At which point Marius remembered his manners and shifted the conversation from Latin to Greek, drawing Copillus warmly into the group, and promising that his chains would soon be struck off.
3
“Do you know, Quintus Caecilius,” said Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus to Metellus Numidicus, “I am thoroughly enjoying my stint as the quaestor of Ostia? Here I am, fifty-five years old, bald as an egg, lines on my face so deep my barber can’t give me a really clean shave anymore—and I’m feeling like a boy again! Oh, and the ease with which one solves the problems! At thirty, they loomed like insurmountable alps—I remember it well. At fifty-five, they’re piddling little cobblestones.”
Scaurus had come back to Rome for a special meetingof the Senate convened by the praetor urbanus Gaius Memmius to discuss a matter of some concern regarding Sardinia; the junior consul, Gaius Flavius Fimbria, was indisposed—-a common occurrence these days, it seemed to many.
“Did you hear the rumor?” asked Metellus Numidicus as the two of them strolled up the steps of the Curia Hostilia and passed inside; the herald had not yet summoned the House to convene, but most senators who arrived early didn’t bother waiting outside—they went straight in and continued their talk until the meeting started with the convening magistrate offering a sacrifice and prayers.
“What rumor?” asked Scaurus a little inattentively; his mind these days tended to be absorbed with the grain supply.
“Lucius Cassius and Lucius Marcius have clubbed together and intend to put it to the Plebeian Assembly that Gaius Marius be allowed to stand for consul again—in absentia, no less!”
Scaurus stopped a few feet short of where his personal attendant had set up his stool in its customary front-rank position next to the stool of Metellus Numidicus, and with Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus on his other side. His eyes rested on Numidicus’s face, wide with shock.
“They wouldn’t dare!” he said.
“Oh yes they would! Can you imagine it? A third term as consul is unprecedented—it’s to make the man a long-term dictator! Why else on those rare occasions when Rome needed a dictator was the term of a dictator limited to six months, if not to make sure that the man holding the office got no inflated idea of his own supremacy? And now, here we are with this—this—peasant making up his own rules as he goes along!” Metellus Numidicus was spitting in rage.
Scaurus sank down onto his stool like an old man. “It’s our own fault,” he said slowly. “We haven’t had the courage of our predecessors and rid ourselves of this noxious mushroom! Why is it that Tiberius Gracchus and Marcus Fulvius and Gaius Gracchus were eliminated, where Gaius Marius survives? He ought to have been cut down years ago!”
Metellus Numidicus shrugged. “He’s a peasant. The Gracchi and Fulvius Flaccus were noblemen. Noxious mushroom is the right way to describe him—he pops up somewhere overnight, but by the time you arrive to weed him out, he’s gone somewhere else.”
“It has to stop!” cried Scaurus. “No one can be elected to the consulship in absentia, let alone twice running! That man has tampered in more ways with Rome’s traditions of government than any man in the entire history of the Republic. I am beginning to believe that he wants to be King of Rome, not the First Man in Rome.”
“I agree,” said Metellus Numidicus, sitting down. “But how can we rid ourselves of him, I ask you? He’s never here for long enough to assassinate!”
“Lucius Cassius and Lucius Marcius,” said Scaurus in tones of wonder. “I don’t understand! They’re noblemen from the finest, oldest plebeian families! Can’t someone appeal to their sense of fitness, of—of—decency?”
“Well, we all know about Lucius Marcius,” said Metellus Numidicus. “Marius bought up all his debts; he’s solvent for the first time in his rather revolting life. But Lucius Cassius is different. He’s become morbidly sensitive about the People’s opinion of incompetent generals like his late father, and morbidly aware of Marius’s reputation among the People. I think he thinks that if he’s seen helping Marius rid us of the Germans, he’ll retrieve his family’s reputation.”
“Humph!” was all Scaurus said to this piece of theorizing.
Further discussion was impossible; the House convened, and Gaius Memmius—looking very haggard these days, and in consequence handsomer than ever—rose to speak.
