The First Man in Rome (78 page)

"Tell me, Quintus Caecilius," said Jugurtha to Metellus Numidicus when the remains of the food were borne away, and unwatered wine of the best vintage was produced, "what will you do if one day another Gaius Marius should appear—only this time with all Gaius Marius's gifts and vigor and vision—and streak of immortality inside his mind!—wearing a patrician Roman skin?"

Numidicus blinked. "I don't know what you're getting at, King," he said. "Gaius Marius is Gaius Marius."

"He's not necessarily unique," said Jugurtha. "What would you do with a Gaius Marius who came from a patrician family?"

"He couldn't," said Numidicus.

"Nonsense, of course he could," said Jugurtha, rolling the superb Chian wine around his tongue.

“I think what Quintus Caecilius is trying to say, Jugurtha, is that Gaius Marius is a product of his class," said Rutilius Rufus gently.

"A Gaius Marius may be of any class," Jugurtha insisted.

Now all the Roman heads were shaking a negative in unison. "No," said Rutilius Rufus, speaking for the group. "What you are saying may be true for Numidia, or for any other world. But never true of Rome!
No
patrician Roman could ever think or act like Gaius Marius."

So that was that. After a few more drinks the party broke up, Publius Rutilius Rufus went home to his bed, and the inhabitants of Metellus Numidicus's house scattered to their various beds. In the comfortable aftermath of excellent food, wine, and company, Jugurtha of Numidia slept deeply, peacefully.

When he was woken by the slave appointed to serve his needs as valet about two hours before the dawn, Jugurtha got up refreshed and invigorated. He was permitted a hot bath, and great care was devoted to his robing; his hair was coaxed into long, sausagelike curls with heated tongs, and his trim beard curled and then wound about with strings of gold and silver, the clean-shaven areas of cheeks and chin scraped closely. Perfumed with costly unguents, the diadem in place, and all his jewelry (which had already been catalogued by the Treasury clerks, and would go to the dividing of the spoils on the Campus Martius the day after the triumph) distributed about his person, King Jugurtha came out of his chambers the picture of a Hellenized sovereign, and regal from fingertips to toes to top of head.

"Today," he said to his sons as they traveled in open sedan chairs to the Campus Martius, "I shall see Rome for the first time in my life."

Sulla himself received them amid what seemed a chaotic confusion lit only by torches; but dawn was breaking over the crest of the Esquiline, and Jugurtha suspected the turmoil was due only to the number of people assembled at the Villa Publica, that in reality a streamlined order existed.

The chains placed on his person were merely token; where in all Italy could a Punic warrior-king go?

"We were talking about you last night," said Jugurtha to Sulla conversationally.

"Oh?" asked Sulla, garbed in glittering silver cuirass and
pteryges,
silver greaves cushioning his shins, a silver Attic helmet crested with fluffy scarlet feathers, and a scarlet military cloak. To Jugurtha, who knew him in a broad-brimmed straw hat, he was a stranger. Behind him, his personal servant carried a frame upon which his decorations for valor were hung, an imposing enough collection.

"Yes," said Jugurtha, still conversationally. "There was a debate about which man actually won the war against me—Gaius Marius or you."

The whitish eyes lifted to rest on Jugurtha's face. "An interesting debate, King. Which side did you take?"

"The side of right. I said Gaius Marius won the war. His were the command decisions, his the men involved, including you. And his was the order which sent you to see my father-in-law,' Bocchus." Jugurtha paused, smiled. "However, my only ally was my old friend Publius Rutilius. Quintus Caecilius and his son both maintained that you won the war because you captured me."

"You took the side of right," said Sulla.

"The side of right is relative."

"Not in this case," said Sulla, his plumes nodding in the direction of Marius's milling soldiers. "I will never have his gift of dealing with
them.
I have no fellow feeling for them, you see."

"You hide it well," said Jugurtha.

"Oh, they know, believe me," said Sulla. "He won the war, with them. My contribution could have been done by anyone of legatal rank." He drew a deep breath. "I take it you had a pleasant evening, King?"

"Most pleasant!" Jugurtha jiggled his chains, and found them very light, easy to carry. "Quintus Caecilius and his stammering son put on a kingly feast for me. If a Numidian was asked which food he would want the night before he died, he would always ask for snails. And last night I had snails."

