The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough
“All the other magistrates and members of the Senate march at the head of the parade,” Spurius Albinus had explained to Prince Massiva, “and the year’s consuls are always formally invited to march, just as they’re invited to the feast the triumphator gives afterward for the Senate inside the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. But it isn’t good form for the consuls to accept either invitation. This is the triumphator’s great day, and he must be the most distinguished person in the celebrations, have the most lictors. So the consuls always watch from a position of importance, and the triumphator acknowledges them as he passes—yet they do not overshadow him.”
The prince had indicated that he understood, though his extreme foreignness and his lack of exposure to the Romans limited his understanding of the overall picture he was having explained to him. Unlike Jugurtha, he had clung to non-Roman Africa all his life.
Once the consular party arrived at the junction of the Vestal Steps with the Via Nova, its onward progress was hindered by massive crowds. Rome had come out in its hundreds of thousands to see Drusus triumph, that astonishing grapevine which penetrated even into the meanest streets of the Subura having assured everyone that Drusus’s triumph was going to be among the most splendid.
When on duty carrying the fasces within Rome, the lictors wore plain white togas; today their garb rendered them more anonymous than usual, for Rome going to a triumph whitened itself, every last citizen clad in his toga alba instead of just a tunic. In consequence the lictors had trouble forcing a passage for the consular party, which slowed down as the crowds pressed in. By the time it arrived alongside the temple of Castor and Pollux it had virtually disintegrated as a unit, and Prince Massiva, attended by a private bodyguard, lagged behind so badly that he lost all contact with the rest.
His sense of exclusivity and his un-Roman royalness stirred him to outrage at the familiar, disrespectful attitude of the hundreds thronging all around him; his bodyguards were elbowed aside, and he himself for a short moment lost sight of them.
It was the short moment Lucius Decumius had been waiting for; he struck with unerring accuracy, swift and sure and sudden. Crushed against Prince Massiva by a spontaneous surge of the crowd, he slid his specially sharpened dagger under the left side of the royal rib cage, turned it immediately upward with a brutal twist, let the haft go once he knew the blade was all the way in, and had slipped between a dozen bodies long before the first blood began to flow, or Prince Massiva knew enough to cry out. Indeed, Prince Massiva did not cry out; he simply fell where he was, and by the time his bodyguard had collected itself enough to shove people aside until they could surround their slain lord, Lucius Decumius was halfway across the lower Forum heading for the haven of the Argiletum, merely one droplet in a sea of white togas.
A full ten minutes passed before anyone thought to get the news to Spurius Albinus and his brother, Aulus, already installed upon the podium of the temple and unworried by Prince Massiva’s nonappearance. Lictors rushed to cordon off the area, the crowd was pushed elsewhere, and Spurius and Aulus Albinus stood looking down at a dead man and ruined plans.
“It will have to wait,” said Spurius at last. “We cannot offend Marcus Livius Drusus by disturbing his triumph.” He turned to the leader of the bodyguard, which in Prince Massiva’s case was composed of hired Roman gladiators, and spoke to the man in Greek. “Carry Prince Massiva to his house, and wait there until I can come,” he said.
The man nodded. A rude stretcher was made from the toga given up by Aulus Albinus, the body rolled onto it and borne away by six gladiators.
Aulus took the disaster less phlegmatically than his older brother; to him had fallen the bulk of Massiva’s generosity so far, Spurius feeling he could afford to wait for his share until his African campaign saw Massiva installed upon the throne of Numidia. Besides which, Aulus was as impatient as he was ambitious, and anxious to outstrip Spurius age for age.
“Jugurtha!” he said through his teeth. “Jugurtha did it!”
“You’ll never get proof,” said Spurius, sighing. They climbed the steps of the temple of Castor and Pollux and resumed their seats just as the magistrates and senators appeared from behind the imposing bulk of the Domus Publicus, the State-owned house in which lived the Vestal Virgins and the Pontifex Maximus. It was a short glimpse only, but within half a moment they hove clearly into view, and the great procession rolled downhill to where the Via Sacra ended alongside the sunken well of the Comitia. Spurius and Aulus Albinus sat looking as if they had nothing on their minds beyond enjoyment of the spectacle and respect for Marcus Livius Drusus.
