The First Man in Rome (119 page)

When some fifty of the young bloods met at the house of Metellus Piglet on the night before Saturninus planned to pass his grain law, Sulla lay back and listened to the talk in an apparent idle amusement until Caepio Junior rounded on him and demanded to know what he thought they ought to do.

He looked marvelous, the thick red-gold hair barbered to bring out the best of its waves, his white skin flawless, his brows and lashes dark enough to show up (had they only known it, he touched them with a trace
of stibium,
otherwise they virtually disappeared), his eyes as glacially compelling as a blue-eyed cat's. "I think you're all hot air," he said.

Metellus Piglet had been brought to understand that Sulla was anything but Marius's tame dog; like any other Roman, he didn't hold it against a man that he attached himself to a faction, any more than he assumed that man could not be detached. "No, we're not all hot air," he growled without a single stammer. "It's just that we don't know what's the right tactic."

"Do you object to a little violence?" Sulla asked.

"Not when it's to protect the Senate's right to decide how Rome's public money is to be spent," said Caepio Junior.

"And there you have it," said Sulla. "The People have never been accorded the right to spend the city's moneys. Let the People make the laws—we don't object to that. But it's the Senate's right to provide any money the People's laws demand—and the Senate's right to deny funding. If we're stripped of our right to control the purse-strings, we have no power left at all. Money is the only way we can render the People's laws impotent when we don't agree with them. That's how we dealt with the grain law of Gaius Gracchus."

"We won't prevent the Senate's voting the money when this grain law goes through," said Metellus Piglet, still without a stammer; when with his intimates he didn't stammer.

"Of course not!" said Sulla. "We won't prevent its being passed, either. But we can show Lucius Appuleius a little of our strength all the same."

Thus as Saturninus stood exhorting his voters to do the right thing by the
lex Appuleia frumentaria,
the crowds no closer than the Circus Flaminius and the meeting as orderly as any consular could demand, Caepio Junior led some two hundred followers into the lower Forum Romanum. Armed with clubs and billets of wood, most of them were beefy muscular fellows with the slack midriffs which suggested they were ex-gladiators now reduced to hiring out their services for any sort of job requiring strength or the capacity to turn nasty. However, all the fifty present at Metellus Piglet's house the night before led the vanguard, Caepio Junior very much the leader of the pack. Lucius Cornelius Sulla was not among them.

Saturninus shrugged and watched impassively as the gang marched across the Forum, then turned back to the well of the Comitia and dismissed the meeting.

"There'll be no heads broken on my account!" he shouted to the voters, dissolving their tribal clumps in alarm. "Go home, come back tomorrow! We'll pass our law then!"

On the following day the Head Count was back in attendance on the Comitia; no gang of senatorial toughs appeared to break up the meeting, and the grain bill passed into law.

"All I was trying to do, you thick-headed idiot," said Saturninus to Caepio Junior when they met in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, where Valerius Flaccus had felt the Conscript Fathers would be safe from the crowds while they argued about funding for the
lex Appuleia frumentaria,
"was pass a lawful law in a lawfully convoked assembly. The crowds weren't there, the atmosphere was peaceful, and the omens were impeccable. And what happens? You and your idiot friends come along to break a few heads!" He turned to the clusters of senators standing about.

"Don't blame me that the law had to be passed in the middle of twenty thousand Head Count! Blame this fool!"

“This fool is blaming himself for not using force where force would have counted most!" shouted Caepio Junior. "I ought to have killed you, Lucius Appuleius!"

"Thank you for saying that in front of all these impartial witnesses," said Saturninus, smiling. "Quintus Servilius Caepio Junior, I hereby formally charge you with minor treason, in that you did attempt to obstruct a tribune of the plebs in the execution of his duty, and that you did threaten to harm the sacrosanct person of a tribune of the plebs."

"You're riding a half-mad horse for a fall, Lucius Appuleius," said Sulla. "Get off before it happens, man!"

"I have laid a formal charge against Quintus Servilius, Conscript Fathers," said Saturninus, ignoring Sulla as nobody of importance, "but that matter can now be left to the treason court. Today I'm here to demand money."

