The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough
His daughter shivered.
His wife shivered.
“It seems I must refresh your memory, daughter. Do you know who I am?”
Julilla didn’t answer, head down.
“Look at me!”
Her face came up at that; drowned eyes fixed themselves on Caesar, terrified and wild.
“No, I can see that you don’t know who I am,” said Caesar, still in conversational voice. “Therefore, daughter, it behooves me to tell you. I am the paterfamilias, the absolute head of this household. My very word is law. My actions are not actionable. Whatever I choose to do and say within the bounds of this household, I can do and I can say. No law of the Senate and People of Rome stands between me and my absolute authority over my household, my family. For Rome has structured her laws to ensure that the Roman family is above the law of all save the paterfamilias. If my wife commits adultery, Julilla, I can kill her, or have her killed. If my son is guilty of moral turpitude, or cowardice, or any other kind of social imbecility, I can kill him, or have him killed. If my daughter is unchaste, Julilla, I can kill her, or have her killed. If any member of my household—from my wife through my sons and my daughters to my mother, to my servants—transgresses the bounds of what I regard as decent conduct, I can kill him or her, or have him or her killed. Do you understand, Julilla?”
Her eyes had not swerved from his face. “Yes,” she said.
“It grieves me as much as it shames me to inform you that you have transgressed the bounds of what I regard as decent conduct, daughter. You have made your family and the servants of this household—above all you have made its paterfamilias—your victim. Your puppet. Your plaything. And for what? For self-gratification, for personal satisfaction, for the most abominable of motives—yourself alone.”
“But I love him, tata!” she cried.
Caesar reared up, outraged. “Love? What do you know of that peerless emotion, Julilla? How can you besmirch the word ‘love’ with whatever base imitation you have experienced? Is it love, to make your beloved’s life a misery? Is it love, to force your beloved to a commitment he doesn’t want, hasn’t asked for? Well, is any of it love, Julilla?”
“I suppose not,” she whispered, and then added, “but I thought it was.”
The eyes of her parents met above her head; in both lay a wry and bitter pain as they finally understood Julilla’s limitations, their own illusions.
“Believe me, Julilla, whatever it was you felt that made you behave so shabbily and dishonorably, it was not love,” said Caesar, and stood up. “There will be no more cow’s milk, no more eggs, no more honey. You will eat whatever the rest of your family eats. Or you will not eat. It is a matter of no moment to me. As your father and as paterfamilias, I have treated you from the time of your birth with honor, with respect, with kindness, with consideration, with tolerance. You have not thought well enough of me to reciprocate. I do not cast you off. And I am not going to kill you, or have you killed. But from this time on, whatever you make of yourself is entirely on your own head. You have injured me and mine, Julilla. Perhaps even more unpardonably, you have injured a man who owes you nothing, for he does not know you and is not related to you. Later on, when you are less appalling to look at, I shall require that you apologize to Lucius Cornelius Sulla. I do not require an apology from you for any of the rest of us, for you have lost our love and respect, and that renders apologies valueless.”
He walked out of the room.
Julilla’s face puckered; she turned instinctively toward her mother, and tried to hurl herself into her mother’s arms. But Marcia drew back as if her daughter wore a poisoned robe.
“Disgusting!” she hissed. “All that for the sake of a man who isn’t fit to lick the ground a Caesar walks on!”
“Oh, Mama!”
“Don’t ‘oh, Mama!’ me! You wanted to be grown up, Julilla; you wanted to be woman enough to marry. Now live with it.” And Marcia too walked out of the room.
Wrote Gaius Julius Caesar some days later to his son-in-law, Gaius Marius:
And so, the unhappy business is finally wearing itself down. I wish I could say that Julilla has learned a lesson, but I very much doubt it. In later years, Gaius Marius, you too will face all the torments and dilemmas of parenthood, and I wish I could offer you the comfort of saying that you will learn by my mistakes. But you will not. For just as each and every child born into this world is different, and must be handled differently, so too is every parent different. Where did we go wrong with Julilla? I do not honestly know. I do not even know if we went wrong at all. Perhaps the flaw is innate, intrinsic. I am bitterly hurt, and so too is poor Marcia, as best evidenced by her subsequent rejection of all Julilla’s overtures of friendship and regret. The child suffers terribly, but I have had to ask myself whether we owe it to her to maintain our distance for the present, and I have decided we must do so. Love we have always given her, an opportunity to discipline herself we have not. If she is to gain any good out of all this, she must suffer.
Justice forced me to seek out our neighbor Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and tender him a collective apology which will have to do until Julilla’s looks have improved and she can apologize to him in person. Though he didn’t want to hand them over, I insisted that he return all of Julilla’s letters—one of the few times being paterfamilias has had real value. I made Julilla burn them, but not until she had read every one of the silly things out to me and her mother. How awful, to have to be so hard upon one’s own flesh and blood! But I very much fear that only the most personally galling of lessons will sink into Julilla’s self-centered little heart.
