The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough
The door opening onto the colonnade at the house end of the peristyle-garden moved inward, and the sun entered Caesar’s study like a fanfare of trumpets, blinding and brassy, golden-low. Julia stood in its midst, her right hand out, smiling.
“Gaius Marius,” she said with pleasure, the smile clearly starting in her eyes.
“Julia,” he said, moving close enough to take the hand, but holding it as if he didn’t know what to do with it, or what to do next. He cleared his full throat. “Your father has told you?”
“Oh, yes.” Her smile didn’t fade; if anything, it grew, and there was nothing immature or girlishly bashful in her demeanor. On the contrary, she appeared in complete control of herself and the situation, regally poised, a princess in her power, yet subtly submissive.
“You don’t mind?” he asked abruptly.
“I’m delighted,” she said, her beautiful grey eyes wide and warm, the smile still in them; as if to reassure him, she curled her fingers around the edge of his palm, and gently squeezed it. “Gaius Marius, Gaius Marius, don’t look so worried! I really, truly, honestly am delighted!”
He lifted his left hand, encumbered in folds of toga, and took hers between both of his, looking down at its perfect oval nails, its creamy tapered fingers. “I’m an old man!” he said.
“Then I must like old men, because I do like you.”
“You like me?”
She blinked. “Of course! I would not otherwise have agreed to marry you. My father is the gentlest of men, not a tyrant. Much and all as he might have hoped I would be willing to marry you, he would never, never have forced me to it.”
“But are you sure you haven’t forced yourself?” he asked.
“It wasn’t necessary,” she said patiently.
“Surely there’s some young man you like better!”
“Not at all. Young men are too like my brothers.”
“But—but—” He cast round wildly for some objection, and finally said, “My eyebrows!”
“I think they’re wonderful,” she said.
He felt himself blush, helpless to control it, and was thus thrown even further off balance; then he realized that, collected and self-possessed though she was, she was nevertheless a complete innocent, and understood nothing of what he was enduring. “Your father says we may marry in April, before your birthday. Is that all right?” he asked.
She frowned. “Well, I suppose so, if that’s what he says. But I’d rather put it forward to March, if you and he agree. I’d like to be married on the festival of Anna Perenna.”
An appropriate day—yet an unlucky one too. The feast of Anna Perenna, held on the first full moon after the beginning of March, was all tied up with the moon, and the old New Year. In itself the feast day was lucky, but the day following if was not.
“Don’t you fear starting your first proper day of marriage with poor omens?” he asked.
“No,” said Julia. “There are none but good omens in marrying you.”
She put her left hand beneath his right so that they were handfast, and looked up at him gravely.
“My mother has only given me a very short time to be alone with you,” she said, “and there is one matter we must clarify between us before she comes in. My dowry.” Now her smile did fade, replaced by a look of serious aloofness. “I do not anticipate an unhappy relationship with you, Gaius Marius, for I see nothing in you to make me doubt your temper or your integrity, and you will find mine all they should be. If we can respect each other, we will be happy. However, my mother is adamant about a dowry, and my father is most distressed at her attitude. She says must be dowered in case you should ever decide to divorce me. But my father is already overwhelmed by your generosity, and loath to ask you for more. So I said I would ask, and I must ask before mama comes in. Because she’s bound to say something.”
There was no cupidity in her gaze, only concern. “Would it perhaps be possible to lay a sum aside on the understanding that if, as I expect, we find no need to divorce, it will be yours as well as mine? Yet if we do divorce, it would be mine.”
What a little lawyer she was! A true Roman. All so very carefully phrased, gracefully inoffensive, yet crystal-clear.
“I think it’s possible,” he said gravely.
“You must be sure I can’t spend it while I’m married to you,” she said. “That way, you’ll know I’m honorable.”
“If that’s what you want, that’s what I’ll do,” he said. “But it isn’t necessary to tie it up. I’m quite happy to give you a sum now in your own name, to do with as you please.’’
