Fortune's Favorites (26 page)

Lepidus spoke up loudly. “The Dictator serves for six months only,” he said. “Unless my hearing has suddenly grown defective, what you propose to ask of the Centuries is that they appoint a Dictator with no time limit to his office. Not constitutional, Princeps Senatus! I am not against seeing Lucius Cornelius Sulla appointed the Dictator, but I am against his serving one moment longer than the proper term of six months.”

“Six months won't even see my work begun,” said Sulla without rising from his stool. “Believe me, Lepidus, I do not want the wretched job for one single day, let alone for the rest of my life! When I consider my work is finished, I will step down. But six months? Impossible.”

“How so?” asked Lepidus.

“For one thing,” Sulla answered, “Rome's finances are in chaos. To right them will take a year, perhaps two years. There are twenty-seven legions to discharge, find land for, pay out. The men who supported the lawless regimes of Marius, Cinna and Carbo have to be sought out and shown that they cannot escape just punishment. The laws of Rome are antiquated, particularly with regard to her courts and her governors of provinces. Her civil servants are disorganized and prey to both lethargy and cupidity. So much treasure, money and bullion were robbed from our temples that the Treasury still contains two hundred and eighty talents of gold and one hundred and twenty talents of silver, even after this year's profligate waste. The temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus is a cinder.” He sighed loudly. “Must I go on, Lepidus?”

“All right, I concede that your task will take longer than six months. But what's to stop your being reappointed every six months for however long the job takes?” asked Lepidus.

Sulla's sneer was superlatively nasty without his teeth, despite the fact that those long canines were missing. “Oh, yes, Lepidus!” he cried. “I can see it all now! Half of every six-month period would have to be spent in conciliating the Centuries! Pleading, explaining, excusing, drawing pretty pictures, pissing in every knight-businessman's purse, turning myself into the world's oldest and saddest trollop!” He rose to his feet, fists clenched, and shook both of them at Marcus Aemilius Lepidus with more venom in his face than most men there had seen since he had quit Rome to go to war with King Mithridates. “Well, comfortable stay-at-home Lepidus, married to the daughter of a traitor who did try to set himself up as King of Rome, I will do it my way or not at all! Do you hear me, you miserable pack of self-righteous stay-at-home fools and cravens? You want Rome back on her feet, but you want the undeserved right to make the life of the man who is undertaking to do that as miserable and anxious and servile as you possibly can! Well, Conscript Fathers, you can make up your minds to it right here and now-Lucius Cornelius Sulla is back in Rome, and if he has a mind to it, he can shake her rafters until she falls down in ruins! Out there in the Latin countryside I have an army that I could have brought into this city and set on your despicable hides like wolves on lambs! I did not do that. I have acted in your best interests since first I entered the Senate. And I am still acting in your best interests. Peacefully. Nicely. But you are trying my patience, I give all of you fair warning. I will be Dictator for as long as I need to be Dictator. Is that understood? Is it, Lepidus?”

Silence reigned absolutely for many long moments. Even Vatia and Metellus Pius sat white-faced and trembling, gazing at the naked clawed monster fit only to screech at the moon- oh, how could they have forgotten what lived inside Sulla?

Lepidus too gazed white-faced and trembling, but the nucleus of his terror was not the monster inside Sulla; he was thinking of his beloved Appuleia, wife of many years, darling of his heart, mother of his sons-and daughter of Saturninus, who had indeed tried to make himself King of Rome. Why had Sulla made reference to her in the midst of that appalling outburst? What did he intend to do when he became Dictator?

Sick to death of civil wars, of economic depression and far too many legions marching endlessly up and down Italy, the Centuriate Assembly voted in a law which appointed Lucius Cornelius Sulla the Dictator for an unspecified period of time. Tabled at contio on the sixth day of November, the lex Valeria dictator legibus scribundis et rei publicae constituendae passed into law on the twenty-third day of November. It contained no specifics beyond the time span; as it bestowed virtually unlimited powers upon Sulla and also rendered him unanswerable for a single one of his actions, it did not need specificity. Whatever Sulla wanted to enact or do, he could.

Many in the city fully expected a flurry of activity from him the moment his appointment as Dictator was tabled, but he did nothing until the appointment was ratified three nundinae later, in accordance with the lex Caecilia Didia.

