The Grass Crown Read Online Free PDF Page B

was now awake enough to say, “Arpinum? Who?” Arpinum was his home, there lay the lands of his ancestors.
    “Marcus Tullius Cicero. Crassus Orator’s client and the son have the same name.”
    “Unfortunately I do indeed know the family. They’re some sort of cousins. Litigious-minded lot! Stole a bit of our land about a hundred years ago, won the court case. We haven’t really spoken to them since.” His eyelids fell.
    “I see.” Julia cuddled closer. “Anyway, the boy is eight now, and so brilliant he’s going to study in the Forum. Crassus Orator is predicting that he’ll create quite a stir. I suppose when Young Caesar is eight, he’ll create quite a stir too.”
    “Huh!” said Marius, yawning hugely.
    She dug her elbow in again. “You, Gaius Marius, are going off to sleep! Wake up!”
    His eyes flew open, he made a rumbling noise in the back of his throat. “Care to race me round the Capitol?” he asked.
    Giggling, she settled down once more. “Well, I haven’t met this Cicero boy, but I have met my nephew, little Gaius Julius Caesar, and I can tell you, he isn’t… normal. I know we mostly reserve that word for people who are mentally defective, but I don’t see why it can’t mean the opposite as well.”
    “The older you get, Julia, the more talkative you get,” complained the weary husband.
    Julia ignored this. “Young Caesar isn’t two years old yet, but he’s about a hundred! Big words and properly phrased sentences—and he knows what the big words mean too!”
    And suddenly Marius was wide awake, no longer tired. He lifted himself up to look at his wife, her serene face softly delineated by the little flame of a night lamp. Her nephew! Her nephew named Gaius! The Syrian Martha’s prophecy, revealed to him the first time he ever saw the crone, in Gauda’s palace at Carthage. She had predicted that he would be the First Man in Rome, and that he would be consul seven times. But, she had added, he would not be the greatest of all Romans. His wife’s nephew named Gaius would be! And he had said to himself at the time, Over my dead body. No one is going to eclipse me. Now here was the child, a living fact.
    He lay back again, his tiredness translated to aching limbs. Too much time, too much energy, too much passion had he put into his battle to become the First Man in Rome, to stand by tamely and see the luster of his name dimmed by a precocious aristocrat who would come into his own when he, Gaius Marius, was too old or too dead to oppose him. Greatly though he loved his wife, humbly though he admitted that it was her aristocratic name which had procured him that first consulship, still he would not willingly see her nephew, blood of her blood, rise higher than he himself had.
    Of consulships he had won six, which meant there was a seventh yet to come. No one in Roman public life seriously believed that Gaius Marius could ever regain his past glory, those halcyon years when the Centuries had voted him in, three times in absentia, as a pledge of their conviction that he, Gaius Marius, was the only man who could save Rome from the Germans. Well, he had saved them. And what thanks had he got? A landslide of opposition, disapproval, destructiveness. The ongoing enmity of Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar, of Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle, of a huge and powerful senatorial faction united in no other way than to bring down Gaius Marius. Little men with big names, appalled at the idea that their beloved Rome had been saved by a despised New Man—an Italian hayseed with no Greek, as Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle had put it many years before.
    Well, it wasn’t over yet. Stroke or no stroke, Gaius Marius would be consul a seventh time—and go down in the history books as the greatest Roman the Republic had ever known. Nor was he going to let some beautiful, golden-haired descendant of the goddess Venus step into the history books ahead of himself—the patrician Gaius Marius was not, the