*
Bomilcar and Lucius Decumius met with noisy inconspicuousness, standing side by side at the counter of a busy snack bar on the upper corner of the Great Market until each was served a pasty filled with a savory loaf of garlicky sausage, and then moving very naturally aside to stand biting delicately into their goodies, which were very hot.
“Nice day for it, friend,” said Lucius Decumius.
Wrapped in a hooded cloak which concealed his person, Bomilcar let out his breath. “I trust it remains a nice day,” he said.
“This is one day, friend, that I can guarantee is going to end up perfect,” said Lucius Decumius complacently.
Bomilcar fumbled beneath his cloak, found the purse holding the second half of Decumius’s gold. “You’re sure?’’
“Sure as a man whose shoe stinks knows he’s stepped in a turd,” said Decumius.
The bag of gold changed hands invisibly. Bomilcar turned to go, heart light.
“I thank you, Lucius Decumius,” he said.
“No, friend, the pleasure’s all mine!” And Lucius Decumius stayed right where he was, biting with relish into his pasty until it was gone. “Oysters instead of onions,” he said out loud, starting up the Fauces Suburae with a happy spring in his step and the bag of gold safely next to his skin.
Bomilcar left the city through the Fontinalis Gate, hurrying faster as the crowds diminished, down onto the Campus Martius. He got inside the front door of Jugurtha’s villa without encountering a person he knew, and flung off his cloak gladly. The King had been very kind this day and given every slave in the house time off to see Drusus triumph, and a present of a silver denarius each as well. So there were no alien eyes to witness Bomilcar’s return, only the fanatically loyal bodyguards and Numidian servants.
Jugurtha was in his usual place, sitting on the loggia one floor up, above the entrance from the street.
“It’s done,” said Bomilcar.
The King gripped his brother’s arm strongly. “Oh, good man!” he said, smiling.
“I’m glad it went so well,” said Bomilcar.
“He’s definitely dead?”
“My assassin assures me he is—sure as a man whose shoe stinks knows he stepped in a turd.” Bomilcar’s shoulders heaved with laughter. “A picturesque fellow, my Roman ruffian. But extraordinarily efficient, and quite nerveless.”
Jugurtha relaxed. “The moment we hear for certain that my dear cousin Massiva is dead, we’d better call a conference with all our agents. We have to press for the Senate’s recognition of my tenure of the throne, and for our return home.” He grimaced. “I mustn’t ever forget that I still have that pathetic professional invalid half brother of mine to contend with, sweet and beloved Gauda.”
*
But there was one who did not appear when the summons came for Jugurtha’s agents to assemble at his villa. The moment he learned of the assassination of Prince Massiva, Marcus Servilius Agelastus sought an audience with the consul Spurius Albinus. The consul pleaded through a secretary that he was too busy, but Agelastus stuck to his intention until in desperation the overworked secretary shunted him into the presence of the consul’s younger brother, Aulus, who was galvanized when he heard what Agelastus had to say. Spurius Albinus was called, listened impassively as Agelastus repeated his story, then thanked him, took his address and a deposition to be certain, and dismissed him courte
“We’ll take action through the praetor urbanus, as legally as we can under the circumstances,” said Spurius as soon as he was alone with his young brother. “It’s too important a matter to let Agelastus lay the charge—I’ll do that myself—but he’s vital to our case because he’s the only Roman citizen among the lot if you exclude the mysterious assassin. It will be up to the praetor urbanus to decide exactly how Bomilcar will be prosecuted. Undoubtedly he’ll consult the full Senate, seeking a directive to cover his arse. But if I see him personally and give it as my legal opinion that the fact of the crime’s being committed inside Rome on a day of triumph by a Roman citizen assassin outweighs Bomilcar’s noncitizen status—why, I think I can allay his fears. Especially if I reinforce the fact that Prince Massiva was the consul’s client, and under his protection. It’s vital that Bomilcar be tried and convicted in Rome by a Roman court. The sheer audacity of the crime will force Jugurtha’s faction in the Senate to keep quiet. You, Aulus, can ready yourself to do the actual prosecuting in whichever court is decided upon. I’ll make sure the praetor peregrinus is consulted, as he’s normally the man concerned with lawsuits involving noncitizens. He may want to defend Bomilcar, just to keep things legal. But one way or another, Aulus, we are going to finish Jugurtha’s chances to win Senate approval for his cause—and then see if we can’t find another claimant to the throne.”
