The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough
Typical of uninvolved bystanders, the audience made no move to help, just watched with avid interest; to do it justice, however, no one looking on dreamed that what he saw was anything more than a brawl between two candidates. The weapons were a surprise, but the supporters of candidates had been known to carry weapons before.
Two big men lifted Memmius up and held him between them, struggling furiously, while Glaucia got to his feet kicking away his ruined toga. Glaucia said not a word. He plucked a club from someone standing near him, then looked at Memmius for a long moment. Up went the club, held in both hands like a mallet; and down it came upon Gaius Memmius’s strikingly handsome head. No one attempted to interfere as Glaucia bent to follow Memmius fall, and kept on beating, beating that head, handsome no longer. Only when it was reduced to pulp and brains and splatters did Glaucia cease his attack.
A look of incredulous and outraged frustration spread then across Glaucia’s face; he flung the bloodied club away and stared at his friend Gaius Claudius, watching ashen-faced.
“Will you shelter me until I can get away?” he asked.
Claudius nodded, speechless.
The audience was beginning to mutter and move in upon the group, while other men were running from the direction of the saepta; Glaucia turned and raced toward the Quirinal, his companions following him.
*
The news was carried to Saturninus as he prowled up and down the saepta, canvassing persuasively for Glaucia’s illegal candidacy. Covert yet angry glances told him how most of those hearing the news of Memmius’s murder felt, and he was branded as Glaucia’s best friend. Among the young senators and sons of senators a furious buzz was starting, while some of the sons of the more powerful knights gathered around their senatorial peers, and that enigmatic man Sulla was in the midst of it.
“We’d better get out of here,” said Gaius Saufeius, only the day before elected an urban quaestor.
“You’re right, I think we’d better,” said Saturninus, growing more and more uneasy at the anger he could feel all around.
Accompanied by his Picentine henchmen Titus Labienus and Gaius Saufeius, Saturninus left the saepta in a hurry. He knew whereabouts Glaucia would have gone—to Gaius Claudius’s house on the Quirinal—but when he got there Saturninus found its doors bolted and barred. Only after considerable yelling did Gaius Claudius open up and let the three friends in.
“Where is he?” Saturninus demanded.
“My study,” said Gaius Claudius, who had been weeping.
“Titus Labienus,” said Saturninus, “go and find Lucius Equitius, will you? We need him, the crowd thinks he’s lovely.”
“What are you up to?” Labienus asked.
“I’ll tell you when you bring me Lucius Equitius.”
Glaucia was sitting grey-faced in Gaius Claudius’s study; when Saturninus entered he looked up, but said not a word.
“Why, Gaius Servilius? Why?”
Glaucia shivered. “I didn’t mean to do it,” he said. “I just—I just lost my temper.”
“And lost us our chance at Rome,” said Saturninus.
“I lost my temper,” Glaucia said again.
He had stayed the night before the presentation of the curule candidates in this same house, for Gaius Claudius threw a party in his honor; more a creature than a man, Gaius Claudius admired Glaucia’s boldness in challenging the provisions of the lex Villia, and thought the best way to show his admiration was to use some of his large amounts of money to give Glaucia a memorable send-off down the canvassing path. The fifty men who later accompanied Glaucia on his walk to the saepta were all invited to the party, but no women of any sort had been invited, and the result was a comedy remarkable only for its bibulousness and its biliousness. At dawn no one was feeling very well, yet they had to go to the saepta with Glaucia to support him; clubs and cudgels seemed like a good idea. Just as unwell as the .rest, Glaucia gave himself an emetic and a bath, wrapped himself in his whitened toga, and set off with eyes screwed up against the thousand tiny hammers of a severe headache.
To meet the immaculate and laughing Memmius, his handsome head already held like a victor’s, was more than Glaucia’s frayed nerves could cope with. So he responded to Memmius ‘s opposition with a cruel taunt, and when Memmius tore away his toga, Glaucia lost all control. Now the deed was done, and could not be undone. Everything lay in ruins around Gaius Memmius’s shattered head.
