Roman Blood (38 page)

"Who recalls the days when Sulla was a lad, Homeless and shoeless with not a coin to be had?

And how did he pull himself up from this hole?

How did he rise to his fate, to his role?

Through a hole! Through a hole!

Through the gaping cavern of well-worn size

That yawned between Nicopolis's thighs!"

The audience howled with laughter. Sulla shook his head disdainfully and pretended to glower. On the couch next to him, Chrysogonus practically glowed with delight. At the same table Hortensius was whispering in the ear of the young dancer Sorex, while Rufus looked bored and disgusted.

Across the room the rewritten poet blanched fish-belly white.

With each succeeding verse the song grew increasingly ribald and the crowd laughed more and more freely. Soon Sulla himself was laughing out loud. Meanwhile the poet chewed his lip and squirmed, changing colors like a coal in the wind, blanching white at each impiety and blushing scarlet at each tortured rhyme. Having finally caught the joke, he seemed at first relieved—no one would blame him for the travesty, after all, and even Sulla was amused. He managed a timid smile, but then he withdrew into a sulk, no doubt offended at the wreckage that had been made of his patriotic homage. The other young men at his table, having failed to tease him to laughter, turned their backs on him and laughed all the 248

louder. Romans love the strong man who can laugh at himself, and despise the weak man who cannot.

The song continued.

It is not true that Lucius Cornelius Sulla was homeless as a boy. Neither, I imagine, was he ever without shoes, but in every account of his origins, his early poverty is stressed.

The patrician Cornelii were once a family of some influence and prestige, generations ago. One of them, a certain Rufinus, held the consulship, back in the days when the office actually denoted a man of integrity and character. His career ended in scandal—imagine those righteous days when it was illegal for a citizen to own more than ten pounds of silver plate! Rufinus was expelled from the Senate. The family declined and dwindled into obscurity.

Until Sulla. His own childhood was blighted by poverty. His father died young, leaving him nothing, and in his younger days Sulla lived in tenements among ex-slaves and widows. His enemies have charged that his rise to power and wealth, after such humble beginnings, was a sure sign of corruption and depravity. His allies and Sulla himself like to dwell on the mystique of what they call his good fortune, as if some divine will, rather than Sulla's own purpose and character, propelled him to so many triumphs and so much bloodshed.

His youth gave no sign of the great career to come. His education was haphazard. He moved among theater people—acrobats, comedians, cos-tumers, poets, dancers, actors, singers. Metrobius was among his first lovers, but far from the only one. It was among the vagabonds of the stage that his lifelong reputation for promiscuity began.

They say that young Sulla was quite charming. He was a big-boned, square-jawed lad with a stocky frame, his wide soft middle compensated by muscular shoulders. His golden hair made him stand out in a crowd.

His eyes, so I have heard contemporaries recount, were as extraordinary then as now—piercing and pale blue, dominating all in their gaze and confounding those who gazed back, appearing merely mischievous while he perpetrated the most atrocious crimes, looking terrible and severe when he was merely intent on pleasure.

Among his first conquests was the wealthy widow Nicopolis. Her favors were notoriously accessible to virtually any young man who 249

wanted them; it was said that she had resolved to give her body to all men but her heart to none. By all accounts, Sulla fell genuinely and deeply in love with her. At first she scoffed at his devotion, but ultimately his persistence and charm undid her resolve, and she found herself in love at the age of fifty with a youth less than half her age. When she died of a fever she left everything to Sulla. His good fortune had begun.

Another legacy came from his stepmother, his father's second wife, who in her widowhood had inherited a considerable sum from her own family. She died leaving Sulla her only heir, thus establishing him with a moderate fortune.

Having conquered the mysteries of flesh and gold, Sulla decided to enter politics through military service. Marius had just been elected to the first of his seven consulships; Sulla got himself appointed quaestor and became the great populist's protege. In Africa to fight Jugurtha, Sulla engaged in marital derring-do, espionage, and the diplomacy of the perfectly timed double cross. The tortuously complicated details are all in his
Memoirs,

the first volumes of which are already circulating around Rome in pur-loined copies. The vanquished Jugurtha was brought to the city naked and chained and died shortly after in his dungeon cell, half-crazy from torture and humiliation. Marius had overseen the campaign, but it was Sulla, at the risk of his own life, who had persuaded the King of Numidia to betray his doomed son-in-law. Marius was afforded a triumphal parade, but many whispered that it was Sulla who deserved the credit.

