Colleen McCullough - 1. First Man in Rome

Gaius Marius laid the letter down with a sigh, pulled the official dispatches from the Senate toward him, and read those too, comfortably alone, and therefore able to labor aloud over the hopeless fusion of words at the top of his lungs if he so wished. Not that there was any disgrace in it, everyone read aloud; but everyone else was assumed to know Greek. Publius Rutilius was right, as always. His own extremely long letter was infinitely more informative than the dispatches, though they contained the text of Nerva's letter, and were full of statistics. They just weren't as compelling nor as newsy. Nor could they put a man right in the middle of the picture the way Rutilius did. He had no trouble in imagining the consternation in Rome. A drastic grain shortage meant political futures at stake, and a growling Treasury, and aediles scrambling to find alternative sources of grain. Sicily was the breadbasket, and when Sicily didn't deliver a good harvest, Rome stared famine in the face. Neither Africa nor Sardinia sent half as much grain to Rome as Sicily did. Combined they didn't! This present crisis would see the People blaming the Senate for sending an inadequate governor to Sicily, and the Head Count would blame both the People and the Senate for their empty bellies. The Head Count was not a political body; it was not interested in governing any more than it was interested in being governed. The sum total of its participation in public life was seats at the games and free handouts at the festivals. Until its belly was empty. And then the Head Count was a force to be reckoned with. Not that the Head Count got its grain free; but the Senate through its aediles and quaestors made sure the Head Count was sold grain at a reasonable price, even if in times of shortage that meant buying expensive grain and letting it go at the same reasonable price, much to the chagrin of the Treasury. Any Roman citizen resident within Rome could avail himself of the State's price-frozen grain ration, no matter how rich he was, provided he was willing to join the huge line at the aedile's desk in the Porticus Minucia and obtain his chits; these, when presented at one of the State granaries lining the Aventine cliffs above the Port of Rome, would permit him to buy his five modii of cheap grain. That few of means bothered was purely convenience; it was so much easier to shop in the grain market of the Velabrum and leave it to the merchants to fetch the grain from the privately owned granaries lining the bottom of the Palatine cliffs on the Vicus Tuscus. Knowing himself caught in what could be a precarious political position, Gaius Marius frowned his wonderful eyebrows together. The moment the Senate asked the Treasury to open its cobwebbed vaults to buy in expensive grain for the Head Count, the howling would begin; the chiefs of the tribuni aerarii the Treasury bureaucrats would start expostulating that they couldn't possibly afford to pay out huge sums for grain when a Head Count army six legions strong was currently employed in Gaul-across-the-Alps doing public works! That in turn would shift the onus onto the Senate, which would have to do hideous battle with the Treasury to get the extra grain; and then the Senate would complain to the People that, as usual, the Head Count were a mighty costly nuisance. Wonderful! How was he going to get himself elected consul in absentia for a second year in a row, when he led a Head Count army, and Rome was at the mercy of a hungry Head Count? May Publius Licinius Nerva rot! And every grain speculator along with him!

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Only Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus had sensed something wrong ahead of the crisis; with a fresh harvest due, the grain price within Rome normally fell a little at the end of summer. Whereas this year it had steadily risen. The reason seemed apparent; the freeing of the Italian grain slaves would limit the amount of planted grain being harvested. But then the grain slaves had not been freed, and the harvest was predicted normal. At which point, the price should have fallen dramatically. But it didn't. It kept on rising. To Scaurus, the evidence pointed conclusively to a grain manipulation stemming from the Senate, and his own observations pointed to the consul Fimbria and the urban praetor Gaius Memmius, who had been desperately raising money throughout the spring and summer. To buy grain cheaply and sell it at an enormous profit, Scaurus concluded. And then came the news of the slave uprising in Sicily. Whereupon Fimbria and Memmius began frantically selling everything they owned aside from their houses on the Palatine and sufficient land to ensure that they remained on the senatorial census. Therefore, Scaurus deduced, whatever the nature of their business venture might have been, it could not have had anything to do with the grain supply. His reasoning was specious, but pardonably so; had the consul and the urban praetor been involved in the escalation of the grain price, they would now be sitting back picking their teeth contentedly rather than chasing their tails to find the cash to pay back loans. No, not Fimbria and Memmius! He must look elsewhere. After Publius Licinius Nerva's letter confessing the extent of the crisis in Sicily reached Rome, Scaurus began to hear one senatorial name bruited about among the grain merchants; his sensitive proboscis smelled fresher and gamier game than the false scent of Fimbria and Memmius. Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. The quaestor for the port of Ostia. Young and new to the Senate, but holding the most sensitive position a new young senator could, if he was interested in grain prices. For the quaestor at Ostia supervised grain shipment and storage, knew and conversed with everybody involved with the whole gamut of the grain supply, was privy to all kinds of information well ahead of the rest of the Senate. Further investigations convinced Scaurus that he had found his culprit, and he struck his blow for the good name of the Senate at a meeting of that body early in October. Lucius Appuleius Saturninus was the prime mover behind the premature rise in the price of grain which had prevented the Treasury's acquiring additional stocks for the State granaries at anything like a reasonable price, said Scaurus Princeps Senatus to a hushed House. And the House had found its scapegoat; amid great indignation, the senators voted overwhelmingly to dismiss Lucius Appuleius Saturninus from his post as quaestor, thereby depriving him of his seat in the House, and leaving him open to massive prosecutions for extortion. Summoned from Ostia to appear in the House, Saturninus could do little more than deny Scaurus's charges. Of actual proof there was none either for or against and that meant the issue boiled down to which one of the men involved was more worthy of being believed. "Give me proof I am implicated!" cried Saturninus. "Give me proof you are not implicated!" sneered Scaurus. And naturally the House believed its Princeps Senatus, for Scaurus on the trail of wrongdoing was above reproach, everyone knew it. Saturninus was stripped of everything. But he was a fighter, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. In age he was exactly right for the job of quaestor and a new senatorial seat, being thirty; which in turn meant that no one really knew much about him, since he had not starred in a great courtroom drama as a youth, and had not shone out luminously during his military apprenticeship, and came from a senatorial family originating in Picenum. Little choice did he have about losing his post as quaestor, or his seat in the Senate; he could not even protest when the House turned around and gave his beloved job in Ostia to none other than Scaurus Princeps Senatus for the rest of the year! But he was a fighter. No one in Rome believed him innocent. Wherever he went he was spat upon, jostled, even stoned, and the outside wall of his house was smothered in graffiti PIG, PEDERAST, ULCER, WOLFSHEAD, MONSTER, PENIS GOBBLER, and other slurs jostled each other for prominence on the plastered surface. His wife and his young daughter were ostracized, and spent most of their days in tears. Even his servants looked askance at him, and were slow to respond whenever he made a request, or temper tried barked an order. His best friend was a relative nobody, Gaius Servilius Glaucia. Some years older than Saturninus, Glaucia enjoyed mild fame as an advocate in the courts and a brilliant legal draftsman; but he did not enjoy the distinction of being a patrician Servilius, nor even an important plebeian Servilius. Save for his reputation as a lawyer, Glaucia was about on a par with another Gaius Servilius who had made money and scrambled into the Senate on the edge of his patron Ahenobarbus's toga; this other plebeian Servilius, however, had not yet acquired a cognomen, where "Glaucia" was quite a respectable one, for it referred to the family's beautiful grey-green eyes. They were a good-looking pair, Saturninus and Glaucia, the one very dark indeed, the other very fair, each in the best physical mould of his type. The basis for their friendship was an equal sharpness of mind and depth of intellect, as well as the avowed purpose of reaching the consulship and ennobling their families forever. Politics and lawmaking fascinated them, which meant they were eminently suited to the kind of work their birth made mandatory. "I'm not beaten yet," said Saturninus to Glaucia, mouth set hard. "There's another way back into the Senate, and I am going to use it." "Not the censors," said Glaucia. "Definitely not the censors! No, I shall stand for election as a tribune of the plebs," said Saturninus. "You'll never get in." Glaucia was not being unduly gloomy, just realistic. "I will if I can find myself a powerful enough ally." "Gaius Marius." "Who else? He's got no love for Scaurus or Numidicus or any of the Policy Makers," Saturninus said. "I'm sailing for Massilia in the morning to explain my case to the only man who might be prepared to listen to me, and to offer him my services." Glaucia nodded. "Yes, it's a good tactic, Lucius Appuleius. After all, you have nothing to lose." A thought occurring to him, he grinned. "Think of the fun you can have making old Scaurus's life a misery when you're a tribune of the plebs!'' "No, he's not the one I want!" said Saturninus scornfully. "He acted as he saw fit; I can't quarrel with that. Someone deliberately set me up as a decoy, and that's the someone I want. And if I'm a tribune of the plebs, I can make his life a misery. That is, if I can find out who it was." "You go to Massilia and see Gaius Marius," said Glaucia. "In the meantime, I'll start work on