Having taken up residence in the house which had belonged to Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (now a refugee in Africa), Sulla did, it seemed, little except walk constantly through the city. His own house had been wrecked and burned to the ground after Gaius Marius and Cinna had taken over Rome, and he walked across the Germalus of the Palatine to inspect its site, poke slowly among the heaps of rubble, gaze over the Circus Maximus to the lovely contours of the Aventine. At any time of day from dawn to dusk he might be seen standing alone in the Forum Romanum, staring up at the Capitol, or at the life-size statue of Gaius Marius near the rostra, or at some other among the numerous smaller statues of Marius, or at the Senate House, or at the temple of Saturn. He walked along the bank of the Tiber from the great trading emporium of the Aemilii in the Port of Rome all the way to the Trigarium, where the young men swam. He walked from the Forum Romanum to every one of Rome's sixteen gates. He walked up one alley and down another.

Never did he display the slightest sign of fear for life or limb, never did he ask a friend to accompany him, let alone take a bodyguard along. Sometimes he wore a toga, but mostly he just wrapped himself voluminously in a more easily managed cloak-the winter was early, and promised to be as cold as the last. On one fine, unseasonably hot day he walked clad only in his tunic, and it could be seen then how small he was-though he had been a well-made man of medium size, people remembered. But he had shrunk, he was bent over, he crabbed along like an octogenarian. The silly wig was always on his head, and now that the outbreaks on his face were under control he had taken once more to painting his frost-fair brows and lashes with stibium.

And by the time one market interval of the Dictator's wait for ratification was over, those who had witnessed his awful rage in the Senate but had not been direct objects of it (like Lepidus) had begun to feel comfortable enough to speak of this walking old man with some degree of contempt; so short is memory.

“He's a travesty!” said Hortensius to Catulus, sniffing.

“Someone will kill him,” said Catulus, bored.

Hortensius giggled. “Or else he'll tumble over in a fit or an apoplexy.” He grasped at his brother-in-law's toga-swaddled left arm with his right hand, and shook it. “Do you know, I can't see why I was so afraid! He's here, but he's not here. Rome doesn't have a hard taskmaster after all-very peculiar! He's cracked, Quintus. Senescent.”

An opinion which was becoming prevalent among all classes as every day his uninspiring figure could be seen plodding along with wig askew and stibium garishly applied. Was that powder covering up his mulberry-hued scars? Muttering. Shaking his head. Once or twice, shouting at no one. Cracked. Senescent.

It had taken a great deal of courage for such a vain man to expose his aged crudities to general gaze; only Sulla knew how much he loathed what disease had done to him, only Sulla knew how much he yearned again to be the magnificent man he was when he left to fight King Mithridates. But, he had told himself, shunning his mirror, the sooner he nerved himself to show Rome what he had become, the sooner he would learn to forget what the mirror would have shown him had he looked. And this did happen. Chiefly because his walks were not aimless, not evidence of senility. Sulla walked to see what Rome had become, what Rome needed, what he had to do. And the more he walked, the angrier he became-and the more excited, because it was in his hand to take this dilapidated, threadbare lady and turn her into the beauty she used to be.

He waited too for the arrival of some people who mattered to him, though he didn't think of himself as loving them, or even needing them-his wife, his twins, his grown-up daughter, his grandchildren-and Ptolemy Alexander, heir to the throne of Egypt. They had been waiting patiently for many months under the care of Chrysogonus, first in Greece, then in Brundisium, but by the end of December they would be in Rome. For a while Dalmatica would have to live in Ahenobarbus's house, but Sulla's own residence had recently begun rebuilding; Philippus-looking brown and extremely fit-had arrived from Sardinia, unofficially convoked the Senate, and browbeaten that cowed body into voting nonexistent public funds to give back to Sulla what the State had taken away. Thank you, Philippus!

