boy's uncle decided to see what he could do first.

It was an election full of shocks. Quintus Nonius from Picenum got in easily, for example. Whereas Lucius Appuleius Saturninus didn't get in at all. There were ten places for tribunes of the plebs, and Saturninus came in eleventh.

"I—don't—believe it!" Saturninus gasped to Glaucia. "I just don't
believe
it! What happened?"

Glaucia was frowning; suddenly his own chances to become a praetor seemed dim. Then he shrugged, clapped Saturninus on the back with rough comfort, and stepped down from the rostra. "Don't worry," he said, "something might change things yet."

"What can possibly change an election result?" Saturninus demanded. "No, Gaius Servilius, I'm out!"

"I'll see you shortly—here. Just stay here, don't go home yet," said Glaucia, and hurried off into the crowd.

The moment he heard his name called as one of the ten new tribunes of the plebs, Quintus Nonius from Picenum wanted to go home to his expensive new house on the Carinae. There his wife waited with his sister-in-law Cornelia Sulla and her boy, anxious to know the results, provincial enough to doubt Quintus Nonius's chances.

However, it was more difficult to leave the Forum area than Quintus Nonius had counted on, for every few feet he was stopped and warmly congratulated; a natural courtesy could not allow him to fob off his well-wishers, so he lingered in a forced detention, beaming and bowing, shaking a hundred hands.

One by one Quintus Nonius's companions dropped away, until he entered the first of the alleyways on his route home attended only by three close friends who also lived on the Carinae. When they were set upon by a dozen men armed with clubs, one of the friends managed to break away and run back toward the Forum, crying for help, only to find it virtually deserted. Luckily Saturninus and Glaucia were standing talking to some others near the rostra, Glaucia looking red-faced and a little disheveled; when the cry for help came, they all followed at a run. But it was too late. Quintus Nonius and his two friends were dead.

"Edepol!"
said Glaucia, getting to his feet after verifying that Quintus Nonius was indeed dead. "Quintus Nonius has just been elected a tribune of the plebs, and I'm the officer in charge of proceedings." He frowned. "Lucius Appuleius, will you see Quintus Nonius is carried home? I'd better go back to the Forum and deal with the electoral dilemma."

The shock of finding Quintus Nonius and his friends lying extinguished in lakes of their own blood deprived those who had come to the rescue of their normal faculties, including Saturninus; no one noticed how artificial Glaucia sounded, including Saturninus. And standing on an empty rostra shouting to a deserted Forum Romanum, Gaius Servilius Glaucia announced the death of the newly elected tribune of the plebs Quintus Nonius. He then announced that the candidate who came in eleventh would replace Quintus Nonius in the new college—Lucius Appuleius Saturninus.

"It's all set" said Glaucia complacently later, at Saturninus's house. "You are now a legally elected tribune of the plebs, co-opted to fill Quintus Nonius's shoes."

He was not over-endowed with scruples since those awful events which had seen him dismissed from his post as quaestor at Ostia, but Saturninus was nonetheless so shocked he stared at Glaucia, aghast.

"You didn't!" he cried.

Glaucia put the tip of his index finger against the side of his nose and smiled at Saturninus from beneath his brows, a smile owning much fierceness. "Ask me no questions, Lucius Appuleius, and I'll tell you no lies," he said.

"The shame of it is that he was a nice fellow."

"Yes, he was. But that's his luck, to wind up dead. He was the only one who lived on the Carinae, so he was elected—in more ways than one. It's too hard to set something up on the Palatine—there aren't enough people on the streets."

Saturninus sighed, shrugged off his depression. "You're right. And I'm in. I thank you for your help, Gaius Servilius."

"Think nothing of it," said Glaucia.

The scandal was difficult to live down, but it was quite impossible for anyone to prove that Saturninus was implicated in a murder when even the dead man's surviving friend could testify that both Saturninus and Glaucia. had been standing in the lower Forum at the time the deed was done. People talked, but talk was cheap, as Glaucia said with a sneer. And when Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus demanded that the tribunician elections be held all over again, he got nowhere; Glaucia had created a precedent to deal with a particular crisis which had never occurred before.

"Talk is cheap!" Glaucia said again, this time in the Senate. "The allegations that Lucius Appuleius and I were involved in the death of Quintus Nonius have no foundation in fact. As for my replacing a dead tribune of the plebs with a live one, I did what any true presiding officer of an election ought to do—I acted! No one can dispute that Lucius Appuleius polled in eleventh place, nor that the election was properly conducted. To appoint Lucius Appuleius the successor of Quintus Nonius as quickly and smoothly as possible was as logical as it was expedient. The
contio
of the Plebeian Assembly which I called yesterday gave my actions full-throated approval, as everyone here can verify. This debate, Conscript Fathers, is as useless as it is causeless. The matter is closed." Thus Gaius Servilius Glaucia.

Gaius Marius and Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar triumphed together on the first day of December. The joint parade was a stroke of genius, for there could be no doubt that Catulus Caesar, his chariot trailing behind the incumbent consul's, was very much the second lead in the production. The name on everybody's lips was Gaius Marius. There was even a very clever float put together by Lucius Cornelius Sulla—who as usual got the job of organizing the parade—showing Marius allowing Catulus Caesar's men to pick up the thirty-five Cimbric standards, because he had already captured so many in Gaul.

At the meeting which followed in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Marius spoke with passion of his actions in awarding the citizenship to the soldiers of Camerinum and plugging up the Vale of the Salassi by planting a soldier colony at little Eporedia. His announcement that he would seek a sixth consulship was greeted with groans, gibes, cries of bitter protest—and cheers. The cheers were far louder. When the tumult died down he announced that all his personal share of the spoils would go to build a new temple to the military cult of Honor and Virtue; in it his trophies and the trophies of his army would be housed, and it would be sited on the Capitol. He would also build a temple to the Roman military Honor and Virtue at Olympia in Greece.