Saturninus’s silent presence in the study was a different kind of shock; Glaucia began to understand the enormity of his deed, its ramifications and repercussions. Not only had he destroyed his own career, he had probably destroyed the career of his best friend as well. And that he couldn’t bear.
“Say something, Lucius Appuleius!” he cried.
Blinking, Saturninus emerged from his trancelike thoughts. “I think we have only one alternative left,” he said calmly. “We must get the crowd on our side, and use the crowd to make the Senate give us what we want — safe office, a ruling of extenuating circumstances for you, a guarantee none of us will face prosecution. I’ve sent Titus Labienus off to fetch Lucius Equitius, because it’s easier to sway the crowds with him there.” He sighed, flexed His hands. “The moment Labienus comes back, we’re off to the Forum. There’s no time to waste.”
“Should I come?” asked Glaucia.
“No. You stay here with your men, and have Gaius Claudius arm his slaves. And don’t let anyone in until you hear my voice, or Labienus’s, or Saufeius’s.” He got up. “By nightfall I have to control Rome. Otherwise—I’m finished too.”
“Abandon me!” said Glaucia suddenly. “Lucius Appuleius, there’s no need for this! Throw up your hands in horror at my deed, then put yourself in the forefront of the pack baying for my condemnation! It is the only way. Rome isn’t ready for a new form of government! That crowd is hungry, yes. It’s fed up with bungling government, yes. It wants some justice, yes. But not enough to beat in heads and tear out throats. They’ll Cheer you until they’re hoarse. But they won’t kill for you.”
“You’re wrong,” said Saturninus, who felt a little as if he walked on wool, light, free, invulnerable. “Gaius Servilius, all those people filling our Forum are greater in numbers and power than an army! Didn’t you see how the Policy Makers caved in at the knees? Didn’t you see Metellus Caprarius back down over Lucius Equitius? There was no bloodshed! The Forum’s run redder by far from the brawls of a hundred men, yet there were hundreds of thousands of them! No one is going to defy that crowd, yet it will never be necessary to arm them, or set them to beating in heads or tearing out throats. Their power is in their mass! A mass I can control, Gaius Servilius! All I need is my own oratory, proof of my devotion to their cause, and a wave or two from Lucius Equitius! Who can resist the man who runs that crowd like some gigantic siege apparatus? The straw men of the Senate?”
“Gaius Marius,” said Glaucia.
“No, not even Gaius Marius! And anyway, he’s with us!”
“He’s not,” said Glaucia.
“He may think he’s not, Gaius Servilius, but the fact that the crowd cheers him the way it cheers me and Lucius Equitius will make the Policy Makers and everyone else in the Senate see him in the same light as they see us! I don’t mind sharing the power with Gaius Marius—for a little while. He’s getting old, he’s had a stroke. What more natural than for him to die from another one?’’ asked Saturninus eagerly.
Glaucia was feeling better; he straightened in his chair and looked at Saturninus in mingled doubt and hope. “Could it work, Lucius Appuleius? Do you really think it could?”
And Saturninus stretched his arms toward the ceiling, vibrating confidence, a smile of savage joy upon his face. “It will work, Gaius Servilius. Leave everything to me.”
So Lucius Appuleius Saturninus went from the house of Gaius Claudius down to the rostra in the Forum Romanum, accompanied by Labienus, Saufeius, Lucius Equitius, and some ten or twelve other close adherents. He cut across the Arx, fee
However, the Forum wasn’t deserted; perhaps two or three thousand of Saturninus’s less reputable rabble paraded up and down, shouting and waving their fists, demanding free grain of the empty air. Sheer disappointment brought tears very close to the surface; then Saturninus looked sternly at the hard-bitten men roiling around the lower end of the Forum, and made a decision. They would do. They would have to do. He would use them as a spearhead; through them he would draw the vast crowd back into the Forum— for they mingled with the members of that vast crowd, where he did not.
