Colleen McCullough - 1. First Man in Rome

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Said Publius Rutilius Rufus in a letter to Gaius Marius dated the end of September:

Well, Publius Licinius Nerva has nerved himself at last to write to the Senate with complete candor about the situation in Sicily. As senior consul, you are being sent the official dispatches, of course, but you will hear my version first, for I know you'll choose to read my letter ahead of boring old dispatches, and I've cadged a place for my letter in the official courier's bag. But before I tell you about Sicily, it is necessary to go back to the beginning of the year, when as you know the House recommended to the People in their tribes that a law should be passed freeing all slaves of Italian Allied nationality throughout our world. But you will not know that it had one unforeseen repercussion namely, that the slaves of other nationalities, particularly those nations officially designated as Friends and Allies of the Roman People, either assumed that the law referred to them as well, or else were mighty displeased that it did not. This is particularly true of Greek slaves, who form the majority of Sicily's grain slaves, and also form the majority of slaves of all kinds in Campania. In February, the son of a Campanian knight and full Roman citizen named Titus Vettius, aged all of twenty years old, apparently went mad. The cause of his madness was debt; he had committed himself to pay seven silver talents for of all things! a Scythian slave girl. But the elder Titus Vettius being a tightwad of the first order, and too old to be the father of a twenty-year-old besides, young Titus Vettius borrowed the money at exorbitant interest, pledging his entire inheritance as collateral. Of course he was as helpless as a plucked chicken in the hands of the moneylenders, who insisted he pay them at the end of thirty days. Naturally he could not, and he did obtain an extension of a further thirty days. But when again he had no hope of paying them, the moneylenders went to his father and demanded their loan with exorbitant interest. The father refused, and disowned his son. Who went mad. The next thing, young Titus Vettius had put on a diadem and a purple robe, declared himself the King of Campania, and roused every slave in the district to rebellion. The father, I hasten to add, is one of the good old-fashioned bulk farmers treats his slaves well, and has no Italians among them. But just down the road was one of the new bulk farmers, those dreadful men who buy slaves dirt-cheap, chain them up to work, don't ask questions about their origins, and lock them in ergastulum barracks to sleep. This despicable fellow's name was Marcus Macrinus Mactator, and he turns out to have been a great friend of your junior colleague in the consulship, our wonderfully upright and honest Gaius Flavius Fimbria. The day young Titus Vettius went mad, he armed his slaves by buying up five hundred sets of old show-arms a gladiatorial school was auctioning off, and down the road the little army marched to the well of servile pain run by Marcus Macrinus Mactator. And proceeded to torture and kill Mactator and his family, and free a very large number of slaves, many of whom turned out to be of Italian Allied nationality, and therefore were illegally detained. Within no time at all, young Titus Vettius the King of Campania had an army of slaves over four thousand strong, and had barricaded himself into a very well fortified camp atop a hill. And the servile recruits kept pouring in! Capua barred its gates, brought all the gladiatorial schools into line, and appealed to the Senate in Rome for help. Fimbria was very vocal about the affair, and mourned the loss of his friend Mactator Slaughterman until the Conscript Fathers were fed up enough to depute the praetor peregrinus, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, to assemble an army and quash the servile uprising. Well, you know what a colossal aristocrat Lucius Licinius Lucullus is! He didn't take at all kindly to being ordered by a cockroach like Fimbria to clean up Campania. And now a mild digression. I suppose you know that Lucullus is married to Metellus Piggle-wiggle's sister, Metella Calva. They have a pair of sons about fourteen and twelve years of age who are commonly rumored to be extremely promising, and now that Piggle-wiggle's son, the Piglet, can't manage to get two words out straight, the whole family is rather pinning its hopes on young Lucius and young Marcus Lucullus. Now stop it, Gaius Marius! I can hear you ho-humming from Rome! All this is important stuff, if only you could be brought to believe it. How can you possibly conduct yourself unscathed through the labyrinth of Roman public life if you won't bother to learn all the family ramifications and gossip? Lucullus's wife who is Piggle-wiggle's sister is notorious for her immorality. First of all, she conducts her affairs of the heart in blazingly public fashion, complete with hysterical scenes in front of popular jeweler's shops, and the occasional attempted suicide by stripping off all her clothes and trying to hop over the wall into the Tiber. But secondly, poor Metella Calva does not philander with men of her own class, and that's what really hurts our lofty Piggle-wiggle. Not to mention the haughty Lucullus. No, Metella Calva likes handsome slaves, or hulking laborers she picks up on the wharves of the Port of Rome. She is therefore a dreadful burden to Piggle-wiggle and Lucullus, though I believe she is an excellent mother to her boys. End of digression. I mention it to sprinkle this whole episode with a little much-needed spice. And to make you understand why Lucullus went off to Campania smarting at having to take orders from precisely the sort of man Metella Calva might well have fancied were he poorer rougher he could not be! There is something very fishy going on with Fimbria, incidentally. He has struck up a friendship with Gaius Memmius, of all people, and the two of them are as thick as thieves, and a lot of money is changing hands, though for what purpose is unclear. Anyway, Lucullus soon cleaned up Campania. Young Titus Vettius was executed, as were his officers and the members of his slave army. Lucullus