There were fewer than eighty senators present, in spite of the safe location, and none of significance; Saturninus glared at them contemptuously. "I want money to buy grain for the People of Rome," he said. "If you haven't got it in the Treasury, I suggest you go out and borrow it.
For money I will have!"

Saturninus got his money. Red-faced and protesting, Caepio Junior the urban quaestor was ordered to mint a special coinage from an emergency stockpile of silver bars in the temple of Ops, and pay for the grain without further defiance.

"I'll see you in court," said Saturninus sweetly to Caepio Junior as the meeting finished, "because I'm going to take great pleasure in prosecuting you myself."

But in this he overstepped himself; the knight jurors took a dislike to Saturninus, and were already favorably disposed toward Caepio Junior when Fortune showed that she too was most favorably disposed toward Caepio Junior. Right in the middle of the defending counsel's address came an urgent letter from Smyrna to inform his son that Quintus Servilius Caepio had died in Smyrna, surrounded by nothing more comforting than his gold. Caepio Junior wept bitterly; the jury was moved, and dismissed the charges.

Elections were due, but no one wanted to hold them, forstill each day the crowds gathered in the Forum Romanum, and still each day the granaries remained empty. The junior consul, Flaccus, insisted the elections must wait until time proved Gaius Marius incapable of conducting them; priest of Mars though he was, Lucius Valerius Flaccus had too little of Mars in him to risk his person by supervising elections in a climate like this present one.

Marcus Antonius Orator had had a very successful three-year campaign against the pirates of Cilicia and Pamphylia, which he finished in some style from his headquarters in the delightfully cosmopolitan and cultured city of Athens. Here he had been joined by his good friend Gaius Memmius, who on his return to Rome from governing Macedonia had found himself arraigned in Glaucia's extortion court along with Gaius Flavius Fimbria, his partner-in-crime in the grain swindle. Fimbria had been convicted heavily, but Memmius was unlucky enough to be convicted by one vote. He chose Athens as his place of exile because his friend Antonius spent so much time there, and he needed his friend Antonius's support in the matter of an appeal to the Senate to quash his conviction. That he was able to defray the costs of this expensive exercise was due to pure chance; while governing Macedonia, he had almost literally tripped over a cache of gold in a captured Scordisci village—one hundred talents of it. Like Caepio at Tolosa, Memmius had seen no reason why he ought to share the gold with anybody, so he didn't. Until he dropped some of it into Antonius's open hand in Athens. And a few months later got his recall to Rome and his seat in the Senate reinstated.

Since the pirate war was properly concluded, Gaius Memmius waited in Athens until Marcus Antonius Orator was ready to go home as well. Their friendship had prospered, and they formed a pact to seek the consulship as joint candidates.

It was the end of November when Antonius sat down with his little army on the vacant fields of the Campus Martius, and demanded a triumph. Which the Senate, able to meet in the safety of the temple of Bellona to deal with this, was pleased to grant him. However, Antonius was informed that his triumph would have to wait until after the tenth day of December, as no tribunician elections had yet been held, and the Forum Romanum was still packed with the Head Count. Hopefully the tribunician elections would be held and the new college would enter office on the tenth day of the month, but a triumphal parade with the city in its current mood, Antonius was informed, was out of the question.

It began to look to Antonius as if he would not be able to stand for the office of consul, for until his triumph was held, he had to remain outside the
pomerium,
the sacred boundary of the city; he still held imperium, which put him in exactly the same position as a foreign king, forbidden to enter Rome. And if he couldn't enter Rome, he couldn't announce himself as a candidate in the consular elections.

However, his successful war had made him tremendously popular with the grain merchants and other businessmen, for traffic on the Middle Sea was safer and more predictable than in half a century. Could he stand for the consulship, there was every chance that he would win the senior position, even against Gaius Marius. And in spite of his part in Fimbria's grain swindle, Gaius Memmius's chances were not bad either, for he had been an intrepid foe of Jugurtha's, and fought Caepio bitterly when he returned the extortion court to the Senate. They were, as Catulus Caesar said to Scaurus Princeps Senatus, as popular a pair with the knights who formed the majority of the First and Second Classes as the
boni
could possibly ask—and both of them were infinitely preferable to Gaius Marius.

