A Pillar of Iron: A Novel of Ancient Rome

  Sulla touched his horse and turned it. His house and all his property had been confiscated when he had fled Rome for the East. But now his house, bedecked with flowers, awaited his return.

  The storm had driven the welcomers from the streets into any shelter they could find. Therefore, with the exception of the smashing thunder, there was little sound on the streets as Sulla and his men rode onward. Only their steps echoed.

  The remains of the temple of Jupiter sank into embers, expired into blackness, the broken columns strewn far as if hurled by giant hands.

  There was no Sybil abroad in the gathering night warning Romans that the Republic, long in its dying, had finally died and had vanished into the sombre shadows of history. There were only the ghosts of the dead to mourn, “Sic transit Roma!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Marcus Tullius Cicero had known terror as a wild and flaring thing, as scarlet as a smear of fresh blood, as dark lightning, as a tempest that broke and scattered.

  He had never known it as he knew it now, as a vast and silent grayness, as a climate like iron. It held the city in the hollow of its echoing palms; it filled the air with silent and drifting grit. Its shadows fell from all the tall buildings and appeared to obliterate their outlines. It rode in muttering quiet from gate to gate. Its hushed voice was on every threshold; its presence was in the temples, and in the colonnades. Wherever its crepuscular umbra swept men’s voices dropped. It obscured the faces of the crowds in shifting swarthiness, made all colors murky; even the noon was dull. Alleys were heavy with gloom; the vast fanlike stairs rising on every hill appeared laden with ghosts; thoroughfares even by moonlight and torchlight seemed shifting with forms that had no substance.

  The Roman giantess had never known such terror before, no, not even under Marius, the old murderer, who had slain out of sheer and childish malice, and not with a plan. Sulla killed implacably and methodically. He had posted his five thousand proscribed names in the very Senate, but there were thousands of names more which were not known except to the bereaved. He had announced himself as dictator supreme. He had said, “I will restore the Republic.” In the name of the Republic, then, he murdered without emotion, without remorse. He brought to Rome her first experience with true dictatorship, which was lightless and terrible—almost soundless. Even the mobs were quiet, the emotional and animated mobs whose voices heretofore had never been silent. Their volatile faces were smoothed into masks by the horror that rode through the streets; they blinked emptily at each other, and their mouths opened. They knew they were too unimportant for murder to mark them as her own, that she did not even know their names. But they felt the presence of death everywhere, and saw funerals on every street. They said to each other in low, stuttering voices, “What is this?”

  “I feel despair in the city,” said Tullius, who never left his home and wandered only in the narrow autumn gardens of his house, listening to the livid patter of the two small fountains, watching the leaves falling one by one onto the silent earth. “You must tell me, Marcus, what is abroad.”

  But he was an invalid and frail, with strength only to move through the small halls of his house and in the garden, and he must not know. So his son, Marcus, said, “Matters have not settled themselves as yet, under Sulla. In the meantime, I pursue law in the midst of chaos.”

  “It cannot be as bad, under Sulla, as it was under Cinna, Marius, and Carbo,” said Tullius, fretfully. “What tyrants they were! How they profaned the name and freedom of Rome! Sulla has said he will restore the Republic. Is that not what we have always dreamed, you, my son, I, and my father, and his fathers before him?” When Marcus did not answer, Tullius’ voice rose. “Is not Sulla restoring the Republic?”

  “That is what he says,” replied Marcus.

  He and Helvia did not tell Tullius that one of Helvia’s cousins, a gentle, slightly stupid businessman, had been murdered by order of Sulla. He had not been a man of politics; he had not known one tyrant from another. He had been a man of smiles and great amiability. He had hailed Marius, Cinna, and Carbo out of sheer good nature, and because they were “the government.”

  He had been an excellent businessman, a merchant of textiles. He had numerous shops throughout the city; he imported silks and linens and the finest of wools. His designers and dyers were the best craftsmen. Therefore, even during the long wars he had become prosperous. “Let us go to the shops of Lynius,” the middle-class of Rome would say, and many of the rich. “For there we shall not be cheated; the quality of his goods is beyond compare.”