the grain culprit." In the autumn it was possible to sail to the west, and Lucius Appuleius Saturninus had a good passage to Massilia. From there he journeyed on horseback to the Roman camp outside Glanum, and sought an audience with Gaius Marius. It had not been a gross exaggeration on Marius's part to tell his senior staff that he planned to build another Carcasso, though this was a wood-and-earth version of Carcasso's stone. The hill upon which the vast Roman camp stood bristled with fortifications; Saturninus appreciated at once that a people like the Germans, unskilled in siege, would never be able to take it, even if they stormed it with every man they had at their disposal. " But," said Gaius Marius as he took his unexpected guest upon a tour of the dispositions, "it isn't really here to protect my army, you know. It's here to delude the Germans into thinking it is." This man isn't supposed to be subtle! thought Saturninus, suddenly appreciating the quality of Gaius Marius's intellect. If anyone can help me, he can. They had taken a spontaneous liking to each other, sensing a kindred ruthlessness and determination, and perhaps a certain un-Roman iconoclasm. Saturninus was profoundly glad to discover that as he had hoped he had beaten the news of his disgrace from Rome to Glanum. However, it was difficult to tell how long he might have to wait to unfold his tale of disaster, for Gaius Marius was the commander-in-chief of a mighty enterprise, and his life, including his debatable leisure, was not his own for many moments at a stretch. Expecting a crowded dining room, Saturninus was surprised to discover that he and Manius Aquillius were the only two who would share Gaius Marius's meal. "Is Lucius Cornelius in Rome?" he asked. Unperturbed, Marius helped himself to a stuffed egg. "No, he's off on a special job," he said briefly. Understanding that there was no point in concealing his plight from Manius Aquillius, who had conclusively proven himself Marius's man the previous year and who would be bound to get letters from Rome with all the tittle-tattle in them Saturninus embarked upon his story as soon as the meal was over. The two men listened in silence until it was done, not interrupting with even a single question, which made Saturninus feel that he must have outlined events with clarity and logic. Then Marius sighed. "I'm very glad you came in person to see me," he said. "It lends considerable strength to your case, Lucius Appuleius. A guilty man might have resorted to many ploys, but not that of coming to see me in person. I am not deemed a gullible man. Nor is Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, for that matter. But, like you, I think whoever had investigated this tortuous situation would have been led by a series of illusions to you. After all, as quaestor at Ostia, you're a perfect decoy." "If the case against me falls down anywhere, Gaius Marius, it is in the fact that I don't have the kind of money to buy grain in bulk," Saturninus said. "True, but it doesn't automatically exonerate you, either," Marius said. "You could as easily have done it for a very big bribe, or taken out a loan." "Do you think I did?" "No. I think you're the victim, not the perpetrator." "So do I," said Manius Aquillius. "It's too simple." "Then will you help me secure election as a tribune of the plebs?" asked Saturninus. "Oh, certainly," said Marius without hesitation. "I shall reciprocate in whatever way I can." "Good!" said Marius. After which things happened in a hurry. Saturninus had no time to waste, as the tribunician elections were scheduled for early November, and he had to get back to Rome in time to have himself declared a candidate and line up the support Marius had promised him. So, armed with a bulky packet of letters from Marius to various people in Rome, Saturninus set off toward the Alps in a fast gig drawn by four mules, and with a purse large enough to make sure he could hire animals along the way as good as the four which started him on his journey. As he was leaving, an extraordinary trio came in on foot through the camp's main gates. Three Gauls. Barbarian Gauls! Never having set eyes upon a barbarian in his life, Saturninus gaped. One was apparently the prisoner of the other two, for he was manacled. Oddly enough, he was less barbaric in his garb and appearance than the other two! A medium-sized fellow, fairish but not spectacularly so, his hair worn long but cut like a Greek, clean-shaven, clad in the trousers of a Gaul and in a Gallic coat of hairy wool bearing a faint and complicated check in its weave. The second fellow was very dark, but he wore a towering headdress of black feathers and golden wire which proclaimed him some Celtiberian outlander and little else by way of clothing, displaying instead a body bulging with muscles. The third man was obviously the leader, a true barbarian Gaul, the bare skin of his chest white as milk yet weathered, his trousers bound with thongs like a German or one of the mythical Belgae; long red-gold hair hung down his back, long red-gold moustaches fell one on either side of his mouth, and around his neck he wore a massive dragon-headed tore of what looked like real gold. The gig started to move; as he swept by the little group at even closer quarters, Saturninus encountered the cold white gaze of the leader, and shivered in spite of himself. Now he was a complete barbarian!