“Conscript Fathers,” he said, a short document in his hand, “I have received a letter from Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo in Sardinia. It was addressed to me rather than to our esteemed consul Gaius Flavius because, as urban praetor, it is my duty to supervise the law courts of Rome.”
He paused to glare fiercely at the back ranks of senators, and contrived to appear almost ugly; the back ranks of senators got the message, and put on their most attentive expressions.
“To remind those of you at the back who hardly ever bother to honor this House with your presence, Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo is quaestor to the governor of Sardinia, who—to remind you!—is Titus Annius Albucius this year. Now do we all understand these complicated relationships, Conscript Fathers?” he asked, voice dripping sarcasm.
There was a general mumble, which Memmius took as assent.
“Good!” he said. “Then I shall read out Gnaeus Pompeius’s letter to me. Are we all listening?”
Another mumble.
“Good!” Memmius unfurled the paper in his hand and held it out before him, then began to read with a clear, crisp diction no one afterward could have faulted.
“I write, Gaius Memmius, to request that I be allowed to prosecute Titus Annius Albucius, governor propraetore of our province of Sardinia, immediately upon our return to Rome at the end of the year. As the House is aware, one month ago Titus Annius reported that he had succeeded in stamping out brigandage in his province, and requested an ovation for his work. His request for an ovation was refused, and rightly so. Though some nests of these pernicious fellows were eradicated, the province is by no means free of brigands. But the reason I wish to prosecute the governor lies in his un-Roman conduct after he learned that his request for an ovation had been denied. Not only did he refer to the members of the Senate as a pack of unappreciative irrumatores, but he proceeded—at great expense—to celebrate a mock triumph through the streets of Carales! I regard his actions as threats to the Senate and People of Rome, and his triumph as treasonous. In fact, so strongly do I feel that I am adamant no one other than myself shall conduct the prosecution. Please answer me in good time.”
Memmius laid the letter down amid a profound silence. “I would appreciate an opinion from the learned Leader of the House, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus,” he said, and sat down.
His lined face grim, Scaurus walked to the middle of the floor. “How strange,” he began, “that I was speaking of matters not unlike this just before the House convened. Of matters indicating the erosion of our time-honored systems of government and personal conduct in government. In recent years, this august body composed of Rome’s greatest men has suffered the loss not only of its power, but of its dignity as Rome’s senior arm in government. We—Rome’s greatest men!—are no longer permitted to direct the path Rome treads. We—Rome’s greatest men!—have become used to the People—fickle, untrained, greedy, thoughtless, part-time and good-time amateur politicians at best—have become used to the People grinding our faces into the mud! We—Rome’s greatest men!—are held of no account! Our wisdom, our experience, the distinction of our families over the many generations since the founding of the Republic, all have ceased to matter. Only the People matter. And I say to you, Conscript Fathers, that the People are not qualified to govern Rome!”
He turned toward the open doors, and threw his voice in the direction of the well of the Comitia. “What segment of the People runs the Plebeian Assembly?” he bellowed. “The men of the Second and Third and even Fourth Classes—minor knights ambitious to run Rome like their businesses, shopkeepers and smallholding farmers, even artisans grown large enough to run ‘multiple sculpturals,’
as I saw one yard describe itself! And men who call themselves advocates, but who must hawk for clients among the bucolic and the imbecilic, and men who call themselves agents, but can never quite describe what they are agents for! Their private activities bore them, so they frequent the Comitia flattering themselves that they in their precious tribes can run Rome better than we in our Curiate exclusivity! Political cant dribbles off their tongues as noisome and lumpy as vomit, and they prate of entertaining this or that tribune of the plebs, and applaud when senatorial prerogatives are handed over to the knights! They are middlemen, these fellows! Neither great enough to belong to the First Class of the Centuries, nor lowly enough to mind their own business like the Fifth Class and the Head Count! I say to you again, Conscript Fathers, that the People are not qualified to govern Rome! Too much power has been accorded to them, and in their overweening arrogance—aided and abetted, I might add, by sundry members of this House when tribunes of the plebs!—they now presume to ignore our advice, our directives, and our persons!”
