The First Man in Rome (89 page)

The House was nearly empty when Crassus Orator, Quintus Mucius Scaevola, Metellus Numidicus, Catulus Caesar, and Scaurus Princeps Senatus recollected themselves enough to break off their euphoric conversation and think about following in the footsteps of the rest. Lucius Caecilius Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus was still sitting on his stool, back straight, hands folded in his lap as neatly as a well-bred girl's. But his head had fallen forward, chin on chest, the thinning wisps of his greying hair blowing gently in a little breeze through the open doors.

"Brother of mine, that was the greatest speech I have ever heard!" cried Metellus Numidicus, putting his hand out to squeeze Dalmaticus's shoulder.

Dalmaticus sat on, and did not speak or move; only then did they discover he was dead.

"It's fitting," said Crassus Orator. "I'd die a happy man to think I gave my greatest speech on the very threshold of death."

But not the speech of Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus nor the passing of Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus nor all the ire and power of the Senate could prevent the Plebeian Assembly from passing Saturninus's agrarian bill into law. And the tribunician career of Lucius Appuleius Saturninus was off to a resounding start, a curious compound of infamy and adulation.

"I love it," said Saturninus to Glaucia over dinner late in the afternoon of the day the agrarian
lex Appuleia
was voted into law. They often did dine together, and usually at Glaucia's house; Saturninus's wife had never properly recovered from the awful events following Scaurus's denunciation of Saturninus when the quaestor at Ostia. "Yes, I do love it! Just think, Gaius Servilius, I might have had quite a different kind of career if it hadn't been for that nosy old
mentula,
Scaurus."

"The rostra suits you, all right," said Glaucia, eating hot-house grapes. "Maybe there is something shapes our lives after all."

Saturninus snorted. "Oh, you mean
Quirinus
!
"

"You can sneer if you want. But I maintain that life is a very bizarre business," said Glaucia. "There's more pattern and less chance to it than there is in a game of
cottabus."

"What, no element of Stoic or Epicure, Gaius Servilius? Neither fatalism nor hedonism? You'd better be careful, or you might confound all the old Greek killjoys who maintain so loudly that we Romans will never produce a philosophy we didn't borrow from them," laughed Saturninus.

"Greeks
are.
Romans
do.
Take your pick! I never met a man yet who managed to combine both states of being. We're the opposite ends of the alimentary canal, we Greeks and Romans. Romans are the mouth—we shove it in. Greeks are the arsehole—they shove it out. No disrespect to the Greeks intended, simply a figure of speech," said Glaucia, punctuating his statement by popping grapes into the Roman end of the alimentary canal.

"Since one end has no job to do without the contributions of the other, we'd better stick together," said Saturninus.

Glaucia grinned. "There speaks a Roman!" he said.

"Through and through, despite Metellus Dalmaticus's saying I'm not one. Wasn't that a turnup for the books, the old
fellator
up and dying so very timely? If the Policy Makers were more enterprising, they might have made an undying example of him. Metellus Dalmaticus—the New Quirinus!" Saturninus swirled the lees in his cup and tossed them expertly onto an empty plate; the splatter they made was counted according to the number of arms radiating out of the central mass. "Three," he said, and shivered. "That's the death number."

"And where's our Skeptic now?" gibed Glaucia.

"Well, it's unusual, only three."

Glaucia spat expertly, and destroyed the form of the splash with three grape seeds. "There! Three done in by three!"

"We'll both be dead in three years," said Saturninus.

"Lucius Appuleius, you're a complete contradiction! You are as white as Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and with far less excuse. Come, it's only a game of
cottabus
!”
said Glaucia, and changed the subject. "I agree, life on the rostra is far more exciting than life as a darling of the Policy Makers. It's a great challenge, politically manipulating the People. A general has his legions. A demagogue has nothing sharper than his tongue." He chuckled. "And wasn't it a pleasure to watch the crowd chase Marcus Baebius from the Forum this morning, when he tried to interpose his veto?"

"A sight to cure sore eyes!" grinned Saturninus, the memory banishing ghostly fingers, three or thirty-three.

"By the way," said Glaucia with another abrupt change of subject, "have you heard the latest rumor in the Forum?"

