Colleen McCullough: 2. The Grass Crown

All the children had been brought to Marius's house for this dinner, and all were asleep when the party broke up. Only Young Marius remained where he was; the others had to be taken home by their parents. Two big litters stood outside in the lane, one to accommodate Sulla's children, Cornelia Sulla and Young Sulla, the other for Aurelia's three, Julia Major called Lia, Julia Minor called Ju-ju, and Young Caesar. While the adult men and women stood talking low-voiced in the atrium, a team of servants carried the sleeping children out to the litters and placed them carefully inside. The man carrying Young Caesar looked unfamiliar to Julia, automatically counting; then she stiffened, clutched Aurelia by the arm convulsively. "That's Lucius Decumius!" she gasped. "Of course it is," said Aurelia, surprised. "Aurelia, you really shouldn't!" “Nonsense, Julia. Lucius Decumius is a tower of strength to me. I don't have a nice respectable journey home, as you well know. I go through the middle of a den of thieves, footpads, the gods know what for even after seven years, I don't! It isn't often that I'm lured out of my own home, but when I am, Lucius Decumius and a couple of his brothers always come to bring me home. And Young Caesar isn't a heavy sleeper. Yet when Lucius Decumius picks him up, he never stirs." "A couple of his brothers!" whispered Julia, horrified. "Do you mean to say that there are more at home like Lucius Decumius?" "No!" said Aurelia scornfully. "I mean his brothers in the crossroads college his minions, Julia." She looked cross. "Oh, I don't know why I come to these family dinners on the rare occasions when I do come! Why is it that you never seem to understand that I have my life very nicely under control, and don't need all this fussing and clucking?" Julia said no more until she and Gaius Marius went to bed, having settled the household down, banished the slaves to their quarters, locked the door onto the street, and made an offering to the trio of gods who looked after every Roman home Vesta of the hearth, the Di Penates of the storage cupboards, and the Lar Familiaris of the family. "Aurelia was very difficult today," she said then. Marius was tired, a sensation he experienced a great deal more often these days than of yore, and one which shamed him. So rather than do what he longed to do namely to roll over on his left side and go to sleep he lay on his back, settled his wife within his left arm, and resigned himself to a chat about women and domestic problems. "Oh?" he asked. "Can't you bring Gaius Julius home? Aurelia is growing into an old retired Vestal Virgin, all I don't know! Sour. Crabby. Juiceless! Yes, that's the right word, juiceless," said Julia. "And that child is wearing her out." "Which child?" mumbled Marius. "Her twenty-two-month-old son, Young Caesar. Oh, Gaius Marius, he is astonishing! I know such children are born occasionally, but I've certainly never met one before, nor even heard of one among our friends. I mean, all we mothers are happy if our sons know what dignitas and auctoritas are after their fathers have taken them for their first trip to the Forum at age seven! Yet this little mite knows already, though he's never even met his father! I tell you, husband, Young Caesar is truly an astonishing child." She was warming up; another thought occurred to her, of sufficient moment to make her wriggle, bounce up and down. "Ah! I was talking to Crassus Orator's wife, Mucia, yesterday, and she was saying that Crassus Orator is boasting of having a client with a son like Young Caesar.'' She dug Marius in the ribs. "You must know the family, Gaius Marius, because they come from Arpinum." He hadn't really followed any of this, but the elbow had completed what the wriggle and bounce had begun, and he was now awake enough to say, "Arpinum? Who?" Arpinum was his home, there lay the lands of his ancestors. "Marcus Tullius Cicero. Crassus Orator's client and the son have the same name." "Unfortunately I do indeed know the family. They're some sort of cousins. Litigious-minded lot! Stole a bit of our land about a hundred years ago, won the court case. We haven't really spoken to them since." His eyelids fell. "I see." Julia cuddled closer. "Anyway, the boy is eight now, and so brilliant he's going to study in the Forum. Crassus Orator is predicting that he'll create quite a stir. I suppose when Young Caesar is eight, he'll create quite a stir too." "Huh!" said Marius, yawning hugely. She dug her elbow in again. "You, Gaius