Praise for Sulla rankled the old populist, and though Marius continued to use Sulla, elevating his rank with each campaign, soon the old man's jealousy drove Sulla to seek other patrons. Taking command of the troops of the consul Catulus, Sulla subdued the wild tribes of the Alps.

When premature winter storms trapped the legions in the foothills without adequate food, Sulla did an expert j o b of rerouting and supplying fresh provisions—not only to his own troops, but also to those of Marius, who became livid with indignation. The long, withering rivalry between Sulla and Marius, which was ultimately to cause so much grief and chaos in Rome, began with such incidents of petty jealousy.

Sulla traveled east, where Fortune led him to further victories in Cappadocia. On diplomatic business he ventured as far as the Euphrates, and became the first Roman official ever to hold friendly discourse with that kingdom that owns the rest of the world, the Parthians. His charm (or else his blind arrogance) must have worked a wicked spell upon the 250

Parthian ambassador, who actually allowed himself to be seated on a lower dias than Sulla, as if he were a suppliant of a Roman overlord.

Afterward the King of Parthia put the ambassador to death—having lost face, the man subsequently lost his head, a joke Sulla never tired of repeating.

Every powerful man must have omens of greatness attached to his legend—stars fell from the firmament at the birth of Alexander, Hercules strangled a snake in his cradle, eagles battled overheard when Romulus and Remus were torn from their mother's womb. It was while entertaining the Parthian retinue that Sulla's career begins to take on the patina of legend. Truth or fiction, only Sulla now knows for certain, but the story goes that a Chaldean savant attached to the Parthian retinue performed a study of Sulla's face, plumbing his character by using principles of science unknown in the West. Probably he was searching for weaknesses he could report to his Parthian masters, but instead the wise man drew back in astonishment. Sulla, never guilty of false modesty, recounts the old Chaldean's reaction word for word in his
Memoirs:
"Can a man be so great and not be the greatest of all men on earth? It astounds me—not his greatness, but the fact that even now he abstains from taking his place as first in all things above his fellowmen!"

When Sulla returned to Rome, Marius was not happy to see him.

The bone of contention snapped when a statue arrived from the friendly King of Numidia, commemorating the end of the African war and Jugurtha's downfall. Beneath the outstretched wings of Victory the gilded figures depicted the King handing over the chained Jugurtha to the King's great friend, Sulla. Marius was nowhere depicted. Marius nearly went out of his mind in a jealous rage at the idea of Sulla stealing his glory, and threatened to destroy the statue with his own hands unless the Senate passed legislation to remove it from the Capitol. The rhetoric on either side escalated until the breach between the two men was irreparable. Violence would surely have followed, but at that moment all private feuds were abruptly postponed by the eruption of the Social War between Rome and her Italian allies.

The scale of the Social War was unprecedented on Italian soil, as was the suffering and disruption it caused. But finally compromises were reached, intransigent rebels were mercilessly punished, and Rome endured, but not all Roman politicians fared equally well. Marius, well over sixty, his military powers faded and his health erratic, accomplished 251

practically nothing in the war. Sulla, in the prime of his manhood and riding the crest of good fortune, was everywhere at once, making his reputation as hero, savior, destroyer, currying the favor of the legions and amassing political prestige.

When it was over, Sulla had his first consulship at the respectable age of fifty. Rome, like a patient in violent throes, having just survived one great spasm, was about to undergo another.

Marius's populist movement reached its peak. His right-hand man was the radical tribune and demagogue Sulpicius, the elected representative of the masses, whose every move mocked the power and prestige of the noble establishment. Under Sulpicius, Roman citizenships were sold at auction to ex-slaves and aliens in the Forum, an act of impiety that drove the old nobility to apoplexy. More insidiously, Sulpicius gathered a private army of three thousand swordsmen from the equestrian class, ambitious and ruthless young men ready for anything. From these he culled an elite bodyguard of six hundred who milled constantly about the Forum. Sulpicius called them his Anti-Senate.