There. Enough of Julilla and her schemes. Far more important things are happening. I may actually turn out to be the first to send this news to Africa Province, as I have a firm promise that this will go on a fast packet leaving Puteoli tomorrow. Marcus Junius Silanus has been shockingly defeated by the Germans. Over thirty thousand men are dead, the rest so demoralized and poorly led that they have scattered in all directions. Not that Silanus seems to care, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he seems to value his own survival ahead of his troops’. He brought the news to Rome himself, but in such a toned-down version that he stole a march on public indignation, and by the time that all the truth was known, he had stripped the disaster of much of its shock value. Of course what he’s aiming for is to wriggle out of treason charges, and I think he’ll succeed. If the Mamilian Commission were empowered to try him, a conviction might be possible. But a trial in the Centuriate Assembly, with all those antiquated rules and regulations, and so many jurors? It’s not worth the effort of initiating proceedings, and so most of us feel.
And, I hear you ask, what of the Germans? Are they even now pouring down toward the coast of the Middle Sea, are the inhabitants of Massilia packing up in panic? No. For would you believe it, having annihilated Silanus’s army, they promptly turned around again and went north. How can one deal with an enemy so enigmatic, so utterly unpredictable? I tell you, Gaius Marius, we shiver in our boots. For they will come. Later rather than sooner, it now seems, they will come. And we have no better commanders to oppose them than the likes of Marcus Junius Silanus. As usual these days, the Italian Allied legions took the brunt of the losses, though many Roman soldiers fell too. And the Senate is having to deal with a stream of complaints from the Marsi and the Samnites, and a host of other Italian nations.
But to finish on a lighter note, we are currently having a hilarious battle with our esteemed censor Marcus Aemilius Scaurus. The other censor, Marcus Livius Drusus, died very suddenly three weeks ago, which brought the lustrum of the censors to an abrupt end. Scaurus of course is obliged to stand down. Only he won’t! And therein lies the hilarity. As soon as the funeral of Drusus was over, the Senate convened and directed Scaurus to lay aside his censorial duties so that the lustrum could be officially closed in the customary ceremony. Scaurus refused.
“I was elected censor, I’m in the middle of letting contra
“Marcus Aemilius, Marcus Aemilius, it isn’t up to you!” said Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus. “The law says that when one censor dies in office, the lustrum is at an end, and his fellow censor must resign immediately.”
“I don’t care what the law says!” Scaurus replied. “I cannot resign immediately, and I will not resign immediately.”
They begged and they pleaded, they shouted and they argued, all to no avail. Scaurus was determined to create a precedent by flouting convention and remaining censor. So they begged and they pleaded, they shouted and they argued all over again. Until Scaurus lost patience and temper.
“I piss on the lot of you!” he cried, and went right on with his contracts and his plans.
So Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus called another meeting of the Senate, and forced it to pass a formal consultum calling for Scaurus’s immediate resignation. Off went a deputation to the Campus Martius, and there interviewed Scaurus as he sat on the podium of the temple of Jupiter Stator, which edifice he had chosen for his office because it’s right next door to the Porticus Metelli, where most of the building contractors have their headquarters.
Now as you know, I am not a Scaurus man. He’s as crafty as Ulysses and as big a liar as Paris. But oh, I do wish you could have seen him make mincemeat out of them! How such an ugly, skinny, undersized specimen as Scaurus can do it, I do not know—he hasn’t even got a hair left on his head! Marcia says it’s his beautiful green eyes and his even more beautiful speaking voice and his wonderful sense of humor. Well, I will admit the sense of humor, but the charms of his ocular and vocal apparatus escape me. Marcia says I’m a typical man, though what her point about that is, I do not know. Women tend to seek refuge in such remarks when pinned down to logic, I have found. But there must also be some obscure logic to his success, and who knows? Perhaps Marcia has the right of it.
So there he sat, the little poseur, surrounded by all the utter magnificence of Rome’s first marble temple, and those glorious statues of Alexander the Great’s generals all mounted on horseback that Metellus Macedonicus pillaged from Alexander’s old capital of Pella. Dominating the lot. How can that be possible, a hairless Roman runt outclassing Lysippus’s quite superbly lifelike horses? I swear every time I see Alexander’s generals, I expect them to step down from their plinths and ride away, each horse as different as Ptolemy is from Parmenion.
I digress. Back to business, then. When Scaurus saw the deputation he shoved contracts and contractors aside and sat spear-straight on his curule chair, toga perfectly draped, one foot extended in the classic pose.
“Well?” he asked, addressing his question to Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus, who had been appointed the spokesman.
“Marcus Aemilius, the Senate has formally passed a consultum commanding that you resign your censorship at once,” said this unhappy man.
“I won’t do it,” said Scaurus.
“You must!” bleated Dalmaticus.
“I mustn’t anything!” said Scaurus, and turned his shoulder on them, beckoning the contractors to draw close again. “Now what was I saying before I was so rudely interrupted?” he asked.
Dalmaticus tried again. “Marcus Aemilius, please!”
But all he got for his pontificial pains was an “I piss on you! Piss, piss, piss!”