This, everyone recognized, was going to be one of Scaurus’s more memorable speeches; his own secretary and several other scribes were busy scribbling his words down verbatim, and he was speaking slowly enough to make sure his words were properly recorded.
“It is high time,” he went on sonorously, “that we of the Senate reversed this process. It is high time that we showed the People that they are the juniors in our joint governing venture!” He drew a breath, and spoke conversationally. “Of course the origins of this erosion of senatorial power are easy to pinpoint. This august body has admitted too many parvenus, too many noxious mushrooms, too many New Men into its senior magistracies. What does the Senate of Rome honestly mean to a man who had to wipe the pig-shit off his face before he came to Rome to try his political luck? What does the Senate of Rome mean to a man who is at best a half Latin from the Samnite borderlands—who rode into his first consulship on the skirts of a patrician woman he bought! And what does the Senate of Rome mean to a cross-eyed hybrid from the Celt-infested hills of northern Picenum?”
Naturally Scaurus was going to attack Marius, that was to be expected; but his approach was tangential enough to be refreshing, and the House felt itself properly rebuked. So the House listened on in a spirit of interest as well as duty.
“Our sons, Conscript Fathers,” said Scaurus sadly, “are timid creatures, growing up in a political atmosphere which suffocates the Senate of Rome even as it breathes life into the People of Rome. How can we expect our sons to lead Rome in their turn, when the People cow them? I say to you—if you have not already begun, today you must begin to educate your sons to be strong for the Senate, and merciless to the People! Make them understand the natural superiority of the Senate! And make them prepared to fight to maintain that natural superiority!”
He had moved away from the doors, and now addressed his speech to the tribunes’ bench, which was full. “Can anyone tell me why a member of this august House would deliberately set out to undermine it? Can anyone? Because it happens all the time! There they sit, calling themselves senators—members of this august House!—yet also calling themselves tribunes of the plebs! Serving two masters these days! I say, let them remember they are senators first, and tribunes of the plebs only after that. Their real duty toward the plebs is to educate the plebs in a subordinate role. But do they do that? No! Of course they don’t! Some of these tribunes remain loyal to their rightful order, I acknowledge, and I commend them highly. Some, as is always the way in the annals of men, accomplish nothing for Senate or for People, too afraid that if they sit to either end of the tribunes’ bench, the rest will get up, and they will be tipped on the ground and turn themselves into laughingstocks. But some, Conscript Fathers, deliberately set out to undermine this august body, the Senate of Rome. Why? What could possibly lead them to destroy their own order?”
The ten on the bench sat in various attitudes which clearly reflected their political attitudes: the loyal senatorial tribunes were glowing, upright, smug; the men on the middle of the bench wriggled a little, and kept their eyes on the floor; and the active tribunes sat with eyes and faces hard, defiant, impenitent.
“I can tell you why, fellow senators,” said Scaurus, voice oozing contempt. “Some allow themselves to be bought like pinchbeck gewgaws on a cheap market stall—those men we all understand! But others have more subtle reasons, and of these men the first was Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. I speak of the kind of tribune of the plebs who sees in the plebs a tool to further his own ambitions, the kind of man who craves the status of the First Man in Rome without earning it among his peers, as Scipio Aemilianus did, and Scipio Africanus, and Aemilius Paullus, and—if I may beg your collective pardon for my presumption—Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus! We have borrowed a word from the Greeks to describe the Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus style of tribune of the plebs: we call them demagogues. However, we do not use it in precisely the way that the Greeks do. Our demagogues don’t bring the whole city into the Forum screaming for blood, and tear down senators bodily from the steps of the Curia, and work their will through mass violence. Our demagogues content themselves with inflaming the habitual frequenters of the Comitia, and work their will through legislation. Oh, there is violence from time to time, but more often than not, it is we of the Senate who have had to resort to violence to re-establish the status quo. For our demagogues are legislators and legal draftsmen, more subtle, more vindictive, more dangerous by far than simple inciters of riots! They corrupt the People to further their own ambitions. And that, Conscript Fathers, is beneath contempt. Yet every day it is done, and every day it grows more prevalent. The shortcut to power, the easy road to pre-eminence.”
