THE FIRST YEAR (110 B.

C)

IN THE CONSULSHIP OF
MARCUS MINUCIUS RUFUS
AND

SPURIUS POSTUMIUS ALBINUS

[FMR [Link]]

Having no personal commitment to either of the new consuls, Gaius Julius

Caesar and his sons simply tacked themselves onto the procession which

started nearest to their own house, the procession of the senior consul, Marcus

Minucius Rufus. Both consuls lived on the Palatine, but the house of the junior
consul, Spurius Postumius Albinus, was in a more fashionable area. Rumor had
it Albinus's debts were escalating dizzily, no surprise; such was the price of
becoming consul.
Not that Gaius Julius Caesar was worried about the heavy burden of debt

incurred while ascending the political ladder; nor, it seemed likely, would his sons

ever need to worry on that score. It was four hundred years since a Julius had

sat in the consul's ivory curule chair, four hundred years since a Julius had been

able to scrape up that kind of money. The Julian ancestry was so stellar, so

august, that opportunities to fill the family coffers had passed the succeeding
generations by, and as each century finished, the family of Julius had found itself

ever poorer. Consul? Impossible! Praetor, next magistracy down the ladder from

consul? Impossible! No, a safe and humble backbencher's niche in the Senate
was the inheritance of a Julius these days, including that branch of the family
called Caesar because of their luxuriantly thick hair.

So the toga which Gaius Julius Caesar's body servant draped about- his left

shoulder, wrapped about his frame, hung about his left arm, was the plain white
toga of a man who had never aspired to the ivory curule chair of high office. Only
his dark red shoes, his iron senator's ring, and the five-inch-wide purple stripe on

the right shoulder of his tunic distinguished his garb from that of his sons, Sextus
and Gaius, who wore ordinary shoes, their seal rings only, and a thin purple
knight's stripe on their tunics.
Even though dawn had not yet broken, there were little ceremonies to usher in

the day. A short prayer and an offering of a salt cake at the shrine to the gods of

the house in the atrium, and then, when the servant on door duty called out that

he could see the torches coming down the hill, a reverence to Janus Patulcius,
the god who permitted safe opening of a door.

Father and sons passed out into the narrow cobbled alley, there to separate.
While the two young men joined the ranks of the knights who preceded the new

senior consul, Gaius Julius Caesar himself waited until Marcus Minucius Rufus

passed by with his lictors, then slid in among the ranks of the senators who

followed him.

It was Marcia who murmured a reverence to Janus Clusivius, the god who

presided over the closing of a door, Marcia who dismissed the yawning servants

to other duties. The men gone, she could see to her own little expedition. Where
were the girls? A laugh gave her the answer, coming from the cramped little
sitting room the girls called their own; and there they sat, her daughters, the two

Julias, breakfasting on bread thinly smeared with honey. How lovely they were!
It had always been said that every Julia ever born was a treasure, for the Julias

had the rare and fortunate gift of making their men happy. And these two young
Julias bade fair to keep up the family tradition.
Julia Major—called Julia—was almost eighteen. Tall and possessed of grave

dignity, she had pale, bronzy-tawny hair pulled back into a bun on the nape of

her neck, and her wide grey eyes surveyed her world seriously, yet placidly. A
restful and intellectual Julia, this one.

Julia Minor—called Julilla—was half past sixteen. The last child of her parents’
marriage, she hadn't really been a welcome addition until she became old

enough to enchant her softhearted mother and father as well as her three older

siblings. She was honey-colored. Skin, hair, eyes, each a mellow gradation of

amber. Of course it had been Julilla who laughed. Julilla laughed at everything. A

restless and unintellectual Julia, this one.

"Ready, girls?" asked their mother.

They crammed the rest of their sticky bread into their mouths, wiggled their
fingers daintily through a bowl of water and then a cloth, and followed Marcia out

of the room.

"It's chilly," said their mother, plucking warm woolen cloaks from the arms of a

servant. Stodgy, unglamorous cloaks.

Both girls looked disappointed, but knew better than to protest; they endured
being wrapped up like caterpillars into cocoons, only their faces showing amid
fawn folds of homespun. Identically swaddled herself, Marcia formed up her little

convoy of daughters and servant escort, and led it through the door into the

street.