"Then your belly's nice and full, King."

Jugurtha grinned. "Indeed it is! The right way to go to the strangler's loop, I'd say."

"No, that's
my
say," said Sulla, whose toothy grin was far darker in his far fairer face.

Jugurtha's own grin faded. "What do you mean?"

"I'm in charge of the logistics of this triumphal parade, King Jugurtha. Which means I'm the one to say how you die. Normally you'd be strangled with a noose, that's true. But it isn't regulation, there is an alternative method. Namely, to shove you down the hole inside the Tullianum, and leave you to rot." Sulla's grin grew. "After such a kingly meal—and especially after trying to sow discord between me and my commanding officer—I think it would be a pity if you weren't permitted to finish digesting your snails. So there will be no strangler's noose for you, King! You can die by inches."

Luckily his sons were standing too far away to hear; the King watched as Sulla flicked a salute of farewell to him, then watched as the Roman strode to his sons, and checked their chains. He gazed around at the panic all about him, the seething masses of servants doling out head wreaths and garlands of victory laurel leaves, the musicians tuning up their horns and the bizarre horse-headed trumpets Ahenobarbus had brought back from Long-haired Gaul, the dancers practising last-moment twirls, the horses snuffling and blowing snorting breaths as they stamped their hooves impatiently, the oxen hitched to carts in dozens with horns gilded and dewlaps garlanded, a little water donkey wearing a straw hat ludicrously wreathed in laurel and its ears poking up rampant through holes in the crown, a toothlessly raddled old hag with swinging empty breasts and clad from head to foot in purple and gold being hoisted up onto a pageant dray, where she spread herself on a purple-draped litter like the world's greatest courtesan, and stared stared stared straight down into his eyes with eyes like the Hound of Hades—surely she should have had three heads…

Once it got going, the parade hustled. Usually the Senate and all the magistrates except the consuls marched first, and then some musicians, then dancers and clowns aping the famous; then there came the booty and display floats, after which came more dancers and musicians and clowns escorting the sacrificial animals and their priestly attendants; next came the important prisoners, and the triumphing general driving his antique chariot; and, in last place, the general's legions marched. But Gaius Marius changed the sequence around a bit, preceding his booty and his pageants and his floats, so that he would arrive on the Capitol and sacrifice his beasts in time to be inaugurated afterward as consul, hold the inaugural meeting of the Senate, and then preside at his feast in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

Jugurtha found himself able to enjoy his first—and last— journey on foot through the streets of Rome. What mattered it how he died? A man had to die sooner or later, and his had been a most satisfying life, even if it had ended in defeat. He'd given them a good run for their money, the Romans. His dead brother, Bomilcar... He too had died in a dungeon, come to think of it. Perhaps fratricide displeased the gods, no matter how valid the reason. Well, only the gods had kept count of the number of his blood kin who had perished at his instigation, if not by his own hands. Did that lack of personal participation make his hands clean?

Oh, how tall the apartment buildings were! The parade jogged briskly into the Vicus Tuscus of the Velabrum, a part of the city stuffed with insulae, leaning as if they tried to embrace across the narrow alleys by falling on each other's bricky chests. Every window held faces, every face cheered, and he was amazed that they cheered for him too, urged him on to his death with words of encouragement and best wishes.

And then the parade skirted the edges of the Meat Market, the Forum Boarium, where the statue of naked Hercules Triumphalis was all decked out for the day in the general's triumphal regalia—purple-and-gold
toga picta,
palm-embroidered purple
tunica palmata,
the laurel branch in one hand and the eagle-topped ivory scepter in the other, and his face painted bright red with
minim.
The meaty business of the day was clearly suspended, for the magnificent temples on the borders of the huge marketplace were cleared of booths and stalls. There! The temple of Ceres, called the most beautiful in the entire city—and beautiful it was in a garish way, painted in reds and blues and greens and yellows, high on a podium like all Roman temples; it was, Jugurtha knew, the headquarters of the Plebeian Order, and housed their records and their aediles.