A laugh escaped her. “Just as well you chose me and not Julilla! No, thank you, Gaius Marius. I prefer the honorable way,” she said gently, and lifted her face. “Now will you kiss me before my mother comes?”
Her demand for a dowry hadn’t discomposed him one bit, where this demand certainly did. Suddenly he understood how vitally important it was that he do nothing to disappoint her—or, worse still, give her a distaste for him. Yet what did he know about kisses, about lovemaking? His self-esteem had never required reassurances from his infrequent mistresses as to his competence as a lover, because it had never really mattered to him what they thought of his lovemaking or his kisses; nor did he have the faintest idea what young girls expected from their first lovers. Ought he to grab her and kiss her passionately, ought he to make this initial contact chastely light? Lust or respect, since love was at best a hope for the future? Julia was an unknown quantity, he had no clue as to what she expected—or what she wanted. All he did know was that pleasing her mattered greatly to him.
In the end he stepped closer to her without releasing her hands, and leaned his head down, not a very long way, for she was unusually tall. Her lips were closed and cool, soft and silky; natural instinct solved his dilemma for him when he shut his eyes and simply put himself on the receiving end of whatever she cared to offer. It was a totally new experience for her, one she desired without knowing what it would bring her, for Caesar and Marcia had kept their girls sheltered, refined, ignorant, yet not unduly inhibited. This girl, the scholarly one, had not developed along the lines of her young sister, but she was not incapable of strong feeling. The difference between Julia and Julilla was one of quality, not capacity.
So when her hands struggled to be free, he let go of them at once, and would have moved away from her had she not immediately lifted her arms and put them round his neck. The kiss warmed. Julia opened her lips slightly, and Marius employed his empty hands in holding her. Vast and many-folded, the toga prevented too intimate a contact, which suited them both; and the moment came quite naturally when this exquisite form of exploration found a spontaneous ending.
Marcia, entering noiselessly, could fault neither of them, for though they were embraced, his mouth was against her cheek, and she seemed, eyelids lowered, as satisfied yet unassailed as a cat discreetly stroked in just the right way.
Neither of them confused, they broke apart and turned to face the mother—who looked, thought Marius, distinctly grim. In her, not as ancient an aristocrat as the Julius Caesars, Marius sensed a certain grievance, and understood that Marcia would have preferred Julia to marry someone of her own class, even if it had meant no money came into the family. However, his happiness at that moment was complete; he could afford to overlook the umbrage of his future mother-in-law, some two years younger than he was himself. For in truth she was right: Julia belonged to someone younger and better than an elderly Italian hayseed with no Greek. Which was not to say that he intended for one moment to change his mind about taking her! Rather, it was up to him to demonstrate to Marcia that Julia was going to the best man of all.
“I asked about a dowry, Mama,” said Julia at once,’ “and it’s all arranged.”
Marcia did have the grace to look uncomfortable. “That was my doing,” she said, “not my daughter’s—or my husband’s.”
“I understand,” he said pleasantly.
“You have been most gen
“I disagree, Marcia. It’s you who’ve been most generous. Julia is a pearl beyond price,” said Marius.
*
A statement which stuck in his mind, so that when he left the house shortly after and found the tenth hour of daylight still in the lap of the future, he turned at the foot of the Vestal Steps to the right rather than to the left, and skirted the beautiful little round temple of Vesta to walk up the narrow defile between the Regia and the Domus Publicus. Which brought him out onto the Via Sacra at the foot of the little incline called the Clivus Sacer.
He strode up the Clivus Sacer briskly, anxious to reach the Porticus Margaritaria before the traders all went home. This big, airy shopping arcade built around a central quadrangle contained Rome’s best jewelers. It had got its name from the pearl sellers who had established quarters in it when it had been newly erected; at that time the defeat of Hannibal had seen all the stringent sumptuary laws forbidding women to wear jewelry repealed, and in consequence the women of Rome spent wildly on every kind of gewgaw.