“Like Prince Gauda?”
“Like Prince Gauda, poor material though he is. After all, he’s Jugurtha’s legitimate half brother. We’ll just make sure Gauda never comes to Rome to plead in person.” Spurius smiled at Aulus. “We are going to make our fortunes in Numidia this year, I swear it!”
But Jugurtha had abandoned any idea of fighting according to Rome’s rules. When the urban praetor and his lictors arrived at the villa on the Pincian Hill to arrest Bomilcar on a charge of conspiracy to murder, for a moment the King was tempted to refuse outright to hand Bomilcar over, and see what happened after that. In the end he temporized by stating that, as neither the victim nor the accused was a Roman citizen, he failed to see what business it was of Rome’s. The urban praetor responded by stating that the Senate had decided the accused must answer charges in a Roman court because there was evidence to indicate that the actual assassin procured was certainly a Roman citizen. One Marcus Servilius Agelastus, a Roman knight, had furnished much proof of this, and had sworn on oath that he himself had first been approached to do the murder.
“In which case,” said Jugurtha, still fighting, “the only magistrate who can arrest my baron is the foreign praetor. My baron is not a Roman citizen, and my place of abode— which is also his—is outside the jurisdiction of the urban praetor!”
“You have been misinformed, sire,” said the urban praetor smoothly. “The praetor peregrinus will be concerned, of course. But the imperium of the praetor urbanus extends as far as the fifth milestone from Rome, therefore your villa is within my jurisdiction, not the foreign praetor’s. Now please produce Baron Bomilcar.”
Baron Bomilcar was produced, and hied off at once to the cells of the Lautumiae, where he was to be held pending trial in a specially convened court. When Jugurtha sent his agents to demand that Bomilcar be released on bail—or at least that he be confined in the house of a citizen of good standing rather than in the tumbledown chaos of the Lautumiae—the request was refused. Bomilcar must remain resident inside Rome’s only jail.
The Lautumiae had started existence several hundred years earlier as a quarry in the side of the Arx of the Capitol, and now was a haphazard collection of unmortared stone blocks which huddled in the cliff side just beyond the lower Forum Romanum. It could accommodate perhaps fifty prisoners in disgracefully dilapidated cells owning no sort of security; those imprisoned could wander anywhere they liked within its walls, and were kept from wandering out of it only by lictors on guard duty, or, on the rare occasions when someone truly dangerous was imprisoned, by manacles. Since the place was normally empty, the sight of lictors on guard duty was a great novelty; thus Bomilcar’s incarceration rapidly became one of Rome’s most widely disseminated news items thanks tothe lictors, who were not at all averse to gratifying the curiosity of the passersby.
*
The lowliness of Lucius Decumius was purely social; it most definitely did not extend to his cerebral apparatus, which functioned extremely well. To gain the post of custodian of a crossroads college was no mean feat. So when a tendril of the gossip grapevine thrust its feeler deep into the heart of the Subura, Lucius Decumius put two of his fingers together with two more, and came up with an answer of four fingers. The name was Bomilcar, not Juba, and the nationality was Numidian, not Mauretanian. Yet he knew it was his man at once.
Applauding rather than condemning Bomilcar’s deceit, off went Lucius Decumius to the Lautumiae cells, where he gained entrance by the simple expedient of grinning widely at the two lictors on door duty before rudely elbowing his way between them.
“Ignorant shit!” said one, rubbing his side.
“Eat it!” said Decumius, skipping nimbly behind a crumbling pillar and waiting for the grumbles at the door to subside.