The parade now turned into the interior of the Circus Maximus, a greater structure than he had ever seen; it stretched the whole length of the Palatine, and seated about a hundred and fifty thousand people. Every one of its stepped wooden tiers was packed with cheering onlookers for Gaius Marius's triumphal parade; from where he walked not far in front of Marius, Jugurtha could hear the cheers swell to screams of adulation for the general. No one minded thehasty pace, for Marius had sent out his clients and agents to whisper to the crowds that he hurried because he cared for Rome; he hurried so he could leave all the quicker for Gaul-across-the-Alps and the Germans.

The leafy spaces and magnificent mansions of the Palatine were thronged with watchers too, above the level of the herd, safe from assault and robbery, women and nursemaids and girls and boys of good family mostly, he had been told. They turned out of the Circus Maximus into the Via Triumphalis, which skirted the far end of the Palatine and had rocks and parklands above it on the left, and on the right, clustering below the Caelian Hill, yet another district of towering apartment blocks. Then came the Palus Ceroliae—the swamp below the Carinae and the Fagutal—and finally a turn into the Velia and the downhill trip to the Forum Romanum along the worn cobbles of the ancient sacred way, the Via Sacra.

At last he would see it, the center of the world, just as in olden days the Acropolis had been the center of the world. And then he set eyes on it, the Forum Romanum, and was hugely disappointed. The buildings were little and old, and they didn't face a logical way, for they were all skewed to the north, where the Forum itself was oriented northwest to southeast; the overall effect was slipshod, and the whole place wore an air of dilapidation. Even the newer buildings—which did at least face the Forum at a proper angle— were not kept up well. In fact, the buildings along the way had been far more imposing, and the temples along the way bigger, richer, grander. The houses of the priests did sport fairly new coats of paint, admittedly, and the little round temple of Vesta was pretty, but only the very lofty temple of Castor and Pollux and the vast Doric austerity of the temple of Saturn were at all eye-catching, admirable examples of their kind. A drab and cheerless place, sunk down in a queer valley, damp and unlovely.

Opposite the temple of Saturn—from the podium of which the senior Treasury officials watched the parade— Jugurtha and his sons and those among his barons and his wives who had been captured were led out of the procession and put to one side; they stood to watch the lictors of the general, his dancers and musicians and censer bearers, his drummers and trumpeters, his legates, and then the chariot-borne general himself, remote and unrecognizable in all his regalia and with his
minim-
painted
red face, pass by. They all went up the hill to where the great temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus presented its pillared side to the Forum, for it too was skewed north-south. Its front looked south. South to Numidia.

Jugurtha looked at his sons. "Live long and live well," he said to them; they were going into custody in remote Roman towns, but his barons and his wives were going home to Numidia.

The guard of lictors who surrounded the King nudged his chains a little, and he walked across the crowded flags of the lower Forum, beneath the trees around the Pool of Curtius and the statue of the satyr Marsyas blowing his oboe, around the edge of the vast tiered well which saw meetings of the Tribes, and up to the start of the Clivus Argentarius. Above was the Arx of the Capitol and the temple of Juno Moneta, where the mint was housed. And there was the ancient shabby Senate House across the far side of the Comitia, and beyond it the small shabby Basilica Porcia, built by Cato the Censor.

But that was as far as his walk through Rome took him. The Tullianum stood in the lap of the Arx hill just beyond the Steps of Gemortia, a very tiny grey edifice built of the huge unmortared stones men all over the world called Cyclopean; it was only one storey high and had only one opening, a doorless rectangular gap in the stones. Fancying himself too tall, Jugurtha ducked his head as he came to it, but passed inside with ease, for it turned out to be taller than any mortal man.

His lictors stripped him of his robes, his jewels, his diadem, and handed them to the Treasury clerks waiting to receive them; a docket changed hands, officially acknowledging that this State property was being properly disposed of. Jugurtha was left only the loincloth Metellus Numidicus had advised him to wear, for Metellus Numidicus knew the rite. The fountainhead of his physical being decently covered, a man could go to his death decently.

The only illumination came from the aperture behind him, but by its light Jugurtha could see the round hole in the middle of the roundish floor. Down there was where they would put him. Had he been scheduled for the noose, the strangler would have accompanied him into the lower regions with sufficient helpers to restrain him, and when the deed was done, and his body tossed down into one of the drain openings, those who still lived would have climbed up a ladder to Rome and their world.