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Against Rome |
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Back to section iii of this chapter II. Scipio, Rome, 219 - 218 B.C. iv To
Scipio’s mind, nothing could equal a triumph. Not ascending to the consulship,
not marrying for love, not having sons, not military achievement itself. A
triumph embodied the preeminent moment of a man’s life, the capstone of his
reputation, his auctoritas, his dignitas—Scipio’s triumph, one
day, would be his moment in the sun, when he grabbed Rome by the throat and
forced his so-called peers to bathe him in their delicious envy. Scipio,
Lucius, and Marcus Livius had, like many other Roman boys, raced through the
streets just ahead of the parade that day, now three years gone, at its
inception on the great military field, then from the Campus Martius towards the
Capitoline Hill, then into the city proper. They watched it first from the
podium of the little Temple of Portunus in the Forum Boarium—at least until
Uncle Gnaeus appeared in the meat market at the head of the magistrates and
senators, grim-faced but gamely soldiering through his colleague’s triumph
when he had been denied his own. The Senate had not wanted to “demean”
Marcellus’s triumph, and Uncle Gnaeus’s political foes, especially Fabius
Maximus, had leapt upon the opportunity to deny him. This
was Marcellus’s triumph, though Scipio wished the years already past so it
could be his own. Still, it was exciting, by far the grandest triumph of the
greatest man Scipio had ever seen. The
boys left the parade route temporarily as the column entered the Circus Maximus,
the huge chariot-racing arena filled with nearly a hundred thousand screaming
people. “Marcellus! Marcellus!” Deafening. Up
the Velabrum between the Capitoline and Palatine Hills the boys ran, then
paralleled the Forum Romanum, past Scipio’s and Lucius’s own home just a
block off the Forum. They waved to their mother and sister, just coming out into
the street to view the parade from the Forum, and raced on by, up to the head of
Rome’s civic center. They elbowed through the crowd and staked out a good
vantage point on the flank of the Capitol, with a view straight down the Forum,
past temples and shops and the Senate House, every staircase, podium, and
windowsill jammed with screaming spectators. The
parade came into the Forum after winding through the streets of Rome, and Marcus
Marcellus himself pulled to a halt just below them in his gilded antique
chariot—“Marcellus! Marcellus!”—dressed in the purple robes and face
painted with red minim. No more stunning figure could be possible in
their world. A handsome man, Marcellus’s good looks were elevated to
magnificence. He looked powerful, kingly, brilliant, savage. The
boys watched only until the Gallic prisoners, so impressive for their great
stature and gaudy costumes, had been led off to drop through a hole and there
meet the strangler in the underground chamber of the Tullianum, Rome’s only
prison. Unseen
by the throngs, unfortunately, for every person there would give his arm to
watch these mighty perish in the service of their captor’s greater glory. Then
up to the Capitol for another viewpoint, on the steps of the Temple of Jupiter
Capitolinus. The boys joined the crowd of people cheering and exclaiming
repeatedly as huge freighters with big rattling wheels and low sides were
diverted up the hill to the Arx of the Capitol for storage in the Temple of Juno
Moneta. They overflowed with finely-worked silver and gold goblets, plates, and
jewelry; chests overflowing with figurines, wine flagons, mirrors, arms; piles
of rich cloth and clothing, polished furniture, and glittering horse tack
confiscated from the subdued Gallic nobility. Splendid spoils. Splendid. Both
rich and exotic. “Marcellus!”
the spectators cried. Garlands and colorful banners hung everywhere. Trumpets
blared. Beside
the altar at the foot of the temple stairs, Marcellus stood like the great god
himself as the priests began his sacrifice. “Don’t
make a mistake,” Scipio muttered. Every gesture and act must be done
correctly—or they would have to start over, for to secure the aid and
blessings of the great god required strict fulfillment of ever-practical
Rome’s end of the contract. Only if it was done with punctilious correctness
was Jupiter Optimus Maximus bound by the ceremony. Please, please, don’t make
a mistake. Scipio
devoured the scene as the priests enjoined the god’s acceptance of the
offerings to come, an offering of incense and wine saluting the great god’s
supremacy. Marcellus and the temple custodian stood by as the priests prepared
the first animal, sprinkling its head with wine and salted flour. The
officiating priest passed his knife lightly along the beast’s spine,
transferring the victim to Jupiter’s possession. Then came the crucial moment.
A
specialist rose high on his toes, raised his iron hammer over his head, and
brought it down hard, stunning the ox. A shiver passed through Scipio’s groin
as the animal slumped to its knees, where it waved its head from side to side,
up and down. The priests watched the animal’s movements closely, for they were
one means of divining the will of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. There
was more to come, however. Scipio watched Lucius from the corner of his eye.
