Colleen McCullough - 1. First Man in Rome

How strange the world was! thought Gaius Marius, looking closely into the glazed faces of the men wearing purple-bordered togas all around him in that dreary, mizzling hour after dawn. No, not a Tiberius or a Gaius Sempronius Gracchus among them! Pluck out Marcus Aemilius Scaurus and Publius Rutilius Rufus, and you were left with a gaggle of very little men. Yet all of them looked down on him Gaius Marius as a bumptious nobody with more gall than grace. Simply because they had the right blood in their veins. Any one of them knew if the right circumstances came into being, he might be entitled to call himself the First Man in Rome. Just as Scipio Africanus, Aemilius Paullus, Scipio Aemilianus, and perhaps a dozen others over the centuries of the Republic had been so called. The First Man in Rome was not the best man; he was the first among other men who were his equals in rank and opportunity. And to be the First Man in Rome was something far better than kingship, autocracy, despotism, call it what you would. The First Man in Rome held on to that title by sheer pre-eminence, perpetually aware that his world was stuffed with others eager to supplant him others who could supplant him, legally and bloodlessly, by producing a superior brand of pre-eminence. To be the First Man in Rome was more than being consul; consuls came and went at the rate of two a year. Where as the centuries of the Roman Republic passed, only the smallest handful of men would come to be hailed as the First Man in Rome. At the moment Rome had no First Man; indeed, there had been no First Man since the death of Scipio Aemilianus nineteen years before. Marcus Aemilius Scaurus undoubtedly came closest, but he didn't have quite enough power auctoritas they called it, a blend of power, authority, and fame peculiar to Rome to merit the title, nor was the title applied to him. Save by himself!

There was a sudden reflexive stir and murmur among the crowd of senators; the senior consul, Marcus Minucius Rufus, was about to offer his white bull to the Great God, only it wasn't behaving itself, must have had the prescience to avoid its last manger of drugged fodder. Not a good year, everyone was saying it already. Poor omens during the night watch of the consuls, a miserable day, and now the first of the two victims was snorting and plunging, had half a dozen sacerdotal underlings hanging on to his horns and ears silly fools, they should have put a ring through his nose as a precaution. Stripped to the waist like the other attendants, the acolyte carrying the stunning hammer didn't wait for the raising of the head toward the sky, followed by the dipping of the head toward the earth; it could always be argued successfully later that the beast had lifted and lowered its head dozens of times during its fight to survive. He stepped in and swung his iron weapon up and down so quickly its shape was a blur. The dull crack of the blow was followed immediately by another, the noise of the bull's knees hitting the stone paving as it came down, all sixteen hundred pounds of it. Then the half-naked axeman brought his double-bladed instrument down into the neck and the blood was pouring everywhere, some of it caught in the sacrificial cups, most of it a steaming sticky river coursing off to nowhere, melting and thinning amid the rain-soaked ground. You could tell much about a man from how he reacted to the shedding of blood, thought Gaius Marius, clinically remote, a half smile curling the corners of his full mouth as he saw this one step hastily aside, that one indifferent to the fact his left shoe was filling up, another trying to pretend he wasn't on the verge of puking. Ahhhhhh! There was the man to watch! The young yet fully mature fellow on the outskirts of the knights, togate, yet minus even a knight's stripe on the right shoulder of his tunic; he hadn't been there long, and now he moved off again down the slope of the Clivus Capitolinus toward the Forum. But not before Gaius Marius had seen his extraordinary grey-white eyes glisten, flare, drink up the sight of the blood redly, greedily. Positive he had never seen the fellow before, Gaius Marius wondered who he was; not a nobody, certainly. The kind of looks called epicene, a beauty as much feminine as masculine, and such amazing coloring! Skin as white as milk, hair like the rising sun. Apollo incarnate. Was that who he had been? No. The god never existed with eyes like the mortal man who had just left; his were the eyes of someone who suffered, and there was no point in being a god if you had to suffer, was there? Though the second bull was better drugged, it fought too, even harder. This time the hammerman didn't manage to strike true the first time, and the poor maddened creature turned in blind rage to charge. Then some thinking fellow grabbed the swaying bag of its scrotum, and in the single frozen instant his action afforded the slaughtermen, the hammerman and the axeman swung together. Down went the bull, spraying everyone within two dozen paces with blood, including both the consuls: Spurius Postumius Albinus was saturated; so was his younger brother, Aulus, standing just behind and to one side of him. Gaius Marius eyed them askance, wondering if the omen was what he thought it was. Bad news for Rome, anyway. And still his unwelcome guest, the feeling, refused to go away; in fact, of late it had greatly increased in strength. As if the moment approached. The moment in which he, Gaius Marius, would become the First Man in Rome. Every particle of common sense in him and there were many screamed