Abroad, Mithridates was ravaging Rome's eastern possessions, including Greece. The Senate voted to send Sulla to reclaim them, a duty which his previous service had earned and which should have fallen to him by right as consul. The command would be extraordinarily lucrative; there is nothing like a successful Eastern campaign to raise immense revenues through tributes, taxes, and outright looting. It would also give its commanding general immense power; in the old days Roman armies were loyal to the Senate, but now they follow the man who leads them.

Sulpicius's Anti-Senate decided that the command should go to Marius.

Chaos erupted in the Forum. The Senate was pressured into transferring the command from Sulla to Marius, and Sulla barely escaped being murdered in the streets.

Sulla fled Rome to take his appeal directly to the army. When the common soldiers heard what had happened, they pledged themselves to Sulla and stoned their staff officers (appointed by Marius) to death.

Marius's followers reacted in Rome by attacking members of the Sullan party and looting their property. In a panic, people changed from one side to the other, fleeing from Rome to Sulla's camp or from the camp to Rome. The Senate capitulated to whatever Marius and Sulpicius demanded. Sulla marched on the capital.

The unthinkable came to pass. Rome was invaded by Romans.

252

On the night before, Sulla dreamed. Behind him stood Bellona, whose cult had been brought to Rome from the East, whose ancient temples Sulla himself had visited in Cappadocia. She placed thunderbolts in his hands. She named his enemies one by one, and as she named them they appeared through a mist like tiny figures seen from a hilltop. The goddess told Sulla to strike them. He cast the thunderbolts. His enemies were blasted asunder. He awoke, his
Memoirs
tell us, feeling invigorated and supremely confident.

What kind of man has such a dream? Is he mad? Or a genius? Or simply a child of Rome blessed by Fortune, sent a reassuring message of success by the power that guides his destiny?

Before dawn, as the army assembled, a lamb was sacrificed. By the smoky torchlight the soothsayer Postumius read the entrails. He rushed to Sulla and knelt, offering up his hands as if for shackles. He begged Sulla to keep him bound as a prisoner so that he might be summarily executed if his visions were false, so certain was he of Sulla's triumph.

So the legend tells us. There is something about a man like Sulla that makes savants and soothsayers clamor to grovel at his feet.

Sulla attacked from the east with a force of 35,000. There are sections of the Esquiline Hill that still bear the blackened scars of his advance.

The walls were breached. The unarmed populace resisted with a bom-bardment of tiles and rubble cast from rooftops. Sulla himself was the first to take a torch in hand and set fire to a building where the people had gathered to resist. Archers shot fire-arrows onto rooftops. Whole families were burned alive; others were left homeless and ruined. The flames made no distinction between the guilty and the innocent, friend and foe. All were consumed.

Marius was driven back to the Temple of Tellus. Here his radical populism reached its apex: In return for their support, he offered freedom to the slaves of Rome. It says something for the prescience of the slaves or for the decline of Marius's reputation that only three slaves came forward. Marius and his supporters fled the city and scattered. The tribune Sulpicius, master of the Anti-Senate, was betrayed by one of his own slaves and put to death. Sulla first rewarded the treacherous slave by granting him freedom, then punished him as a free man by having him hurled to his death from the Tarpeian Rock.

253

My thoughts, having wandered their own way on the wings of Metrobius's song, returned abruptly to the present. Echoing up from below us, Metrobius's voice affected a childish singsong with an atrociously crude Greek accent:

"Sulla's face is a mulberry; Sulla's wife is a whore.

Sulla's face is red and purple; Sulla's wife is a bore.

Mottled and splotched with bumps that must itch—

Is it Sulla's face—or the breasts of his bitch?"

The crowd gasped. A few in the room tittered nervously. Chrysogonus suppressed his golden smile. Sulla's face was a blank. Rufus looked disgusted. Hortensius had just put something into his mouth and was looking about the room, uncertain whether he should swallow. The ruined young poet looked nauseated—literally nauseated, pale and sweaty, as if something on the table had disagreed with him and he might vomit at any moment.