Wishing he had heralds to trumpet his arrival, Saturninus walked down the Gemonian Steps and strode to the rostra, his little band of followers shouting to the rabble to gather round and hear Lucius Appuleius.
“Quirites!” he addressed them amid howling cheers, holding out his arms for silence. “Quirites, the Senate of Rome is about to sign our death warrants! I, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, as well as Lucius Equitius and Gaius Servilius Glaucia, are to be accused of the murder of a minion of the nobility, an effeminate puppet whose only purpose in putting himself up for election as consul was to make sure that you, People of Rome, continue to starve!” The dense collection about the rostra was silent and still, listening; Saturninus took confidence and energy from his intent auditors, and expanded upon his theme. “Why do you think you have received no grain, even after I passed my law to give it to you for a pittance? Because the First and Second Classes of our great city would prefer to buy less and sell it for more! Because the First and Second Classes of our city don’t want your hungry mouths turned in their direction! They think of you as the cuckoo in their nest, an extravagance Rome doesn’t need! You are the Head Count and the lower classes-—you’re not important any more, with all the wars won and the loot from them safe in the Treasury! Why spend that loot filling your worthless bellies? asks the Senate of Rome, and refuses to give me the funds I need to buy grain for your worthless bellies! For it would suit the Senate of Rome and the First and Second Classes of Rome very, very well if several hundred thousand of Rome’s so-called worthless bellies shrank to the point where their owners died of starvation! Imagine it! All that money saved, all those smelly overcrowded insulae emptied—what a green and spacious park could Rome become! Where you cramped yourselves to live, they would stroll in pleasure gardens, the money jingling in their purses and their bellies full! They don’t care about you! You’re a nuisance they’d be glad to be rid of, and what better way than an artificially induced famine?”
He had them, of course; they were growling in the backs of their throats like angry dogs, a rumble that filled the air with menace and Saturninus’s heart with triumph.
“But I, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, have fought to fill your bellies so long and so hard that now I am to be eliminated for a murder I did not commit!” That was a good one; he hadn’t committed murder either, he could speak the truth and have the truth ring unmistakably in every word! “With me will perish all my friends, who are your friends too. Lucius Equitius here, the heir to Tiberius Gracchus’s name and aims! And Gaius Servilius Glaucia, who so brilliantly frames my laws that not even the nobles who run the Senate can tamper with them!” He paused, he sighed, he lifted his arms helplessly. “And when we are dead, Quirites, who will be left to look after you? Who will carry on the good fight? Who will battle the privileged to fill your bellies? No one!”
The growl was now a roar, the mood of the throng was shot with potential violence, they were his to do with as he pleased. “Quirites, it is up to you! Do you want to stand by while we who love you and esteem you are put to death, innocent men? Or will you go home and arm yourselves, and run to every house in your neighborhood, and bring out the crowds?”
They began to move, but the shrieking Saturninus pulled them up with his voice. “Come back to me here in all your thousands upon thousands! Bring yourselves to me, and put yourselves in my charge! Before night has fallen, Rome will belong to you because it will belong to me, and then we shall see whose bellies are full! Then we’ll break open the Treasury, and buy grain! Now go, bring the whole city to me, meet me here in the heart of Rome, and show the Senate and the First and Second Classes who really rules our city and our empire!”
Like a vast number of tiny balls shocked by a single blow from a hammer on the rim containing them, the rabble scattered in all directions at a run, screaming incoherent babbles of words, while Saturninus sank back on his heels, and turned on the rostra to face his henchmen.
“Oh, wonderful!” cried Saufeius, straining at the leash.
“We’ll win, Lucius Appuleius, we’ll win!” cried Labienus.
Surrounded by men pounding his back in euphoric glee, Saturninus stood royally and contemplated the enormity of his future.
At which point Lucius Equitius burst into tears. “But what are you going to do?” he blubbered, mopping his face with the edge of his toga.
“Do? What do you think it sounded like, you imbecile? I’m going to take over Rome, of course!”
“With that lot?”