that his feeling was a traitor, a trap which would betray him and lead to ignominy and death. Yet he went on experiencing it, the ineradicable feeling that he would become the First Man in Rome. Ridiculous! argued the man of eminent good sense: he was forty-seven years old, he had limped in sixth and last among the six men elected as praetors five years ago, he was too old now to seek the consulship without benefit of name and a host of clients. His time had gone. Gone, gone, gone. The consuls were finally being inaugurated; that pompous ass Lucius Caecilius Metellus Dalmaticus who rejoiced in the title of Pontifex Maximus was rattling off the concluding prayers, and soon the senior consul, Minucius Rufus, would have the herald call the Senate to meet inside the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. There they would fix the date of the Latin Festival on the Alban Mount; discuss which of the provinces must receive new governors, and which prorogued governors; draw the lots apportioning the provinces, for the praetors as well as the consuls; some self-serving tribune of the plebs would start raving on about the People; Scaurus would squash the presumptuous fool like a beetle underfoot; and one of the many Caecilius Metelluses would drone interminably about the decline in the moral and ethical standards of Rome's younger generation, until dozens of voices from all around him told him to shut up and pull his head in. Same old Senate same old People same old Rome same old Gaius Marius. Now forty-seven years old. Next year he'd be fifty-seven, the year after that sixty-seven, and then they'd shove him into the middle of a pyre of logs and kindling, and up he'd go in a puff of smoke. Goodbye, Gaius Marius, you upstart from the pigpens of Arpinum, you non-Roman. Sure enough, the herald brayed his summons. Sighing, Gaius Marius began to move, lifting his head to see if there was anyone within footshot he could tread on heavily and feel good about doing so. No one. Of course. At which moment his eye caught the eye of Gaius Julius Caesar, who was smiling as if he knew exactly what Gaius Marius was thinking. Arrested, Gaius Marius gazed back. Only a backbencher, but never mere lobby fodder, this most senior of the Julius Caesars left in the Senate now his older brother, Sextus, was dead. Tall, as erect as if he were a Military Man, wide in the shoulders still, his fine head of silver-gilt hair a fitting crown for his lined, handsome face. He wasn't young, had to be upward of fifty-five years old, but he looked as if he was going to become one of those desiccated ancients the patrician nobility produced with monotonous regularity, tottering off to every meeting of Senate or People at ninety-plus, and continuing to speak praiseworthy good sense. The sort you couldn't kill with a sacrificial axe. The sort who when it was all boiled down made Rome what Rome was, in spite of the plethora of Caecilius Metelluses. Better than the rest of the world put together. "Which Metellus is going to harangue us today?" asked Caesar as they fell in beside each other and began to ascend the many steps of the temple. "One still to earn his extra name," said Gaius Marius, his gigantic eyebrows leaping up and down like millipedes on pins. "Quintus Caecilius plain old Metellus, younger brother of our revered Pontifex Maximus." "Why him?" "Because he's going to run for consul next year, I think. So he's got to start making noises of the right kind now," said Gaius Marius, standing aside to permit the older man to precede him into the earthly dwelling place of the Great God, Jupiter Optimus Maximus Jupiter Best and Greatest. "I do believe you are correct," said Caesar. The vast central room of the temple was reduced to semi-darkness, so poor was the light outside, but the brick-red face of the Great God glowed as if illuminated from within. He was very old, made centuries before by the famous Etruscan sculptor Vulca out of terracotta, though gradually he had been gifted with an ivory robe, gold hair, gold sandals, gold thunderbolt, even silver skin on his arms and legs, and ivory nails on his fingers and toes. Only his face remained the color of that richly ruddy clay, clean-shaven in the Etruscan fashion Rome had inherited; his brainless shut-mouthed smile curved his lips up almost to his ears, and gave him the air of a fatuous parent determined to ignore the fact that his child was busy setting fire to the nursemaid. On each side of the Great God's room opened another room, the left-hand one to house his daughter Minerva, the right-hand one to house his wife, Juno. Each lady had a wonderful statue of herself in gold and ivory within her cella, and each lady bore with resignation the presence of an uninvited guest, for when the temple was built two of the old gods refused to move out; Romans being Romans, they simply left the old gods there alongside the new. "I wonder, Gaius Marius," said Caesar, "if you would care to share my dinner tomorrow afternoon?" That was surprising! Gaius Marius blinked, using the fraction of time the action brought him to arrive at a conclusion. After something, was he? Undoubtedly. But it wouldn't be shoddy. And one thing no one could say about the Julius Caesars, that they were snobs. A Julius Caesar didn't need to be a snob. If you could trace your lineage straight back in the male line to Iulus, Aeneas, Anchises, and the goddess Venus, you were secure enough to find it no comedown to mix with anyone from a dockside worker to a Caecilius Metellus. "Thank you, Gaius Julius," said Marius. "I would be very pleased to share your dinner."