was commended for his work, and went back to hearing the assizes in places like Reate. But didn't I tell you some time ago that I had a feeling about those tiny little servile uprisings in Campania last year? My nose was right. First we had Titus Vettius. And now we have a full-scale slave war on our hands in Sicily! I have always thought Publius Licinius Nerva looked and acted like a mouse, but who could ever have dreamed that it would be dangerous to send him as praetor-governor to Sicily? He's so squeaky-meticulous the job should have suited him down to the ground. Scurrying here, scurrying there, laying in his stores for winter, writing copiously detailed accounts with the tip of his tail dipped in ink, whiskers twitching. Of course all would have gone well, had it not been for this wretched law about freeing the Italian Allied slaves. Our praetor-governor Nerva scurried off to Sicily and began to manumit the Italians, who number about a quarter of the total grain slaves. And he got started in Syracuse, while his quaestor got started at the other end of the island, in Lilybaeum. It went slowly and precisely, Nerva being Nerva he did, by the way, evolve an excellent system to catch out slaves claiming to be Italian who were not Italian, by quizzing them in Oscan and local geography of our peninsula. But he published his decree in Latin only, thinking this too would weed out potential imposters. With the result that those reading Greek had to rely upon others to translate, and the confusion grew, and grew, and grew.... The two weeks at the end of May saw Nerva free some eight hundred Italian slaves in Syracuse, while his quaestor in Lilybaeum marked time, waiting for orders. And there arrived in Syracuse a very angry deputation of grain farmers, all the members of which threatened to do things to Nerva if he went on freeing their slaves that ranged from emasculation to litigation. Nerva panicked at sight of this spitting cat, and shut down his tribunal at once. No more slaves were to be freed. This directive reached his quaestor in Lilybaeum a little too late, unfortunately, for his quaestor had grown tired of waiting, and set up his tribunal in the marketplace. Now, having barely got started, he too shut down. The slaves lined up in the marketplace were quite literally mad with rage, and went home to do murder. The result was an outright revolt at the western end of the island. It started with the murder of a couple of wealthy brothers who farmed a huge grain property near Halicyae, and it went on from there. All over Sicily slaves in hundreds and then thousands left their farms, some of them only after murdering their overseers and even their owners, and converged on the Grove of the Palici, which lies, I believe, some forty miles southwest of Mount Aetna. Nerva called up his militia, and thought he had crushed the revolt when he stormed and took an old citadel filled with refugee slaves. So he disbanded his militia, and sent them all to their various homes. But the revolt was only just beginning. It flared up next time near Heracleia Minoa, and when Nerva tried to get his militia together again, everyone became extremely deaf. He was forced to fall back on a cohort of auxiliaries stationed at Enna, quite a distance from Heracleia Minoa, but the closest force of any size nonetheless. This time Nerva didn't win. The whole cohort perished, and the slaves acquired arms. While this was going on, the slaves produced a leader, predictably an Italian who had not been freed before Nerva closed down his tribunals. His name is Salvius, and he's a member of the Marsi. His profession when a free man, it seems, was a snake-charming flute player, and he was enslaved because he was caught playing the flute for women involved in the Dionysiac rites which so worried the Senate a few years ago. Salvius now calls himself a king, but being an Italian, his idea of a king is Roman, not Hellenic. He wears the toga praetexta rather than a diadem, and is preceded by lictors bearing the fasces, complete with axes. At the far end of Sicily, somewhere around Lilybaeum, a second slave-king then appeared, a Greek this time, named Athenion, and he too raised an army. Both Salvius and Athenion converged on the Grove of the Palici, and there had a conference. The result of this is that Salvius (who now calls himself King Tryphon) has become the ruler of the whole lot, and has chosen for his headquarters an impregnable place called Triocala, in the lap of the mountains above the coast opposite Africa, about halfway between Agrigentum and Lilybaeum. Right at this moment, Sicily is a very Iliad of woes. The harvest is lying trampled into the ground aside from what the slaves harvested to fill their own bellies, and Rome will get no grain from Sicily this year. The cities of Sicily are groaning at the seams to contain the enormous numbers of free refugees who have sought shelter within the safety of walls, and starvation and disease are already stalking the streets. An army of over sixty thousand well-armed slaves and five thousand slave cavalry is running wild anywhere it likes from one end of the island to the other, and when threatened, retires to this impregnable fortress of Triocala. They have attacked and taken Murgantia, and all but succeeded in taking Lilybaeum, which fortunately was saved by some veterans who heard about the trouble and sailed across from Africa to help. And here comes the ultimate indignity. Not only is Rome looking at a drastic grain shortage, but it very much seems that someone attempted to manipulate events in Sicily to manufacture a grain shortage! The slave uprising has turned what would have been a spurious shortage into a real one, but our esteemed Princeps Senatus, Scaurus, is nose-down on a trail leading, he hopes, to the culprit or culprits. I suspect he suspects our despicable consul Fimbria and Gaius Memmius. Why would a decent and upright man like Memmius ally himself with the likes of Fimbria? Well, yes, I can answer that one, I think. He should have been praetor years ago but has only just got there now, and he doesn't have the kind of money to run for consul. And when lack of money keeps a man out of the chair he thinks he's entitled to sit in, he can do many imprudent things.