On the twenty-third day of November, Sulla's dictatorship was formally ratified, and passed into law. And on that day Rome awoke to find every statue of Gaius Marius gone from the Forums Romanum, Boarium, Holitorium, various crossroads and squares, vacant pieces of land. Gone too were the trophies hung in his temple to Honor and Virtue on the Capitol, fire-damaged but still habitable for lifeless suits of enemy armor, flags, standards, all his personal decorations for valor, the cuirasses he had worn in Africa, at Aquae Sextiae, at Vercellae, at Alba Fucentia. Statues of other men had gone too-Cinna, Carbo, Old Brutus, Norbanus, Scipio Asiagenus-but perhaps because they were far fewer in number, their going was not noticed in the same way as the disappearance of Gaius Marius. He left a huge gap, a whole grove of empty plinths with his name obliterated from each, herms with their genitalia hammered off.

And at the same time the whispers increased about other, more serious disappearances; men were vanishing too! Men who had been strong and loud in their support of Marius, or Cinna, or Carbo, or of all three. Knights in the main, successful in business during a time when business success was difficult; knights who had gained lucrative State contracts, or loaned to partisans, or enriched themselves in other ways from affiliations to Marius, to Cinna, to Carbo, or to all three. Admittedly no senator had puffed out of existence, but suddenly the total of men who had was big enough to be noticed. Whether because of this public awareness or as a side effect of it, people now saw these men vanishing; some sturdy-looking private individuals, perhaps ten or fifteen in number, would knock upon a knight's street door, be admitted, and then scant moments later would emerge with the knight in their midst, and march him off to-no one knew where!

Rome stirred uneasily, began to see the peregrinations of her wizened master as something more than just benign excursions; what had been quite amusing in a saddened way now took on a more sinister guise, and the innocent eccentricities of yesterday became the suspicious purposes of today and the terrifying objectives of tomorrow. He never spoke to anyone! He talked to himself! He stood in one place for far too long looking at who knew what! He had shouted once or twice! What was he really doing? And why was he doing it?

Exactly in step with this growing apprehension, the odd activities of those innocuous-looking bands of private persons who knocked on the street doors of houses belonging to knights became more overt. They were now noticed to stand here or there taking notes, or to follow like shadows behind an affluent Carboan banker or a prosperous Marian broker. The disappearing men disappeared with increasing frequency. And then one group of private persons knocked upon the street door of a pedarius senator who had always voted for Marius, for Cinna, for Carbo. But the senator was not marched away. When he emerged into the street there was a flurry of arms, the sweep of a sword, and his head fell to the ground with a hollow thock!, and rolled away. The body lay emptying itself of blood down the gutter, but the head disappeared.

Everyone began to find a reason for drifting past the rostra to count the heads-Carbo, Young Marius, Carrinas, Censorinus, Scipio Asiagenus, Old Brutus, Marius Gratidianus, Pontius Telesinus, Brutus Damasippus, Tiberius Gutta of Capua, Soranus, Mutilus.... No, that was all! The head of the backbencher senator was not there. Nor any head of any man who had vanished. And Sulla continued to walk with his idiotic wig not quite straight, and his brows and lashes painted. But whereas before people used to stop and smile to see him-albeit smiled with pity-now people felt a frightful hole blossom in their bellies at sight of him, and scrambled in any direction save toward him, or bolted at a run away from him. Wherever Sulla now was, no one else was. No one watched him. No one smiled, albeit with pity. No one accosted him. No one molested him. He brought a cold sweat in his wake, like the wraiths which issued from the mundus on the dies religiosi.

Never before had one of the great public figures been so shrouded in mystery, so opaque of purpose. His behavior was not normal. He should have been standing on the rostra in the Forum telling everyone in magnificent language all about his plans, or throwing rhetorical sand in the Senate's eyes. Speeches of intent, litanies of complaint, flowery phrases-he should have been talking. To someone, if not everyone. Romans were not prone to keep their counsel. They talked things over. Hearsay ruled. But from Sulla, nothing. Just the solitary walks which acknowledged no complicity, implied no interest. And yet-all of it had to be emanating from him! This silent and uncommunicative man was the master of Rome.

On the Kalends of December, Sulla called a meeting of the Senate, the first such since Flaccus had spoken. Oh, how the senators hurried and scurried to the Curia Hostilia! Feeling colder even than the air, pulses so rapid heartbeats could not be counted, breathing shallow, pupils dilated, bowels churning. They huddled on their stools like gulls battered by a tempest, trying not to look up at the underside of the Curia roof for fear that, like Saturninus and his confederates, they would be felled in an instant by a rain of tiles from above.