The First Man in Rome Read Online Free PDF

two floors higher up in the crumbling tenement and did for various tenants in all sorts of ways. Once a week she took his dirty clothing down the alley to where a crossroads widened the maze of streets into a tiny, irregular, square; in it were a shrine of the crossroads, a clubhouse where the crossroads sodality met, and a fountain spewing a continuous trickle of water out of the mouth of an ugly old Silanus into a stone-bottomed pool donated to the city— one of many—by that grand old man of history, Cato the Censor, a man as practical as he had been lowborn. Fighting for elbow room, she pounded Sulla's tunics on the stones, borrowed the assistance of another washerwoman to wring every garment bone-dry (having performed the same service for her fellow), and then brought him back his laundry neatly folded. Her price was simple; a quick in-and-out and none the wiser, especially the sour old bird she lived with.
    At which point he met Nicopolis. Victory City, her name meant in her native Greek. She was certainly that to him, for she was a widow, comfortably off, and in love with him to the point of madness. The only trouble was that while she was happy to support him in lavish fashion, she was far too shrewd to give him an allowance. The twin, he recognized gloomily, of his stepmother, Clitumna. Women were fools, but they were clever fools. Either that, or he was far too transparent.
    Two years after he had moved out of Clitumna's splendid house, his father died, having guzzled himself with unalloyed happiness into terminal liver disease; and if he had been the price Clitumna was prepared to pay in order to catch his son, then her ruse worked at last, especially after Sulla discovered that Clitumna was not at all averse to sharing his favors—and her bed—with Nicopolis the Greek tart. The three of them settled down into a cozy relationship in the house on the Palatine, a relationship which had only one occasional marring element, Sulla's weakness for young boys. It was not, he assured his two women, a serious weakness; he had no taste for the innocent, no desire to seduce the sons of senators as they cavorted on the exercise fields of the Campus Martius, playing at fencing with their wooden swords and vaulting on and off the backs of stuffed bolsters saddled just like real horses. No, Sulla liked trollops, the professional pretty-boys up to every trick in town; the truth was, they reminded him of himself at the same age.
    But because his women detested his trollops, and he was in spite of his sexual appetites very much a man, he resisted his urges in this direction for the sake of domestic harmony, or else made sure he indulged himself mighty far away from the ken of Clitumna and Nicopolis. Until New Year's Eve, the last hours of the consulship of Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica and Lucius Calpurnius Bestia, the last hours before the commencement of the consulship of Marcus Minucius Rufus and Spurius Postumius Albinus. The Eve of Metrobius, it was likely to come to be called, if Clitumna and Nicopolis had anything to do with it.
    The three of them adored the theater, but not the highbrow Greek stuff of Sophocles and Aeschylus and Euripides, all masks and groaning throbbing voices and high-flown poetry. No, they loved comedy—the giggle-gorged Latin larkery of Plautus and Naevius and Terence; and above all else the simple, maskless idiocy of the pure mime, with its naked strumpets, clumsy fools, clarion farts, elaborate practical jokes, improbable plots made up on the spur of the moment from traditional repertoires. Tall daisies stuck in arses wiggle-waggled; the movement of one finger was more eloquent than a thousand words; blindfolded fathers-in-law mistook tits for ripe melons; the adulteries were insane and the gods drunk—nothing was sacred in the name of Mimus.
    They were friends with every comedic actor and director in Rome, didn't consider they threw a good party unless a cluster of "names" were present. As far