  Lynius, like thousands of his kind, did not know that the middle-class was deeply hated by Sulla, as it is always hated by tyrants. He was never to know that an envious competitor whispered that Lynius had been devoted to Cinna. So Lynius was murdered.

  Tullius became conscious that his wife’s cousin’s calm and genial presence was seen no longer in his house.

  “Where is Lynius?” he asked of Helvia one night. “Has he deserted us?”

  Helvia’s dauntless face these days had lost its bright color, and her hair was graying rapidly. She could not answer her husband and so Marcus said smoothly, “Now that the wars are over, Lynius has gone abroad for new and more enticing silks and linens.”

  On another occasion Tullius wailed, “Why do we not hear from Quintus? Surely now that all is quiet letters could reach us. I fear he is dead.”

  Marcus answered over his own fear, “Letters are often lost. I have heard a rumor in the city that his legion is on the way home.” This was not true, but Tullius, the scholar, the immured man, the God-enamored philosopher, must never be forced to confront the frightful reality of these days. His father had protected him in other years; his wife had protected him; his son, Marcus, must now protect him from hearing the voice of terror that muttered in the streets of Rome.

  Marcus himself lived with fear and grief and anxiety. He had so many silent terrors of his own that often he could not endure his father’s petulant voice, his demands for an enlightenment which might kill him, his insistence that he be assured that all was well not only with his family but with his world. One night Helvia came into the darkness of Marcus’ cubiculum and sat on the edge of his bed and took his cold hand. She tried to speak calmly and with sympathy. She, the strong and indomitable, could only burst into tears. He held her in his arms and she wept against his cheek, “Where is my Quintus? Why should Lynius have been murdered? And many of our friends?”

  Marcus began to ask his own wretched questions of his mother. He found he could speak to her of the awful pain of his own heart, and his dread of tomorrow. “I am only a lawyer; I am not a politician. Yet, there is Catilina among Sulla’s officers, and Catilina has forgotten me no more than I have forgotten him. I cannot forget Livia, my mother. Does Livia exist, still? Or, has she died of her wounds? Shall I be alive at tomorrow’s sunset? If I die, who shall care for you, and my father?”

  “Pallas Athene will protect you, Marcus,” said Helvia, wiping away her tears and her son’s tears also. “The gods do not permit good men to die wantonly.” She paused, then added, “What nonsense is this I speak! Still, I believe that Pallas Athene is guarding your days.”

  “I hope that Sulla is aware of that,” said Marcus. “How many names have fallen in Rome, the names of virtuous Senators as well as evil ones! How many men like my cousin, Lynius, innocent and bewildered, have died for nothing! What was their crime? That they did not hasten to make friends with tyrants, or fawn upon them. They wished only to live in peace, under any government which would permit them to earn an honest living. But governments will not permit men to live in peace!”

  He had many clients, even in these days, but he had no friends. Men were too afraid to speak to each other in confidence. Sulla had proclaimed freedom, so men trod warily and spoke in low voices behind their shut doors and wondered if they could trust their sons. Sulla had restored peace, he declared, so fathers looked apprehensively at the faces of their young in their cradles. “I
will refill our bankrupt treasury,” said Sulla, so men whispered with dismay at the rumors of even higher taxes, and withdrew their savings from the banks and hid them in their gardens, or stole from the city at night with their gold. “Justice, at last!” cried Sulla, and the citizens were afraid of each new dawn and held their wives desperately to their hearts, and knew that justice was dead.

  “Rome is no longer a city-state,” said Sulla. “We are a nation, and we must march on to our manifest destiny!” So thousands of Romans, who had money with which to bribe, fled Rome for quiet spots in Greece or even in Egypt, or lost themselves on little farms in Sicily, praying that Rome’s manifest destiny would thunder abroad far from their doors.

  One dark winter day Helvia said to her son, “We are no longer poor as once we were. One of my uncles has been wise enough, all these years, to walk prudently, inspire no envy, and hide his wealth. He has offered me a car and two fine horses. Let us go to Arpinum and forget our fear and our grief for a little.”