They had lived in this modest house on the lower Germalus of the Palatine
since Father Sextus had bestowed it upon his younger son, Gaius, together with
five hundred iugera of good land between Bovillae and Aricia—a sufficient

endowment to ensure that Gaius and his family would have the wherewithal to

maintain a seat in the Senate. But not, alas, the wherewithal to climb the rungs of

the cursus honorum, the ladder of honor leading up to the praetorship and
consulship.
Father Sextus had had two sons and not been able to bear parting with one; a

rather selfish decision, since it meant his property—already dwindled because he

too had had a sentimental sire and a younger brother who also had to be

provided for—was of necessity split between Sextus, his elder son, and Gaius,
his younger son. It had meant that neither of his sons could attempt the cursus

honorum, be praetor and consul.

Brother Sextus had not been as sentimental as Father Sextus; just as welll He

and his wife, Popillia, had produced three sons, an intolerable burden for a

senatorial family. So he had summoned up the necessary steel to part with his
eldest boy, given him up for adoption to the childless Quintus Lutatius Catulus,
thereby making a fortune for himself as well as ensuring that his eldest son

would come into a fortune. Old Catulus the adopter was fabulously wealthy, and
very pleased to pay over a huge sum for the chance to adopt a boy of patrician
stock, great good looks, and a reasonable brain. The money the boy had brought
Brother Sextus—his real father—had been carefully invested in land and in city
property, and hopefully would produce sufficient income to allow both of Brother

Sextus's younger sons a chance at the senior magistracies.

Strong-minded Brother Sextus aside, the whole trouble with the Julius Caesars
was their tendency to breed more than one son, and then turn sentimental about

the predicament more than one son embroiled them in; they were never able to

rule their hearts, give up some of their too-profuse male offspring for adoption,
and see that the children they kept married into lots of money. For this reason

had their once-vast landholdings shrunk with the passing of the centuries,
progressively split into smaller and smaller parcels to provide for two and three

sons, and some of it sold to provide dowries for daughters.

Marcia's husband was just such a Julius Caesar—a sentimentally doting
parent, too proud of his sons and too enslaved by his daughters to be properly,
Romanly sensible. The older boy should have been adopted out and both girls
should have been promised in marriage to rich men years ago; the younger son

should also have been contracted to a rich bride. Only money made a high
political career possible. Patrician blood had long become a liability.

It was not a very auspicious sort of New Year's Day. Cold, windy, blowing a

fine mist of rain that slicked the cobbles dangerously and intensified the stale

stench of an old burning in the air. Dawn had come, late because sunless, and

this was one Roman holiday the ordinary people would prefer to spend in a

cramped confinement indoors, lying on their straw pallets playing the ageless
game they called Hide the Sausage.
Had the weather been fine, the streets would have been thronged with people
from all walks of life going to a favorite vantage point from which to view the

pomp in the Forum Romanum and on the Capitol; as it was, Marcia and her

daughters found it easy walking, their servant escort not needing to use brute
force in making a way for the ladies.
The tiny alley in which the house of Gaius Julius Caesar lay opened onto the
Clivus Victoriae not far above the Porta Romulana, the ancient gate in the
ancient Palatine city's walls, vast blocks of stone laid down by Romulus himself,
now overgrown or built upon or carved up with the graffitic initials of six hundred

years of tourists. Turning right to ascend the Clivus Victoriae toward the corner

where the Palatine Germalus looked down upon the Forum Romanum, the ladies

reached their destination five minutes later, a piece of vacant land occupying the

best spot of all.

Twelve years earlier one of the finest houses in Rome had stood there.
Nowadays the site bore little evidence of its previous dwelling, just an occasional

stone half-buried in grass. The view was splendid; from where the servants set

up campstools for Marcia and the two Julias, the women had an unobstructed

vista before them of Forum Romanum and Capitol, with the seething declivity of
the Subura adding definition to the northern hills of the city's horizon.

"Did you hear?" asked that Caecilia who was the wife of the merchant banker

Titus Pomponius. Very pregnant, she was sitting nearby with her Aunt Pilia; they
lived next but one down the street from the Caesars.

"No, what?" asked Marcia, leaning forward.

"The consuls and priests and augurs started just after midnight, to make sure

they'd finish the prayers and rites in time—"

"They always do that!" said Marcia, interrupting. "If they make a mistake, they
have to start all over again."
"I know, |

know, I'm not that ignorant!" said Caecilia tartly, annoyed because

she knew she was being put in her place by a praetor's daughter. "The thing is,
they didn't make a mistake! The auspices were bad. Lightning four times on the

right, and an owl inside the augural place screeching as if being murdered. And

now the weather— it's not going to be a good year, or a good pair of consuls."