Lacking any military or civil law-enforcement officers, Rome habitually obliged its College of Lictors to provide members for all kinds of peculiar duties. There were perhaps three hundred lictors all told, poorly paid by the State and therefore very dependent upon the generosity of the men they served; they inhabited a building and small piece of open land behind the temple of the Lares Praestites on the Via Sacra, and found the location satisfactory only because it also lay behind the long and sprawling premises of Rome’s best inn, where they could always cadge a drink. Lictors escorted all the magistrates owning imperium and fought for the chance to serve on the staff of a governor going abroad, since they then shared in his share of the spoils and perquisites of office. Lictors represented the thirty divisions of Rome called curiae. And lictors might be called upon to assume guard duty at either the Lautumiae or the Tullianum next door, where those condemned to death waited scant hours for the strangler. Such guard duty was about the least desirable task a lictor could be given by the head man of his group of ten. No tips, no bribes, no nothing. Therefore neither lictor was interested in pursuing Lucius Decumius inside the building; their job description said they were there to guard the door, so that was all they were going to do, by Jupiter.
“Yoohoo, friend, where are you?” yelled Decumius in a voice loud enough to be heard by the bankers in the Basilica Porcia.
The hairs on Bomilcar’s arms and neck rose; he leaped to his feet. This is it, this is the end, he thought, and waited numbly for Decumius to appear escorted by a troop of magistrates and other officials.
Decumius duly appeared. But quite alone. When he saw Bomilcar standing stiffly by the outside wall of his cell (which contained an unbarred and unshuttered opening quite large enough for a man to crawl through—that Bomilcar hadn’t was evidence of his utter mystification at the way Romans thought and acted, for he could not believe the simple truth—that prison was a concept alien to the Romans), Decumius smiled at him jauntily and strolled into the doorless room.
“Who squealed on you, friend?” he asked, perching his skinny body on a fallen block of masonry.
Controlling his tendency to shake, Bomilcar licked his lips. “Well, if it wasn’t you before, you fool, it certainly is now!” he snapped.
Eyes widening, Decumius stared at him; a slow comprehension was dawning. “Here, here, friend, don’t you worry about things like that,” he said soothingly. “There’s no one to hear us, just a couple of lictors on the door, and that’s twenty paces off. I heard you got arrested, so I thought I’d better come and see what went wrong.”
“Agelastus,” said Bomilcar. “Marcus Servilius Agelastus!”
“Want me to do the same to him I did to Prince Massiva?”
“Look, will you just get out of here?” cried Bomilcar, despai
“It’s all right, friend, it’s all right! Stop worrying—no one knows about me, and no one cares a fig that I’m here. This ain’t no Parthian dungeon, friend, honest! They only put you in here to throw your boss into fits, that’s all. They won’t care a whole lot if you do a moonlight flit, it’ll just brand you guilty.” And he pointed to the gap in the outside wall.
“I can’t run away,” said Bomilcar.
“Suit yourself.” Decumius shrugged. “Now, what about this Agelastus bird? Want him out of the way? I’ll do it for the same price—payable on delivery this time; I trust you.”
Fascinated, Bomilcar came by logical progression to the conclusion that not only did Lucius Decumius believe what he said, but he was undoubtedly correct to do so. If it hadn’t been for Jugurtha, he would now have availed himself of that moonlit escape; but if he yielded to the temptation, only the gods knew what might happen to Jugurtha.
“You’ve got yourself another bag of gold,” he said.
“Where’s he live, this fellow who—judging by his name, anyway—never smiles?”
“On the Caelian Hill, in the Vicus Capiti Africae.”
“Oh, nice new district!” said Decumius appreciatively. “Agelastus must be doing all right for himself, eh? Still, makes him easy to find, living out there where the birds sing louder than the neighbors. Don’t worry, I’ll do it for you straightaway. Then when your boss gets you out of here, you can pay me. Just send the gold to me at the club. I’ll be there to take delivery.”
“How do you know my boss will get me out of here?”
“Course he will, friend! They’ve only chucked you in here to give him a fright. Couple more days and they’ll let him bail you out. But when they do, take my advice and go home as fast as you can. Don’t stay around in Rome, all right?”