Catulus Caesar listened with a sinking heart, understanding that if he was to preserve his own reputation he would have to donate his own share of the spoils to a similar kind of public religious monument, rather than investing it to augment his private fortune—which was large enough, but not nearly as large as Marius's.

It surprised no one when the Centuriate Assembly elected Gaius Marius consul for the sixth time, and in senior place. Not only was he now the undisputed First Man in Rome, many were beginning to call him the Third Founder of Rome as well. The First Founder was none other than Romulus himself. The Second Founder was Marcus Furius Camillus, who had been-responsible for the ejection of the Gauls from Italy three hundred years before. Therefore it seemed appropriate to call Gaius Marius the Third Founder of Rome, since he too had repulsed a tide of barbarians.

The consular elections were not without their surprises; Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle failed to carry the junior consul's poll. This was Marius's high point, and he won, even in the matter of his junior colleague; he had declared his firm support for Lucius Valerius Flaccus, and Lucius Valerius Flaccus was duly elected. Flaccus held an important lifelong priesthood, the position of
flamen Martialis
—the special priest of Mars—and his office had made him a quiet man, biddable and subordinate. An ideal companion for the masterful Gaius Marius.

But it was no surprise to anyone when Gaius Servilius Glaucia was elected a praetor, for he was Marius's man, and Marius had bribed the voters lavishly. What was a surprise was the fact that he came in at the head of the poll, and so was appointed
praetor urbanus,
the most senior of the six praetors elected.

Shortly after the elections Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar announced publicly that he would donate his personal share of the German spoils to two religious causes; the first was to purchase the old site of Marcus Fulvius Flaccus's house on the Palatine—it lay next door to his own house—and build thereon a magnificent porticus to house the thirty-five Cimbric standards he had captured on the field of Vercellae; the second was to build a temple on the Campus Martius to the goddess Fortuna in her guise of the Fortune of the Present Day.

When the new tribunes of the plebs entered office on the tenth day of December, the fun began. Tribune of the plebs for the second time, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus dominated the college completely, and exploited the fear the death of Quintus Nonius had provoked to further his own legislative ends. Though he kept denying strenuously any implication in the murder, he kept dropping little remarks in private to his fellow tribunes of the plebs which gave them cause to wonder if they might not end up as Quintus Nonius did, should they attempt to thwart him. The result was that they permitted Saturninus to do precisely what he pleased; neither Metellus Numidicus nor Catulus Caesar could persuade a single tribune of the plebs to interpose a single veto.

Within eight days of entering office, Saturninus brought forward the first of two bills to award public lands to the veterans of both German armies; the lands were all abroad, in Sicily, Greece, Macedonia, and mainland Africa. The bill also carried a novel proviso, that Gaius Marius himself was to have the authority to personally grant the Roman citizenship to three Italian soldier settlers in each colony.

The Senate erupted into furious opposition.

"This man," said Metellus Numidicus, "is not even going to favor his Roman soldiers! He wants land for all comers on an equal footing—Roman, Latin, Italian. No difference! No distinguished attention for Rome's own men! I ask you, fellow senators, what do you think of such a man? Does Rome matter to him? Of course it doesn't!
Why should it?
He's not a Roman! He's an Italian! And he favors his own breed. A thousand of them enfranchised on the battlefield, while Roman soldiers stood by and watched, unthanked. But what else can we expect of such a man as Gaius Marius?"

When Marius rose to reply, he couldn't even make himself heard; so he walked out of the Curia Hostilia and stood on the rostra, and addressed the Forum frequenters instead. Some were indignant; but he was their darling, and they listened.

"There's land enough for all!" he shouted. "No one can accuse me of preferential treatment for Italians! One hundred
iugera
per soldier! Ah, why so much, I hear you ask? Because, People of Rome, these colonists are going to harder places by far than our own beloved Italy. They will plant and harvest in unkind soils and unkind climates, where to make a decent living a man must have more land than he does in our beloved land of Italy."

"There he goes!" cried Catulus Caesar from the steps of the Senate, his voice carrying shrilly. "There he goes! Listen to what he's saying! Not Rome!
Italy!
Italy, Italy, always it's Italy! He's not a Roman, and he doesn't care about Rome!"

"Italy
is
Rome!" thundered Marius. "They are one and the same! Without one, the other does not and cannot exist! Don't Romans and Italians alike lay down their lives in Rome's armies for Rome? And if that is so—and who can deny it is so?—why should one kind of soldier be any different from the other?"

"Italy!" cried Catulus Caesar. "Always it's Italy!"

"Rubbish!" shouted Marius. "The first allocations of land go to Roman soldiers, not to Italian! Is that evidence of an Italian bias? And isn't it better that out of the thousands of veteran legionaries who will go to these colonies, three of the Italians among them will become full Roman citizens? I said three, People of Rome! Not three thousand Italians, People of Rome! Not three hundred Italians, People of Rome! Not three dozen Italians, People of Rome!
Three!
A drop in an ocean of men! A drop of a drop in an ocean of men!"                                                            

"A drop of poison in an ocean of men!" screamed Catulus Caesar from the steps of the Senate.

"The bill may say that the Roman soldiers will get their land first, but where does it say that the first land given away will be the best land?" shouted Metellus Numidicus.

But the first land bill, which dealt with various tracts Rome had possessed in her public domain for a number of years and leased to absentee landlords, was passed by the Plebeian Assembly in spite of the opposition.

Quintus Poppaedius Silo, now the leading man of his Marsic people in spite of his relative youth, had come to Rome to hear the debates on the land bills; Marcus Livius Drusus had invited him, and he was staying in Drusus's house.