First Man in Rome by Colleen Mccullough

Author:Colleen Mccullough
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Politics, Classics, War, Historical, Colleen McCullough
ISBN: 9780061582417
Published: 1989-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

On the Ides of November a letter came to Utica from the consul Publius Rutilius Rufus. Marius had got into the habit of sharing these letters with Sulla, who enjoyed Rutilius Rufus’s racy style even more than Marius did, being better with words than Marius was. However, Marius was alone when the letter was brought to his office, which fact pleased him; for he liked the opportunity to go through it first to familiarize himself with the text, and when Sulla sat listening to him mutter his way across the endless squiggles trying to divide them up into separate words, it tended to put him off.

But he had hardly begun to read it aloud to himself when he jumped, shivered, leaped to his feet. “Jupiter!” he cried, and ran for Sulla’s office.

He burst in, white-faced, brandishing the scroll. “Lucius Cornelius! A letter from Publius Rutilius!”

“What? What is it?”

“A hundred thousand Roman dead,” Marius began, reading out important snatches of what he had already read himself. “Eighty thousand of the dead are soldiers… The Germans annihilated us…. That fool Caepio refused to join camps with Mallius Maximus … insisted on staying twenty miles to the north … Young Sextus Caesar was badly wounded, so was young Sertorius … Only three of the twenty-four tribunes of the soldiers survived … No centurions left … The soldiers who did survive were the greenest, and have deserted … A whole legion of propertied Marsi dead, and the nation of the Marsi has already lodged a protest with the Senate … claiming huge damages, in court if necessary … The Samnites are furious too …”

“Jupiter!” breathed Sulla, flopping back into his chair.

Marius read on to himself for a moment, murmuring a little too softly for Sulla to hear; then he made a most peculiar noise. Thinking Marius was about to have some sort of seizure, Sulla got quickly to his feet, but didn’t have time to get around his desk before the reason came out.

“I—am—consul!” gasped Gaius Marius.

Sulla stopped in his tracks, face slack. “Jupiter!” he said again, could think of nothing else to say.

Marius began to read Rutilius Rufus’s letter out loud to Sulla, for once beyond caring how much he stumbled as he sorted the squiggles into words.

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