  “Our father will suspect that something is greatly wrong if we flee when winter is on the land,” said Marcus.

  One day he went into the Temple of Justice. He moved silently in the winter dusk to the smooth and empty white altar of the Unknown God. Marcus touched it with his hand; the marble felt sentient under his fingers. He prayed, “Why do You delay Your birth? The world is plunging swifter and swifter toward bloody destruction. Death waits in every shadow. Evil rides triumphantly through the streets of Rome. There is hope for man no longer. Why have You denied us Your salvation?”

  The altar glimmered in the half-light; the crimson shadows of the votive lights on other altars licked the quiet marble of this one which awaited the visible sign of its God. It awaited its Sacrifice, its flowers, its vessels, the voice of its priests. Marcus pressed his cheek against the altar, and his tears wet the white emptiness of it. “Help us,” he said aloud.

  Marcus’ old murdered mentor, the pontifex maximus, Publius Mucius Scaevola, had once told him, “We shall not be lost as a nation until the colleges of the Pontifices shall be seized by a tyrant and made to serve his will.”

  Sulla declared himself not only the dictator of Rome’s civil life and government but head of the Pontifices, shrewdly understanding that he who controls the gods controls all humanity. It was not his will which was now being imposed on Rome, he said. He spoke only as directed from Olympus. The patrician Pontiffs did not revolt, or denounce Sulla. They, like their fellow Romans, had long since lost their manliness. “Let us consult together,” they said in privacy. “Shall we lead Rome into bloody insurrection and catastrophe? It is in our power, but this we must not do. Let Sulla declare himself privy to the desires of Jupiter. Men of wisdom will merely smile. For the sake of our people we must remain silent.” They were, like most Romans, practical men, but they were not practical, or wise, enough to understand that when priests abdicate to civil authority and to tyrants they have abandoned God and man.

  Now the master of the abject Senate—the once powerful Senate—Sulla appointed his own favorites to that august body, increasing it to six hundred members. Almost all were patricians and men of property, for Sulla mistrusted the masses. The public assembly hastened to confirm those he appointed. Some of the new Senators were prosperous businessmen who had never favored Sulla. They did not know that they had received this honor solely because Sulla wished to gain the favor of the commercial class—so that they would desert their sound interests and pragmatic principles and be his absolute creatures. Unlike Cinna, he did not underestimate the power of businessmen. Contrary to ancient Roman law, which laid all power in the hands of the public assembly, the Senate now was given power over that assembly. All measures, once offered to the public assembly for approval or disapproval, had to receive the approval of the Senate first—a direct reversal of the law. The public assembly regarded this move with justified dread and despair, for now the government no longer represented the people. “I wish responsible government,” said Sulla, who destroyed the Constitution with a stroke of his pen. He then attacked the office of Tribune. No tribune, he decreed, could ever hold any other office henceforth and not serve again until ten years had elapsed since the first year of office. The “representatives of the people” then became impotent, and no honorable man, eager to serve his country honestly and under just law, felt any desire to circumscribe his life so stringently.

  For the first time in its hundreds of years of life the Roman Republic became a slave nation, answerable only to its master, Sulla, and his creatures. What he had not accomplished through murder he accomplished through flattery and the giving of honors and powers to those who once were his instinctual enemies.

  “I am a lawyer,” said Marcus to himself. “Yet, we now have no law but Sulla. However, I must behave, as a responsible man, as if law still exists, and I must pray that it will again exist, if not in Rome, in another nation perhaps yet unborn.”

  That year the Saturnalia was very subdued. Sulla wished the rejoicing to be jubilant, as a tribute to himself, for, had he not restored the Republic? But the people were uneasy, confused, and afraid, though not understanding in the huge mass of them what it was that made them so. Their instincts sniffed out the odor of tyranny long before punitive laws against their public assembly and their tribunes became effective and reduced the power of the populace. Sulla, in honor of the Saturnalia, made a large gesture of magnanimity and generous solicitude for the general welfare. He ordered tremendous amounts of stored food to be given to the people without cost, and arranged for huge festivities, and magnificent games in the circuses.