"That Quintus Servilius Caepio stole the Gold of Tolosa himself, you mean?" asked Saturninus.

Glaucia looked disappointed. "Dis take you, I thought I'd got in first!"

"I had it in a letter from Manius Aquillius," Saturninus said. "When Gaius Marius is too busy, Aquillius writes to me instead. And I confess I don't repine, since he's a far better man of letters than the Great Man."

"From Gaul-across-the-Alps? How do they know?"

"That's where the rumor began. Gaius Marius has acquired a prisoner. The King of Tolosa, no less. And
he
alleges that Caepio stole the gold—all fifteen thousand talents of it."

Glaucia whistled. "Fifteen thousand talents! Mazes the mind, doesn't it? A bit much, though—I mean, everyone understands that a governor is entitled to his perquisites, but more gold than there is in the Treasury? A trifle excessive, surely!"

"True, true. However, the rumor will work very well for Gaius Norbanus when he brings his case against Caepio, won't it? The story of the gold will be around the whole city in less time than it takes Metella Calva to lift her dress for a lusty gang of navvies."

"I like your metaphor!" said Glaucia. And suddenly he looked very brisk. "Enough of this idle chatter! You and I have work to do on treason bills and the like. We can't afford to let anything go unnoticed."

The work Saturninus and Glaucia did on treason bills and the like was as carefully planned and co-ordinated as any grand military strategy. They intended to remove treason trials from the province of the Centuries and the impossible sequence of dead ends and stone walls this entailed; after which, they intended to remove extortion and bribery trials from the control of the Senate by replacing the senatorial juries with juries composed entirely of knights.

"First, we have to see Norbanus convict Caepio in the Plebeian Assembly on some permissible charge—as long as the charge isn't worded to say treason, we can do that right now, with popular feeling running so high against Caepio because of the stolen gold," said Saturninus.

"It's never worked before in the Plebeian Assembly," said Glaucia dubiously. "Our hot-headed friend Ahenobarbus tried it when he charged Silanus with illegally causing a war against the Germans—no mention of treason there! But the Plebeian Assembly still threw the case out. The problem is that no one
likes
treason trials."

"Well, we keep working on it," said Saturninus. "In order to get a conviction out of the Centuries, the accused has to stand there and say out of his own mouth that he deliberately connived at ruining his country. And no one is fool enough to say that. Gaius Marius is right. We have to clip the wings of the Policy Makers by showing them that they're not above either moral reproach or the law. And we can only do that in a body of men who are not senators."

"Why not pass your new treason law at once, then try Caepio in its special court?" asked Glaucia. "Yes, yes, I know the senators will squeal like trapped pigs—don't they always?"

Saturninus grimaced. "We want to live, don't we? Even if we do only have three more years, that's better than dying the day after tomorrow!"

"You and your three years!"

"Look," Saturninus persevered, "if we can actually get Caepio convicted in the Plebeian Assembly, the Senate will take the hint we're aiming to give it—that the People are fed up with senators sheltering fellow senators from just retribution. That there's not one law for senators and another for everybody else. It's time the People woke up! And I'm the boy to administer the whack that will wake them up. Since this Republic began, the Senate has gulled the People into believing that senators are a better breed of Roman, entitled to do and say whatever they want. Vote for Lucius Tiddlypuss—his family gave Rome her first consul! And does it matter that Lucius Tiddlypuss is a self-seeking gold-hungry incompetent? No! Lucius Tiddlypuss has the family name, and the family tradition of service in Rome's public sphere. The Brothers Gracchi were right. Take the courts away from the Lucius Tiddlypuss cohort by giving them to the knights!"

Glaucia was looking thoughtful. "Something has just occurred to me, Lucius Appuleius. The People are at least a responsible and well-educated lot. Pillars of Roman tradition. But—what if one day someone starts talking about the Head Count the way you're talking about the People?"

Saturninus laughed. "As long as their bellies are full, and the aediles put on a good show at the games, the Head Count are happy. To make the Head Count politically conscious, you'd have to turn the Forum Romanum into the Circus Maximus!"

"Their bellies aren't quite as full as they ought to be this winter," said Glaucia.