He broke off, took a turn about the floor, clutched the massive folds of his purple-bordered toga with his left hand as they fell forward over his left shoulder and cuddled into his neck, flexed his bare right arm so it could continue to emphasize his words by gestures.
“The shortcut to power, the easy road to pre-eminence,” he repeated sonorously. “Well, we all know these men, don’t we? first among them is Gaius Marius, our esteemed senior consul, who I hear is about to have himself elected consul yet again, and yet again in absentia! By our wish? No! Through the medium of the People, of course! How else could Gaius Marius have got where he is today, except through the medium of the People? Some of us have fought him, and fought him tooth and nail, and fought him to exhaustion, and fought him with every legal weapon in our constitutional arsenal! To no avail. Gaius Marius has the support of the People, the ear of the People, and pours money into the purses of some of the tribunes of the plebs. In this day and age, those are enough. Rich as Croesus, he can buy what he cannot get any other way. Such is Gaius Marius. But it is not Gaius Marius I rose to discuss. You will forgive me, Conscript Fathers, for allowing my emotions to carry me too far from the main thrust of my oration.’’
He walked back to his original position, and turned to face the dais whereon sat the curule magistrates, and addressed his remarks to Gaius Memmius.
“I rose to speak about another upstart, a less noticeable sort of upstart than Gaius Marius. The sort of upstart who claims ancestors in the Senate, and can speak good Greek, and has been educated, and lives in his home with a vastness of power ensuring that his eyes have never rested upon pig-shit—if, that is, his eyes could see anything at all! Not a Roman of the Romans, for all he claims otherwise. I speak of the quaestor Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, deputed by this august House to serve the governor of Sardinia, Titus Annius Albucius.
“Now who is this Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo? A Pompey, who claims blood relationship to the Pompeys in this House for some generations, though it would be interesting to discover just how close the blood links are. Rich as Croesus, half of northern Italy in his clientship, a king inside the borders of his own lands. That’s who is this Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo.”
Scaurus’s voice rose to a roar. “Members of the Senate, what is this august body co
ming to, when a brand-new senator in the guise of a quaestor has the temerity and the—the—crossness to indict his superior? How short of young Roman men are we, that we cannot put Roman arses on a mere three hundred seats? I—am—scandalized! Does this Pompey Cross-eyes really possess so little education in the niceties of behavior expected from a member of the Senate that he could even dream of indicting his superior? What is the matter with us, that we are letting the likes of this Pompey Cross-eyes put his uncouth arse on a senatorial stool? And what is the matter with him, that he could do such a thing? Ignorance and lack of breeding, that’s what’s the matter with him! Some things, Conscript Fathers, are just—not—done! Things like indicting one’s superior or one’s close relatives, including relatives by marriage. Not done! Crass—bovine—ill-mannered—underbred—presumptuous—stupid—our Latin language does not possess sufficient scathing epithets whereby to catalogue the shortcomings of such a noxious mushroom as this Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, this Pompey Cross-eyes!”
A voice came from the tribunes’ bench. “Are you inferring, Marcus Aemilius, that Titus Annius Albucius is to be lauded for his behavior?” asked Lucius Cassius.
The Princeps Senatus drew himself up like a cobra, and just as venomously. “Oh, grow up, Lucius Cassius!” he said. “The issue here is not Titus Annius. Naturally he will be dealt with in the appropriate manner, which in his case is prosecution. If he is found guilty, he will incur the proper punishment the law prescribes. The issue here is protocol, politesse, etiquette—in plain words, Lucius Cassius, manners. Our noxious mushroom Pompey Cross-eyes is guilty of a flagrant breach of manners!’’
He faced the House. “I move, Conscript Fathers, that Titus Annius Albucius answer charges of a treasonable nature—but that the praetor urbanus shall at the same time write a very stiff letter to the quaestor Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo informing him that, one, under no circumstances will he be permitted to prosecute his superior, and that, two, he has the manners of a boor.”