The Grass Crown Read Online Free PDF

down in the nursery with the women, Publius Rutilius!”
     
    All the children had been brought to Marius’s house for this dinner, and all were asleep when the party broke up. Only Young Marius remained where he was; the others had to be taken home by their parents. Two big litters stood outside in the lane, one to accommodate Sulla’s children, Cornelia Sulla and Young Sulla, the other for Aurelia’s three, Julia Major called Lia, Julia Minor called Ju-ju, and Young Caesar. While the adult men and women stood talking low-voiced in the atrium, a team of servants carried the sleeping children out to the litters and placed them carefully inside.
    The man carrying Young Caesar looked unfamiliar to Julia, automatically counting; then she stiffened, clutched Aurelia by the arm convulsively.
    “That’s Lucius Decumius!” she gasped.
    “Of course it is,” said Aurelia, surprised.
    “Aurelia, you really shouldn’t!”
    “Nonsense, Julia. Lucius Decumius is a tower of strength to me. I don’t have a nice respectable journey home, as you well know. I go through the middle of a den of thieves, footpads, the gods know what—for even after seven years, I don’t! It isn’t often that I’m lured out of my own home, but when I am, Lucius Decumius and a couple of his brothers always come to bring me home. And Young Caesar isn’t a heavy sleeper. Yet when Lucius Decumius picks him up, he never stirs.”
    “A couple of his brothers!” whispered Julia, horrified.
    “Do you mean to say that there are more at home like Lucius Decumius?”
    “No!” said Aurelia scornfully. “I mean his brothers in the crossroads college—his minions, Julia.” She looked cross. “Oh, I don’t know why I come to these family dinners on the rare occasions when I do come! Why is it that you never seem to understand that I have my life very nicely under control, and don’t need all this fussing and clucking?”
    Julia said no more until she and Gaius Marius went to bed, having settled the household down, banished the slaves to their quarters, locked the door onto the street, and made an offering to the trio of gods who looked after every Roman home—Vesta of the hearth, the Di Penates of the storage cupboards, and the Lar Familiaris of the family.
    “Aurelia was very difficult today,” she said then.
    Marius was tired, a sensation he experienced a great deal more often these days than of yore, and one which shamed him. So rather than do what he longed to do—namely to roll over on his left side and go to sleep—he lay on his back, settled his wife within his left arm, and resigned himself to a chat about women and domestic problems. “Oh?” he asked.
    “Can’t you bring Gaius Julius home? Aurelia is growing into an old retired Vestal Virgin, all—I don’t know! Sour. Crabby. Juiceless! Yes, that’s the right word, juiceless,” said Julia. “And that child is wearing her out.”
    “Which child?” mumbled Marius.
    “Her twenty-two-month-old son, Young Caesar. Oh, Gaius Marius, he is astonishing! I know such children are born occasionally, but I’ve certainly never met one before, nor even heard of one among our friends. I mean, all we mothers are happy if our sons know what dignitas and auctoritas are after their fathers have taken them for their first trip to the Forum at age seven! Yet this little mite knows already, though he’s never even met his father! I tell you, husband, Young Caesar is truly an astonishing child.”
    She was warming up; another thought occurred to her, of sufficient moment to make her wriggle, bounce up and down. “Ah! I was talking to Crassus Orator’s wife, Mucia, yesterday, and she was saying that Crassus Orator is boasting of having a client with a son like Young Caesar.” She dug Marius in the ribs. “You must know the family, Gaius Marius, because they come from Arpinum.”
    He hadn’t really followed any of this, but the elbow had completed what the wriggle and bounce had begun, and he