‘“Who is there to oppose them? And anyway, they’ll bring the giant crowd. You wait, Lucius Equitius! No one will be able to resist us!”
“But there’s an army of marines on the Campus Martius—two legions of them!” cried Lucius Equitius, still sniffling and shivering.
“No Roman army has ever ventured inside Rome except to triumph, and no man who ordered a Roman army to venture inside Rome would survive,” said Saturninus, contemptuous of this mean necessity; as soon as he was firmly in control, Equitius would have to go, likeness to Tiberius Gracchus or not.
“Gaius Marius would do it,” sobbed Equitius.
“Gaius Marius, you fool, will be on our side!” Saturninus said with a sneer.
“I don’t like it, Lucius Appuleius!”
“You don’t have to like it. If you’re with me, shut up the bawling. If you’re against me, I’ll shut up the bawling!” And Saturninus drew his finger across his throat.
*
One of the first to answer the call for help from Gaius Memmius’s friends was Gaius Marius. He arrived at the scene of the confrontation not more than a few moments after Glaucia and his cronies had gone running to the Quirinal, and found a hundred toga-clad members of the Centuries clustered around what was left of Gaius Memmius. They parted to let the senior consul through; with Sulla at his shoulder, he gazed down at the pulped remnants of head, then looked toward the place where the bloodstained club still lay bedaubed with fragments of hair and muscle and skin and skull.
“Who did this?” asked Sulla.
The answer came from a dozen men: “Gaius Servilius Glaucia.”
Sulla blew through his nose. “Himself?”
Everyone nodded.
“Does anyone know where he went from here?”
This time the answers conflicted, but Sulla finally established that Glaucia and his gang had raced toward the Sanqualis Gate onto the Quirinal; since Gaius Claudius had been one of them, it seemed likely they were heading for his house on the Alta Semita.
Marius hadn’t moved, hadn’t lifted his head from his silent contemplation of Gaius Memmius. Gently Sulla touched him on the arm; he stirred then, wiping the tears from his face with a fold of toga because he didn’t want to betray his left hand’s clumsiness by hunting for his handkerchief.
“On the field of war, this is natural. On the Field of Mars beneath the walls of Rome, it is an abomination!” he shouted, turnin
Other senior senators were arriving, among them Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus, who took one swift look at Marius’s tear-streaked face, then down at the ground, and caught his breath.
“Memmius! Gaius Memmius?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes, Gaius Memmius,” said Sulla. “Murdered in person by Glaucia, all the witnesses say.”
Marius was weeping again, but made no attempt to conceal the fact as he looked at Scaurus. “Princeps Senatus,” he said, “I am convoking the Senate in the temple of Bellona immediately. Do you concur?”
“I do,” said Scaurus.
Some lictors were straggling up, their charge the senior consul having outdistanced them by several hundred paces despite his stroke.
“Lucius Cornelius, take my lictors, find the heralds, cancel the presentation of the candidates, send the flamen Martialis to the temple of Venus Libitina to bring the sacred axes of the fasces to us in Bellona, and summon the Senate,” said Marius. “I will go on ahead with Marcus Aemilius.”
“This has been,” said Scaurus, “an absolutely horrible year. In fact, in spite of all our recent vicissitudes, I don’t recall a year so horrible since the last year of Gaius Gracchus’s life.”
Marius’s tears had dried. “Then we’re overdue for it, I suppose,” he said.
“Let us hope at least there will be no worse violence done than the murder of Memmius.”
But Scaurus’s hope proved vain, though at first it seemed reasonable. The Senate met in the temple of Bellona and discussed the murder of Memmius; sufficient of its members had been eyewitnesses to make the guilt of Glaucia manifest.
“However,” said Marius firmly, “Gaius Servilius must be tried for his crime. No Roman citizen can be condemned without trial unless he declares war on Rome, and that is not an issue here today.”
“I’m afraid it is, Gaius Marius,” said Sulla, hurrying in.
Everyone stared at him. No one spoke.