Marius wanted to buy Julia a pearl, and knew exactly where to go, as did all who lived in Rome: the firm of Fabricius Margarita. The first Marcus Fabricius had been the first of all the pearl vendors, and set up his shop when what pearls there were came from freshwater mussels, bluff and rock and mud oysters, and the sea pen, and were small and mostly dark in color. But Marcus Fabricius made such a specialty of pearls that he followed like a sniffer-hound down the tracks of legends, journeyed to Egypt and Arabia Nabataea in search of ocean pearls—and found them. In the beginning they had been still disappointingly small and irregular in shape, but they did have the true cream-white pearl color, and came from the waters of the Sinus Arabicus, far down near Aethiopia. Then as his name became known, he discovered a source of pearls from the seas around India and the pear-shaped island of Taprobane just below India.
At which point he gave himself the last name of Margarita and established a monopoly of ocean pearl trade. Now, in the time of the consulship of Marcus Minucius Rufus and Spurius Postumius Albinus, his grandson—another Marcus Fabricius Margarita—was so well stocked that a rich man might be fairly sure if he went to Fabricius Margarita that he would find a suitable pearl in the shop right there and then.
Fabricius Margarita did indeed have a suitable pearl on hand, but Marius walked home without it, electing to have its perfect marble-sized roundness and moonlit color set upon a heavy gold necklace surrounded by smaller pearls, a process which would consume some days. The novelty of actually wanting to gift a woman with precious things possessed his thoughts, jostling there amid memories of her kiss, her willingness to be his bride. A great philanderer he was not, but he knew enough about women to recognize that Julia did not present the picture of a girl allying herself where she could not give her heart; and the very idea of owning a heart as pure, as young, as blue-blooded as Julia’s filled him with the kind of gratitude that cried out to shower her with precious things. Her willingness he saw as a vindication, an omen for the future; she was his pearl beyond price, so to her must come pearls, the tears of a distant tropical moon that fell into the deepest ocean and, in sinking to its bottom, froze solid. And he would find her an Indian adamas stone harder than any other substance known and as big as a hazelnut, and a wonderful green smaragdus stone with blue flickers in its heart, all the way from northern Scythia... and a carbunculus stone, as bright and glistening as a blister full of new blood …
*
Grania was in, of course. When was she ever out? Waiting every day from the ninth hour onward to see if her husband would come home for dinner, postponing the meal a few minutes only at a time, she drove her appallingly expensive cook mad, and all too often ended in sniffling her way through a solitary repast designed to revive the vanished appetite of a glutton emerging from a fasting cure.
The culinary masterpiece produced by the artiste in the kitchen was always, always wasted, whether Marius dined out or at home; for Grania had outlaid a fortune for a cook qualified to cast the most discriminating Epicure into ecstasies. When Marius did stay home to dinner he was faced with fare like dormice stuffed with foie gras, the tiniest fig-pecker birds daintied beyond imagination, exotic vegetables and pungent arrays of sauces too rich for his tongue and his belly, if not his purse. Like most Military Men, he was happiest with a hunk of bread and a bowl of pease-pottage cooked with bacon, and didn’t care if he missed a meal or two anyway. Food was fuel for the body to him, not fuel for pleasure. That after so many years of marriage Grania had still not worked this out for herself was symptomatic of the vast distance between them.
What Marius was about to do to Grania did not sit well with him, scant though his affection for her was. Their relationship had always been tinged with guilt on his side, for he was well aware that she had come to their marriage looking forward to a life of connubial bliss, cozy with children and shared dinners, a life centered on Arpinum, but with lots of trips to Puteoli, and perhaps a two-week holiday in Rome during the ludi Romani every September.