For of course everyone expected Gaius Marius back in Rome at the very last minute, all set to stand for his seventh consulship. The story of the stroke had been verified, but it didn't seem to have incapacitated Marius very much, and those who had made the journey to Cumae to see him had come away convinced it had not in any way affected the quality of his mind. No doubt of it in anyone's thoughts; Gaius Marius was sure to declare himself a candidate.

The idea of presenting the electorate with a pair of candidates eager to stand as partners appealed to the Policy Makers very strongly; Antonius and Memmius together stood a chance of breaking Marius's iron hold on the senior chair. Except that Antonius stubbornly refused to give up his
triumph for the sake of the consulship by yielding his imperium and stepping across the
pomerium
to declare himself a candidate.

"I can run for the consulship next year," he said when Catulus Caesar and Scaurus Princeps Senatus came to see him on the Campus Martius. "The triumph is more important—I'll probably never fight another good war again as long as I live." And from that stand he could not be budged.

"All right," said Scaurus to Catulus Caesar as they came away from Antonius's camp despondent, "we'll just have to bend the rules a little. Gaius Marius thinks nothing of breaking them, so why should we be scrupulous when so much is at stake?"

But it was Catulus Caesar who proposed their solution to the House, meeting with just enough members present to make a quorum in yet another safe location, the temple of Jupiter Stator near the Circus Flaminius.

"These are trying times," Catulus Caesar said. "Normally all the candidates for the curule magistracies must present themselves to the Senate and the People in the Forum Romanum to declare their candidacies. Unfortunately the shortage of grain and the constant demonstrations in the Forum Romanum have rendered this location untenable. Might I humbly beg the Conscript Fathers to shift the candidates' tribunal—for this one extraordinary year only!— to a special convocation of the Centuriate Assembly in the
saepta
on the Campus Martius? We must do
something
about holding elections! And if we do shift the curule candidates' ceremony to the
saepta,
it's a start—the requisite time between the declarations and the elections can elapse. It would also be fair to Marcus Antonius, who wants to stand for the consulship, but cannot cross the
pomerium
without abandoning his triumph, yet cannot hold his triumph because of the unrest in our hungry city. On the Campus Martius he can present himself as a candidate. We all expect that the crowds will go home after the tribunes of the plebs are elected and take office. So Marcus Antonius can hold his triumph as soon as the new college goes in, after which we can hold the curule elections."

"Why are you so sure the crowds will go home after the new College of Tribunes of the Plebs takes office, Quintus Lutatius?" asked Saturninus.

"I should have thought you of all people could answer that, Lucius Appuleius!" snapped Catulus Caesar. "It's you draws them to the Forum—it's you up there day after day haranguing them, making them promises neither you nor this august body can keep! How can we buy grain that doesn't exist?"

"I'll still be up there speaking to the crowd after my term is over," said Saturninus.

"You will not," said Catulus Caesar. "Once you're a
privatus
again, Lucius Appuleius, if it takes me a month and a hundred men, I'll find some law on the tablets or some precedent that makes it illegal for you to speak from the rostra or any other spot in the Forum!"

Saturninus laughed, roars of laughter, howls of laughter; and yet no one there made the mistake of thinking he was amused. "Search to your heart's content, Quintus Lutatius! It won't make any difference. I'm not going to be a
privatus
after the current tribunician year is finished, because I'm going to be a tribune of the plebs all over again! Yes, I'm taking a leaf out of Gaius Marius's book, and with no legal constraints to have you yammering after my blood! There's nothing to stop a man's seeking the tribunate of the plebs over and over again!"

"There are custom and tradition," said Scaurus. "Enough to stop all men save you and Gaius Gracchus from seeking a third term. And you ought to take warning from Gaius Gracchus. He died in the Grove of Furrina with only a slave for company."

"I have better company than that," countered Saturninus. "We men of Picenum stick together—eh, Titus Labienus?—eh, Gaius Saufeius? You'll not get rid of us so easily!"