  The people accepted it all. But they were not gay, and they were filled with apprehension. They remembered the first days of terror, the funerals massed on the streets, the gray iron of the climate. It was a long time before they could smile willingly and regain their usual buoyancy.

  The month of Janus was extraordinarily cold.

  Marcus heaped coals upon the brazier in Scaevola’s office, which he now occupied. But still it could not heat the room adequately. The blue woolen curtains were drawn tightly over the windows even at noonday, and the frost penetrated and the cold winds. The floor was like a sheet of ice, and the chill seeped through Marcus’ fur-lined shoes. When he paused in his industrious writing of briefs he could hear the great uproar of the savage winter gale and the hiss of snow. He could not recall that he had ever known such a winter before in Rome. It seemed part of the pervading misery and fear in the city.

  Now he had students of his own, and he was patient with them as Scaevola had never been patient. His sensitive face might be pale with dread and cold, but it was always kind. His changing eyes dwelled on the students gently. When he spoke he spoke as serenely as possible to these disturbed boys. “In the midst of the wilderness law must prevail or our humanity shall be lost,” he would tell them. “But Sulla changes the law,” they would reply. To this he would say, “There are the natural laws of God which can never be changed. Let us study them, for we are Romans still, and we have always invoked God.” But when he was alone he would bend his head and run his long fingers through his thick brown hair and sigh.

  One day while he was preparing a civil case one of his students came to him in great terror and cried, “Master, there is a centurion who wishes to see you, and he is accompanied by his soldiers!”

  Everything became very still in Marcus. Yet he could reflect, “Woe to us in these days, that the appearance of our own soldiers can inspire such fright in us!” He said calmly; “Request the centurion to enter, and send us wine.”

  The centurion, a young armored man with swinging heavy cloak and bright helmet, entered with a clangor of iron-shod shoes, and raised his right arm stiffly in the military salute. Marcus rose. “Greetings,” he said. He leaned his palms on his table and smiled inquiringly at the soldier.

  “Greetings, Marcus Tullius Cicero,” said the centurion. “I am Lepidus Cotta, and I am commanded to escort you to dine with my general, Sul
la. At noon, which is now.”

  Marcus regarded him with astonishment. The centurion stared at him arrogantly. It was this, at the last, which made Marcus’ thin face flush with indignation, and which made him remember that the old law placed civilian authority above that of the military.

  “It is impossible for me to leave,” he said. “I am to present a very important case to a magistrate in the Basilica of Justice within the hour.”

  The centurion’s stare loosened; his jaw dropped. Then he said, “Master, I have only my orders. Shall I return to Sulla and give him that reply?”

  Be prudent; forever be prudent, thought Marcus. But his indignation was rising. A man had to stand for his rights or he was not a man.

  “Let me think,” said Marcus, and sat down. Syrius, the black and faithful slave, silently poured wine into two silver goblets. Marcus motioned to Cotta to drink, then took up a goblet, himself.

  “I have had two postponements of my case, Cotta,” he said. “The magistrate will not look kindly on my absence. I think it best that I go at once to the Basilica of Justice and present my case as rapidly as possible. Then I will be delighted to accept the honor of Sulla’s invitation.”

  Cotta nodded solemnly. “This is very good wine,” he said in a boyish voice. He sat down opposite Marcus and poured his goblet full again. “But we have a litter awaiting you.”

  Marcus’ lips pursed wryly. So, I am not to die, he thought. At least, not immediately. What did Sulla want of him, he a modest lawyer who was of an obscure family and who lived quietly, doing only his duty? Only the magistrates knew of him, and his clients. Then he thought of Catilina.

  “Why am I given this honor?” he asked.

  The centurion shrugged. “Master, I have only my orders. But I do know this: the great pontifex maximus, Scaevola, was the general’s devoted friend, and it is possible that Sulla wishes to honor Scaevola’s beloved pupil.”