But from first sight of her to first night of her, she had left him so utterly unmoved that he couldn’t even begin to counterfeit liking and desire. It wasn’t that she was ugly, she wasn’t; her round face was pleasant enough, it had even been described to him as beautiful, with its large well-opened eyes and small full mouth. It wasn’t that she was a termagant, she wasn’t; in fact, her behavior was tailored to please him in every way she knew. The trouble was, she couldn’t please him, not if she filled his cup with Spanish fly and took one of the fashionable courses in lascivious dancing.
Most of his guilt stemmed from his knowledge that she did not have the faintest idea why she couldn’t please him, even after many painful quizzes on the subject; he was never able to give her satisfactory answers, because he honestly didn’t know why himself, and that was the real trouble.
For the first fifteen years she had made a praiseworthy attempt to keep her figure, which was not at all bad—full of breast, small of waist, swell of hip—and brushed her dark hair dry in the sun after washing it, to give it plenty of lustrous red highlights; and outlined her soft brown eyes with a black line of stibium; and made sure she never stank of sweat or menses.
If there was a change in him on this evening in early January when the door servant admitted him to his house, it was that he had finally found a woman who did please him, with whom he looked forward to marriage, a shared life. Perhaps in contrasting the two, Grania and Julia, he could find the elusive answer at last? And immediately he saw it. Grania was pedestrian, untutored, wholesome, domestic, the ideal wife for a Latin squire. Julia was aristocratic, scholarly, stately, political, the ideal wife for a Roman consul. In affiancing him to Grania, his family had naturally assumed he would lead the life of a Latin squire, this being the heritage of his blood, and chosen his wife accordingly. But Gaius Marius was an eagle, he flew the Arpinate coop. Adventurous and ambitious, formidably intelligent, a no-nonsense soldier who yet had vast imagination, he had come far and intended to go farther still, especially now he was promised a Julia of the Julius Caesars. She was the kind of wife he wanted! The kind of wife he needed.
“Grania!” he called, dropping the huge bulk of his toga on the magnificent mosaic floor of the atrium and stepping out of it before the servant scurrying to retrieve it could get there and save its whiteness from contact with the soles of Gaius Marius’s muddy boots.
“Yes, dear?” She came running from her sitting room with pins and brooches and crumbs littering her wake, far too plump these days, for she had long learned to console her bitter loneliness with too many sweetmeats and syruped figs.
“In the tablinum, please,” he flung over his shoulder as he strode toward the room.
Pattering quickly, she entered on his heels.
“Shut the door,” he said, moving to where his favorite chair stood behind his big desk, seating himself in it, and thus compelling her to sit like a client
“Yes, dear?” she asked, not fearfully, for he was never intentionally rude to her, nor did he ever ill-treat her in any way other than through the medium of neglect.
He frowned, turning an ivory abacus over between his hands; hands she had always loved, for they were as graceful as they were strong, square of palm but long of finger, and he used them like an expert, firmly decisive. Head on one side, she stared at him, the stranger to whom she had been married for twenty-five years. A fine-looking man, was her verdict now, no different from a thousand other verdicts. Did she love him still? How could she know? After twenty-five years, what she had come to feel was a complicated fabric with absolutely no pattern to it, so airy in some places the light of her mind shone through it, yet so dense in others that it hung like a curtain between her thoughts and her vague idea of who and what Grania the person was. Rage, pain, bewilderment, resentment, grief, self-pity—oh, so many, many emotions! Some felt so long ago they were almost forgotten, others fresh and new because she was now forty-five years old, her menses were dwindling, her poor unfruitful womb shrinking. If one emotion had come to dominate, it was ordinary, depressing, uninspiring disappointment; these days she even offered to Vediovis, the patron god of disappointments.
Marius’s lips opened to speak; by nature they were full and sensuous, but he had already disciplined them to the contours of strength before she had met him. Grania leaned a little forward to hang upon what he would say, every fiber of her being strung to twanging point with the effort of concentrating.