The First Man in Rome Read Online Free PDF Page B

as they were concerned, the tragic theater didn't exist—and in that they were true Romans, for Romans adored a good laugh.
    So to the party at Clitumna's house on New Year's Eve were invited Scylax, Astera, Milo, Pedocles, Daphne, and Marsyas. It was of course a costume party; Clitumna reveled in dressing up, so did Nicopolis, and Sulla liked female impersonation of a certain kind, the kind where the onlooker can laugh at the antics of a patent man mocking women.
    Sulla had therefore got himself up as Medusa the Gorgon, complete with a wig of genuine living snakelets that had the whole room screaming in terror every time he lowered his head and threatened to charge, and a flowing mass of draperies in Coan floss silk that showed the guests his biggest snake all too clearly. His stepmother came as an ape, which meant she capered and scratched in a hairy coat, and bared blue-painted buttocks. Rather more orthodox because she was rather more beautiful than Clitumna, Nicopolis tricked herself out as Diana of the Grove, thus exposing her long slender legs and one perfect breast as she cavorted about to make the tinny arrows in her quiver rattle in time to the music of flutes, pipes, bells, lyres, and drums.
    The party got off to a swinging start. Sulla in his snaky getup was an undeniable success, but Clitumna the Ape was funniest. The wine flowed; the laughter and shrieks burst out of the peristyle-garden at the back of the house and drove all the conservative neighbors mad long before New Year's Eve became New Year's Day. Then, last guest to arrive, Scylax teetered through the door in cork-soled platform sandals, a golden-blonde wig, huge tits inflating his gorgeous gown, and the maquillage of an old whore. Poor Venus! In tow as his Cupid came Metrobius.
    Sulla's biggest snake took one look and stood up in less than a second, which didn't please the Ape or Diana of the Grove. Nor for that matter did it please Venus Scylax. And there ensued scenes as frenzied as any that ever enlivened farce or mime: a bouncing blue bottom, a bouncing bared breast, a bouncing blonde wig, a bouncing biggest snake, and a bouncing befeathered boy. Culminating in the best bounce of all, which was Metrobius and Sulla enjoying a little buggery in a corner they had fancied more secluded than it actually was.
    He had known, of course, that he was making a ghastly mistake; but knowing it didn't help in the least. From the moment he'd seen the dye running down those silky legs and the length of the lashes round those lustrous, night-dark eyes, Sulla had been finished, rolled up, hopelessly conquered. And when he brushed his hand across the little frilly skirt the boy wore and lifted it just enough to see how beautiful and hairless and dusky-hued was the endowment beneath, there was nothing else in the world he could do save what he did do, pull the boy into a corner behind a large pouffe and have him.
    Farce almost turned into tragedy. Clitumna took up a rare goblet of Alexandrian glass, broke it, and went in real earnest for Sulla's face. Whereupon Nicopolis went for Clitumna with a wine jug, and Scylax went for Metrobius with one of his cork-soled platform sandals. Everyone else stopped partying to watch, enchanted. Luckily Sulla was not drunk enough to have lost his extraordinary physical competence, so he dealt with the lot of them briskly and harshly: gave Scylax a wallop on one lavishly painted eye that bruised it for a month, administered the sharp ends of a quiverful of arrows to Diana's long bare legs, and turned Clitumna upside down across his knee to make her bare buttocks as black as they were blue. After which he kissed the boy a lingering tongue-borne thank-you, and took himself off to bed in a mood of towering disgust.
    It was only at dawn on New Year's Day that Sulla understood what was really the matter. Not farce. Not even comedy. A tragedy as strange and hideously convoluted as anything Sophocles ever imagined in his worst bout of