Marius, are going off to sleep! Wake up!" His eyes flew open, he made a rumbling noise in the back of his throat. "Care to race me round the Capitol?" he asked. Giggling, she settled down once more. "Well, I haven't met this Cicero boy, but I have met my nephew, little Gaius Julius Caesar, and I can tell you, he isn't... normal. I know we mostly reserve that word for people who are mentally defective, but I don't see why it can't mean the opposite as well." "The older you get, Julia, the more talkative you get," complained the weary husband. Julia ignored this. "Young Caesar isn't two years old yet, but he's about a hundred! Big words and properly phrased sentences and he knows what the big words mean too!" And suddenly Marius was wide awake, no longer tired. He lifted himself up to look at his wife, her serene face softly delineated by the little flame of a night lamp. Her nephew! Her nephew named Gaius! The Syrian Martha's prophecy, revealed to him the first time he ever saw the crone, in Gauda's palace at Carthage. She had predicted that he would be the First Man in Rome, and that he would be consul seven times. But, she had added, he would not be the greatest of all Romans. His wife's nephew named Gaius would be! And he had said to himself at the time, Over my dead body. No one is going to eclipse me. Now here was the child, a living fact. He lay back again, his tiredness translated to aching limbs. Too much time, too much energy, too much passion had he put into his battle to become the First Man in Rome, to stand by tamely and see the luster of his name dimmed by a precocious aristocrat who would come into his own when he, Gaius Marius, was too old or too dead to oppose him. Greatly though he loved his wife, humbly though he admitted that it was her aristocratic name which had procured him that first consulship, still he would not willingly see her nephew, blood of her blood, rise higher than he himself had. Of consulships he had won six, which meant there was a seventh yet to come. No one in Roman public life seriously believed that Gaius Marius could ever regain his past glory, those halcyon years when the Centuries had voted him in, three times in absentia, as a pledge of their conviction that he, Gaius Marius, was the only man who could save Rome from the Germans. Well, he had saved them. And what thanks had he got? A landslide of opposition, disapproval, destructiveness. The ongoing enmity of Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar, of Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle, of a huge and powerful senatorial faction united in no other way than to bring down Gaius Marius. Little men with big names, appalled at the idea that their beloved Rome had been saved by a despised New Man an Italian hayseed with no Greek, as Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle had put it many years before. Well, it wasn't over yet. Stroke or no stroke, Gaius Marius would be consul a seventh time and go down in the history books as the greatest Roman the Republic had ever known. Nor was he going to let some beautiful, golden-haired descendant of the goddess Venus step into the history books ahead of himself the patrician Gaius Marius was not, the Roman Gaius Marius was not. "I'll fix you, boy!" he said aloud, and squeezed Julia. "What was that?" she asked. "In a few days we're leaving for Pessinus, you and I and our son," he said. She sat up. "Oh, Gaius Marius! Really? How wonderful! Are you sure you want to take us with you?" "I'm sure, wife. I don't care a rush what the conventions say. We're going to be away for two or three years, and that's too long a time at my age to spend without seeing my wife and son. If I were a younger man, perhaps. And, since I'm journeying as a privatus, there's no official obstacle to my taking my family along with me." He chuckled. "I'm footing the bill myself." "Oh, Gaius Marius!" She could find nothing else to say. "We'll have a look at Athens, Smyrna, Pergamum, Nicomedia, a hundred other places." "Tarsus?" she asked eagerly. "Oh, I've always wanted to travel the world!" He still ached, but the sleepiness surged back overwhelmingly. Down went his eyelids; his lower jaw sagged. For a few more moments Julia chattered on, then ran out of superlatives, and sat hugging her knees happily. She turned to Gaius Marius, smiling tenderly. "Dear love, I don't suppose . . . ?" she asked delicately. Her answer was his first snore. Good wife of twelve years that she was, she shook her head gently, still smiling, and turned him onto his right side.