Colleen McCullough - 2. The Grass Crown

The kind of marriage Dalmatica had experienced with Scaurus became far more obvious when Sulla put his new wife down on his bed, for she scuttled off it, opened the chest sent on ahead to Sulla's house, and from it plucked a primly neat linen nightgown. While Sulla watched, fascinated, she turned her back to him, loosened her pretty cream wool dress but held it under her arms firmly, and managed thus to get the nightgown over her head and modestly hanging before she abandoned her clothes; one moment she was clad for day, the next moment she was clad for night. And never a glimpse of flesh! "Take that wretched thing off," said Sulla from behind her. She turned round quickly and felt the breath leave her body. Sulla was naked, skin whiter than snow, the curling hair of chest and groin reflecting the mop on his head, a man without a sag to his midriff, without the crepey folds of true old age, a man compact and muscular. It had taken Scaurus what had seemed hours of fumbling beneath her robe, pinching at her nipples and feeling between her legs, before anything happened to his penis the only male member she had known, though she had never actually seen it. Scaurus had been an old-fashioned Roman, kept his sexual activities as modest as he felt his wife should be. That when availing himself of a less modest female than his wife, his sexual activity was very different, his wife could not know. Yet there was Sulla, as noble and aristocratic as her dead husband, shamelessly exhibiting himself to her, his penis seeming as huge and erect as the one Priapus displayed upon his bronze statue in Scaurus's study. She was not unfamiliar with the sexual anatomy of male and female, for both were everywhere in every house; the genitalia upon the herms, the lamps, the pedestals of tables, even some of the paintings on the walls. None of which had ever seemed remotely related to married life. They were simply a part of the furniture. Married life had been a husband who had never shown himself to her who, despite the production of two children, as far as she knew could have been quite differently constructed from Priapus or the furniture and decorations. When she had first met Sulla at that dinner party so many years ago, he had dazzled her. She had never seen a man so beautiful, so hard and strong yet so so womanish? What she had felt for him then (and during the time when she had spied on him as he went about Rome canvassing for the praetorian elections) was not consciously of the flesh, for she was a married woman with experience of the flesh, and dismissed it as the most unimportant and least appealing aspect of love. Her passion for Sulla was literally a schoolgirl crush something of air and wind, not fire and fluid. From behind pillars and awnings she had feasted on him with her eyes, dreamed of his kisses rather than his penis, yearned for him in the most lavishly romantic way. What she wanted was a conquest, his enslavement, her own sweet victory as he knelt at her feet and wept for love of her. Her husband had confronted her in the end, and everything to do with her life changed. But not her love for Sulla. "You have made yourself ridiculous, Caecilia Metella Dalmatica," Scaurus had said to her evenly and coldly. "But and this is far worse you have made me ridiculous. The whole of the city is laughing at me, the First Man in Rome. And that must stop. You have mooned and sighed and gushed in the stupidest way over a man who has not noticed you or encouraged you, who does not want your attentions, and whom I have been obliged to punish in order to preserve my own reputation. Had you not embarrassed him and me, he would be a praetor as he deserves to be. You have therefore spoiled the lives of two men one your husband, the other impeccably blameless. That I do not call myself blameless is due to my weakness in allowing this mortifying business to continue so long. But I had hoped that you would see the error of your ways for yourself, and thus prove to Rome that you are, after all, a worthy wife for the Princeps Senatus. However, time has proven you a worthless idiot. And there is only one way to deal with a worthless idiot. You will never leave this house again for any purpose whatsoever. Not for funerals or for weddings, for lady-friends or shopping. Nor may you have lady-friends visit you here, as I cannot trust your prudence. I must tell you that you are a silly and empty vessel, an unsuitable wife for a man of my auctoritas and dignitas. Now go." Of course this monumental disapproval did not prevent Scaurus's seeking his wife's body, but he was old and growing older, and these occasions grew further and further apart. When she produced his son she regained some slight measure of his approval, but Scaurus refused to relax the terms of her imprisonment. And in her dreams, in her isolation when time hung like a lead sow around her neck, still she thought of Sulla, still she loved him. Immaturely, from out of an adolescent heart. Looking on the naked Sulla now provoked no sexual desire in her, just a winded amazement at his beauty and virility and a winded realization that the difference between Sulla and Scaurus was minimal after all. Beauty. Virility. They were the real differences. Sulla wasn't going to kneel at her feet and weep for love of her! She had not conquered him! He was going to conquer her. With his ram battering down her gates. "Take that thing off, Dalmatica," he said. She took her nightgown off with the alacrity of a child caught out in some sin, while he smiled and nodded. "You're lovely," he said, a purr in his voice, stepped up to her, slid his erection between her legs, and gathered her close. Then he kissed her, and Dalmatica found herself in the midst of more sensations than she had ever known existed the feel of his skin, his lips, his penis, his hands the smell of him clean and sweet, like her children after their baths. And so, waking up, growing up, she discovered dimensions which had nothing to do with dreams or fantasies and everything to do with living, conjoined bodies. And from love she fell into adoration, physical enslavement. To Sulla she manifested the bewitchment he had first known with Julilla, yet magically mixed with echoes of Metrobius; he soared into an ecstatic delirium he hadn't experienced in almost twenty years. I am starved too, he thought in wonder, and I didn't even know it! This is so important, so vital to me! And I had lost all sight of it. Little wonder then that nothing from that first incredible day of marriage to Dalmatica had the power to wound him deeply not the boos and hisses he still experienced from those in the Forum who deplored his treatment of Aelia, not the malicious innuendo of men like Philippus who only saw Dalmatica's