"Well, |
could have told you that without benefit of owls or lightning," said
Marcia, whose father had not lived to be consul, but as praetor urbanus had built

the great aqueduct which brought sweet fresh water into Rome, and kept his

memory green as one of the all-time greats in government. "A miserable

assortment of candidates to begin with, and even then the electors couldn't pick
the best of such a shabby lot.
|

daresay Marcus Minucius Rufus will try, but

Spurius Postumius Albinus! They've always been inadequate.”
"Who?" asked Caecilia, who wasn't very bright.
"The Postumius Albinus clan," said Marcia, her eyes darting to her daughters
to make sure they were all right; they had spotted four girls belonging to two of

the Claudius Pulchers—such a tribe of them, it was never possible to keep them
all straight! And they usually weren't straight. But these girls gathered on the site
of the Flaccus house had all gone to school together as children, and it was

impossible to erect social barriers against a caste almost as aristocratic as the

Julius Caesars. Especially when the Claudius Pulchers also perpetually battled

the enemies of the old nobility, too many children allied to dwindling land and
money. Now her two Julias had moved their campstools down to where the other

girls sat unsupervised—where were their mothers? Oh. Talking to Sulla. Shady!
That settled it.

"Girls!" Marcia called sharply.

Two draped heads turned to look at her.

"Come back here," she said, and added, "at once."

They came.

"Mama, please can't we stay with our friends?" asked young Julilla, eyes

pleading.
"No," said Marcia, in the tone which indicated That Was That.
Down below in the Forum Romanum the procession was forming, as the long
crocodile which had wended its way from the house of Marcus Minucius Rufus

met up with the equally long crocodile originating at the house of Spurius
Postumius Albinus. The knights came first, not as many as on a fine sunny New

Year's Day, but a respectable enough gathering of seven hundred or so; as the

light improved but the rain grew a trifle harder, they moved off up the slope of the
Clivus Capitolinus to where, at the first bend in this short and hilly track, the
priests and slaughtermen waited with two flawless white bulls on spangled
halters, their horns gilded and their dewlaps garlanded. At the rear of the knights
strolled the twenty-four lictors of the new consuls. After the lictors came the

consuls themselves, and after them the Senate, those who had held senior

magistracies in purple-bordered togas, the rest of the House in plain white togas.
And last of all came those who did not by rights belong there, sightseers and a

host of the consuls’ clients.

Nice, thought Marcia. Perhaps a thousand men walked slowly up the ramp
toward the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the Great God of Rome, rearing
its impressive bulk in highest place of all on the more southerly of the two hills

constituting the Capitol. The Greeks built their temples on the ground, but the
Romans built theirs on lofty platforms with many steps, and the steps which led

up to Jupiter Optimus Maximus were indeed many. Nice, thought Marcia again
as the sacrificial animals and their escort joined the procession, and all went on

together until at last they clustered as best they could in the restricted space
before the great temple on high. Somewhere among them were her husband and

her two sons, a part of the governing class of this mightiest of all cities of the
world.

Somewhere among them too was Gaius Marius. As an ex-praetor, he wore

the purple-bordered toga praetexta, and on his dark red senatorial shoes he
wore the crescent-shaped buckle his praetorship permitted. Yet it wasn't enough.
He had been a praetor five years earlier, should have been consul three years

ago. But he knew now that he would never be allowed to run for the consulship.
Never. Why? Because he wasn't good enough. That was the only reason why.
Who had ever heard of a family called Marius? No one.

Gaius Marius was an upstart from the rural nowhere, a Military Man, someone

who was said to have no Greek, and who still could be trapped by excitement or

anger into putting upcountry inflections on his native Latin. It didn't matter that he

could buy and sell half the Senate; it didn't matter that on a battlefield he could

outgeneral both halves of the Senate. What did matter was blood. And his just
wasn't good enough.
Gaius Marius hailed from Arpinum—not so many miles away from Rome really,
but dangerously close to the border between Latium and Samnium, and

therefore a trifle suspect in its loyalties and leanings; the Samnites were still
Rome's most obdurate enemies among the Italians. Full Roman citizenship had

come late to Arpinum—only seventy-eight years ago—and the district still did not

enjoy proper municipal status.

Ah, but it was so beautiful! Huddled in the foothills of the high Apennines, a

fruitful valley cupping both the Liris and the Melfa rivers, where the grape grew
with wonderful results for table as well as vintage, where the crops returned a

hundred-and-fifty-fold, and the sheep were fat and the wool surprisingly fine.
Peaceful. Green. Sleepy. Cooler than expected in summer, warmer than

expected in winter. The water in both rivers was full of fish; the dense forests on

the mountains ringing Arpinum's bowl around still yielded superb timber for ships
and buildings. And there were pitch pines and torch pines, oaks to litter the

ground with acorns for the pigs in autumn, fat hams and sausages and bacon fit

to grace any noble table in Rome—which they often did.