"Full enough, thanks to none other than our revered Leader of the House, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus himself. You know, I don't mourn the fact that we'll never persuade Numidicus or Catulus Caesar to see things our way, but I can't help thinking it a pity we'll never win Scaurus over," said Saturninus.

Glaucia was gazing at him curiously. "You never have held it against Scaurus for throwing you out of the House, have you?"

"No. He did what he thought was right. But one day, Gaius Servilius, I'll find out who the real culprits were, and then—they'll wish they had as easy a time of it as Oedipus!'' said Saturninus savagely.

*    *    *

Early in January the tribune of the plebs Gaius Norbanus arraigned Quintus Servilius Caepio in the Plebeian Assembly on a charge that was phrased as "the loss of his army."

Feelings ran high from the very beginning, for by no means all of the People were opposed to senatorial exclusivity, and the Senate was there in its full plebeian numbers to fight for Caepio. Long before the tribes were called upon to vote, violence flared and blood flowed. The tribunes of the plebs Titus Didius and Lucius Aurelius Cotta stepped forward to veto the whole procedure, and were hauled down from the rostra by a furious crowd. Stones flew viciously, clubs cracked around ribs and legs; Didius and Lucius Cotta were manhandled out of the Comitia well and literally forced by the pressure of the throng into the Argiletum, then kept there. Bruised and shocked though they were, they tried screaming their vetos across a sea of angry faces, but were shouted down again and again.

The rumor about the Gold of Tolosa had tipped the balance against Caepio and the Senate, there could be no doubt of it; from Head Count clear to First Class, the whole city shrieked imprecations at Caepio the thief, Caepio the traitor, Caepio the self-seeker. People—women included—who had never evinced any kind of interest in Forum or Assembly events came to see this man Caepio, a criminal on a scale hitherto unimaginable; there were debates about how high the mountain of gold bricks must have been, how heavy, how many. And the hatred was a tangible presence, for no one likes to see a single individual make off with money deemed the property of everyone. Especially so much money.

Determined the trial would proceed, Norbanus ignored the peripheral turmoil, the brawls, the chaos when habitual Assembly attenders impinged upon the crowds who had come solely to see and abuse Caepio, standing on the rostra amid a guard of lictors deputed to protect him, not detain him. The senators whose patrician rank meant they could not participate in the Plebeian Assembly were clustered on the Curia Hostilia steps hectoring Norbanus, until a segment of the crowd began to pelt them with stones. Scaurus fell, inanimate, bleeding from a wound on his head. Which didn't stop Norbanus, who continued the trial without even pausing to discover whether the Princeps Senatus was dead or merely unconscious.

The voting when it came was very fast; the first eighteen of the thirty-five tribes all condemned Quintus Servilius Caepio, which meant no more tribes were called upon to vote. Emboldened by this unprecedented indication of the degree of hatred felt for Caepio, Norbanus then asked the Plebeian Assembly to impose a specific sentence by vote— a sentence so harsh that every senator present howled a futile protest. Again the first eighteen tribes chosen by lot all voted the same way, to visit dreadful punishment upon Caepio. He was stripped of his citizenship, forbidden fire and water within eight hundred miles of Rome, fined fifteen thousand talents of gold, and ordered confined in the cells of the Lautumiae under guard and without speech with anyone, even the members of his own family, until his journey into exile began.

Amid shaking fists and triumphant yells that he was not going to get the chance to see his brokers or his bankers and bury his personal fortune, Quintus Servilius Caepio, ex-citizen of Rome, was marched between his guard of lictors across the short distance between the well of the Comitia and the tumbledown cells of the Lautumiae.

Thoroughly satisfied with the final events of what had been a deliciously exciting and unusual day, the crowds went home, leaving the Forum Romanum to the tenure of a few men, all senatorial in rank.

The ten tribunes of the plebs were standing in polarized groups: Lucius Cotta, Titus Didius, Marcus Baebius, and Lucius Antistius Reginus huddled gloomily together, the four middlemen looked helplessly from their left to their right, and an elated Gaius Norbanus and Lucius Appuleius Saturninus talked with great animation and much laughter to Gaius Servilius Glaucia, who had strolled over to congratulate them. Not one of the ten tribunes of the plebs still wore his toga, torn away in the melee.