money, not the crippled form of Gaius Marius leaning on his boy, not the nudges and winks of Lucius Decumius nor the sniggers of those who deemed Sulla a satyr and Scaurus's widow an innocent, not even the bitter little note of congratulations Metrobius sent round with a bouquet of pansies. Less than two weeks after the marriage they moved into a huge mansion on the Palatine overlooking the Circus Maximus and not far from the temple of Magna Mater. It had frescoes better than those in the house of Marcus Livius Drusus, pillars of solid marble, the best mosaic floors in Rome, and furniture of an opulence more suited to an eastern king than a Roman senator. Sulla and Dalmatica even boasted a citrus-wood table, its priceless peacock-grained surface supported by a gold-inlaid ivory pedestal in the form of interlocked dolphins; a wedding gift from Metellus Pius the Piglet. Leaving the house in which he had lived for twenty-five years was another much-needed emancipation. Gone the memories of awful old Clitumna and her even more awful nephew, Stichus; gone the memories of Nicopolis, Julilla, Marcia, Aelia. And if the memories of his son were not gone, he had at least removed himself from the pain of seeing and feeling things his son had seen and felt, could no longer look in through the vacant nursery door and have an image of a laughing, naked little boy leap at him from nowhere. With Dalmatica he would start anew. It was Rome's good fortune that Sulla lingered in the city far longer than he would have did Dalmatica not exist; he was there to supervise his program of debt relief and think of ways to put money in the Treasury. Shifting mightily and snatching income at every conceivable opportunity, he managed to pay the legions (Pompey Strabo kept his word and sent in a very light wages bill) and even a little of the debt to Italian Gaul, and saw with satisfaction that business in the city seemed on the verge of a slight recovery. In March, however, he had seriously to think of tearing himself away from his wife's body. Metellus Pius was already in the south with Mamercus; Cinna and Cornutus were scouring the lands of the Marsi; and Pompey Strabo complete with son but without the letter-writing prodigy Cicero skulked somewhere in Umbria. But there was one thing left to do. Sulla did it on the day before his departure, as it did not require the passage of a law. It lay in the province of the censors. This pair had been dilatory in the matter of the census, even though Piso Frugi's law had confined the new citizens to eight of the rural tribes and two new tribes, a distribution which could not destroy the tribal electoral status quo. They had provided themselves with a technical illegality in case the temperature of censorial waters grew too hot for their thin skins to bear and discretion dictated that they should resign their office; when directed by the augurs to conduct a very small and obscure ceremony, they had deliberately neglected to do so. "Princeps Senatus, Conscript Fathers, the Senate is facing its own crisis," said Sulla, remaining without moving beside his own chair, as was his habit. He held out his right hand, in which reposed a scroll of paper. "I have here a list of those senators who will never attend this House again. They are dead. Just a little over one hundred of them. Now the largest part of the one hundred names on this list belongs to the pedarii, backbenchers who craved no special distinction in this House, did not speak, knew no more law than any senator must. However, there are other names names of men we already miss acutely, for they were the stuff of court presidents, special judges and adjudicators and arbitrators, legal draftsmen, legislators, magistrates. And they have not been replaced! Nor do I see a move to replace them! "I mention: the censor-and Princeps Senatus, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus; the censor and Pontifex Maximus, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus; the consular Sextus Julius Caesar; the consular Titus Didius; the consul Lucius Porcius Cato Licinianus; the consul Publius Rutilius Lupus; the consular Aulus Postumius Albinus; the praetor Quintus Servilius Caepio; the praetor Lucius Postumius; the praetor Gaius Cosconius; the praetor Quintus Servilius; the praetor Publius Gabinius; the praetor Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus; the praetor Aulus Sempronius Asellio; the aedile Marcus Claudius Marcellus; the tribune of the plebs Marcus Livius Drusus; the tribune of the plebs Marcus Fonteius; the tribune of the plebs Quintus Varius Severus Hybrida Sucronensis; the legate Publius Licinius Crassus Junior; the legate Marcus Valerius Messala." Sulla paused, satisfied; every face was shocked. "Yes, I know," he said gently. "Not until the list is read out can we fully appreciate how many of the great or the promising are gone. Seven consuls and seven praetors. Fourteen men eminently qualified to sit in judgment, comment upon laws and customs, guard the mos maiorum. Not to mention the six other names of men who would have led in time or joined the ranks of the leaders very soon. There are other names besides names I have not read out, but which include tribunes of the plebs who made lesser reputations during their terms, yet were nonetheless experienced men." "Oh, Lucius Cornelius, it is a tragedy!" said Flaccus Princeps Senatus, a catch in his voice. "Yes, Lucius Valerius, it is that," Sulla agreed. "There are many names not on this list because they are not dead, but who are absent from this House for various reasons on duty overseas, on duty elsewhere in Italy than Rome. Even in the winter hiatus of this war I have not managed to count more than one hundred men assembled in this body politic, though no senators resident in Rome are absent in this time of need. There is also a considerable list of senators at present in exile due to the activities of the Varian Commission or the Plautian Commission. And men like Publius Rutilius Rufus. "Therefore, honored censors Publius Licinius and Lucius Julius, I ask you most earnestly to do everything in your power to fill our seats. Give the opportunity to men of substance and ambition in the city to join the disastrously thinned ranks of the Senate of Rome. And also appoint from among the pedarii those men who should be advanced to give their opinions and urged to take on more senior office. All too often there are not enough men present to make a quorum. How can the Senate of Rome purport to be the senior body in government if it cannot make a quorum?" And that, concluded Sulla, was that. He had done what he could to keep Rome going, and given an inert pair of censors a public kick up the backside to do their duty. Now it was time to finish the war against the Italians.