The Senate having shot its bolt, the whole problem was referred to the Plebeian Assembly, thereby making the Plebs responsible for a matter it hadn’t created, considering that it is the Centuriate Assembly, a more exclusive body by far than the Plebeian Assembly, that elects the censors. However, the Plebs did hold a meeting to discuss Scaurus’s stand, and handed its College of Tribunes one last duty for their year in office. They were instructed to remove Marcus Aemilius Scaurus from office as censor, one way or another.
So yesterday, the ninth day of December, saw all ten tribunes of the plebs march off to the temple of Jupiter Stator, Gaius Mamilius Limetanus in their lead.
“I am directed by the People of Rome, Marcus Aemilius, to depose you from office as censor,” said Mamilius.
“As the People did not elect me, Gaius Mamilius, the People cannot depose me,” said Scaurus, his hairless scone shining in the sun like a polished old winter apple.
“Nonetheless, Marcus Aemilius, the People are sovereign, and the People say you must step down,” said Mamilius.
“I won’t step down!” said Scaurus.
“In that case, Marcus Aemilius, I am authorized by the People to arrest you and cast you into prison until you formally resign,” said Mamilius.
“Lay one hand on me, Gaius Mamilius, and you will revert to the soprano voice of your boyhood!” said Scaurus.
Whereupon Mamilius turned to the crowd which had naturally gathered to see the spectacle, and cried out to it, “People of Rome, I call you to witness the fact that I hereby interpose my veto against any further censorial activity by Marcus Aemilius Scaurus!” he declared.
And that of course was the end of the matter. Scaurus rolled up his contracts and handed everything over to his clerks, had his chair slave fold up his ivory seat, and stood bowing in all directions to the applauding throng, which loves nothing better than a good confrontation between its magistrates, and adores Scaurus wholeheartedly because he has the kind of courage all Romans admire in their magistrates. Then he strolled down the temple steps, gave Perdiccas’s roan horse a pat in passing, linked his arm through Mamilius’s, and left the field wearing all the laurels.
Caesar sighed, leaned back in his chair, and decided that he had better comment upon the news Marius—by no means such a wordy correspondent as his father-in-law—had sent from the Roman African province, where Metellus, it appeared, had succeeded in bogging the war against Jugurtha in a mire of inconsistent activity and poor generalship. Or at least that was Marius’s version, though it did not tally with the reports Metellus kept sending the Senate.
You will shortly hear—if you have not heard already—that the Senate has prorogued Quintus Caecilius’s command of the African province and the Jugurthine war. It will not in any way surprise you, I am sure. And I expect that, having leaped this biggest hurdle, Quintus Caecilius will step up his military activity, for once the Senate has prorogued a governor’s command, he can be sure to retain that command until he considers the danger to his province over. It is a shrewd tactic to be inert until the consulship year is over and proconsular imperium is bestowed.
But yes, I do agree that your general was shockingly dilatory in not even starting his campaign until summer was almost over, especially considering that he arrived in early spring. But his dispatches say his army needed thorough training, and the Senate believes them. And yes, it escapes me as to why he appointed you, an infantryman, to lead his cavalry arm, just as it seems a waste of Publius Rutilius’s talents to use him as praefectus fabrum when he would serve better in the field than running round dealing with supply columns and artillery repairs. However, it is the prerogative of the general to use his men as he likes, from his senior legates all the way down to his auxiliary rankers.
All Rome was delighted when the news of the capture of Vaga came, though I note your letter said the town surrendered. And—if you will forgive my playing Quintus Caecilius’s advocate—I fail to see why you are so indignant at the appointment of Quintus Caecilius’s friend Turpillius as the commander of the Vaga garrison. Is it important?
I am far more impressed with your version of the battle at the river Muthul than I am with the version contained-in Quintus Caecilius’s senatorial dispatch, which should console you somewhat for my hint of skepticism, and reassure you that I do indeed remain on your side. And I’m sure you’re right in telling Quintus Caecilius that the best way to win the war against Numidia is to capture Jugurtha himself, for, like you, I believe him to be the fountainhead of all Numidian resistance.
I’m sorry this first year has been so frustrating for yo
I shall close with one further Forum item. Due to the loss of Silanus’s army in Gaul-across-the-Alps, the Senate has nullified one of the last surviving laws of Gaius Gracchus, namely the one limiting the number of times a man can enlist. Nor does he have to be seventeen anymore, nor do ten years under the colors exclude him from the levies anymore, nor do six campaigns exclude him anymore. A sign of the times. Both Rome and Italy are rapidly becoming denuded of men for the legions.
Do look after yourself, and write as soon as my mild attempts to play advocate for Quintus Caecilius have faded enough to allow you to think of me with affection. I am still your father-in-law, and I still think very well of you.
And that, decided Gaius Julius Caesar, was a letter well worth the sending, full of news and good advice and comfort. Gaius Marius would have it before the old year expired.
*
In the end it was almost halfway through December before Sulla escorted Clitumna down to Circei, all solicitude and tender kindness. Though he had worried that his plans might go awry because time would improve Clitumna’s mood, the extraordinary change in his luck continued to bless him, for Clitumna remained deeply depressed, as Marcia would be bound to report to Caesar.