Lucius had yet to witness a sacrifice of this importance. Lucius stared
unblinking out of avid eyes, his mouth a little open. He seemed not to breathe. Another
specialist slit the beast’s throat with his knife and caught the first blood
in a silver bowl, which he poured over the altar. As the beautiful white beast
slumped, the headsman brought down a mighty stroke of his broad axe to sever the
head. “I’d
like that job,” said nine-year-old Lucius. “Especially cutting off the
head.” Scipio
looked at his blood-thirsty sibling with pity, though he secretly remembered
having thought the same thing around Lucius’s age. Other
priests quickly skinned the ox and cut it up. After the haruspex examined
the ox’s steaming entrails for signs of the gods’ approval, he placed them
in a pot on the altar fire to cook. More meat, the clean meat, went on the altar
to roast. In a moment, Marcellus and several officials ate token pieces of the
roasted meat, blood still dripping from it, while the bones and fat went into
the fire to burn for the god, basted with salted flour and wine, their hot aroma
reaching into the crowd. Slaves bore the rest of the meat up into the temple,
where it would be prepared for Marcellus’s triumphal feast. Smoke curled up
from the altar, hot, pungent, ecstatic. Lucius
was fidgeting long before the second ox had been sacrificed and beheaded,
despite his earlier avid interest in the blood. When
the sacrifice was completed, Marcellus waved again, beaming a wide smile from
his handsome but outlandish painted face, and descended the steps. “Marcellus!
Marcellus!” Now
he deviated from the normal triumphal procedure: he followed the chariot bearing
his captured Gallic armor mounted on a small tree polished bone white as it was
moved to the nearby Temple of Jupiter Feretrius. A forest of old war trophies
already surrounded the small building, and a path had been cleared for the
chariot. Jupiter Feretrius was that aspect of Jupiter that blessed the weapons
of war, and it was to this god that Marcellus had vowed the Gallic king’s
armor. The
grave triumphator stood by as priests lifted the armor and tree down from the
wagon. “Marcellus! Marcellus!” Then
he paced behind them, slow, measured steps, stately, as they carried the
offering past a sacred oak and inside the small temple, where it would be set up
at the altar for a prescribed period. Eventually, the priests would place it on
display inside the temple’s cella, where any citizen could come to
inspect it—this was one trophy that would not sit out in the yard in the
rain—and by inspecting it be reminded of the hero who had won it in single
combat: the spolia opima. The
hero. Truly he was, and compared to his magnificence, Scipio had that day been a
skinny, homely fourteen-year-old boy with dreams so unrealistic he’d sooner be
crowned king of kingless Rome there on the Capitol, that very moment. “Marcellus!
Marcellus!” One more time. With
the last of the laughing, jostling celebrators brushing past him to descend the
street, Scipio had stood that day looking out over the city he knew so well. He
could name her streets and find anything within her walls. Smoke and dust rose
over her in the early afternoon sun—Rome. Her ceaseless clamor sounded to him
like sea surf from his post atop the Capitol—Rome. The receding crowd boiled
and roiled down the Clivus like heavy rain sluicing off a hillock—Rome. Like
a Forum prostitute clutching her fee, she’d dropped her gown, its billowy
folds tucked into meanders of the Tiber River. A haze of smoke from countless
fires floated over the small sea of white stuccoed houses topped with
terracotta. In the Forum and on the Capitol, a dozen brightly-painted wooden and
tufa temples angled this way and that, set against the Forum Romanum’s
arbitrary northwestern-to-southeastern slant between the Esquiline, Palatine,
and Capitoline Hills. “She’s
a hungry bitch,” Uncle Gnaeus had once said to Scipio. Scipio
agreed. She had gorged on the rest of Italy over the past century, then eaten
Sicily with an appetite that stunned the Carthaginians, and finally gobbled
Sardinia for the third course, and Scipio saw no end to the hunger. Perhaps she
would end up eating the world—certainly would if it were up to men like Uncle
Gnaeus and his consular colleague, Marcellus. That would be fine with Scipio. To
him, about to take his own place in the ranks, Rome felt like a husky young
legionary, hungry for adventure, raw as country dirt, full of the lust for
glory. Still
both elated and subdued by the triumph that was not his, for a long moment he
surveyed the length of the Forum Romanum. He saw himself approaching the Capitol
in the ancient gilded chariot behind four sleek white horses, face dark red with
minim, body clothed in purple,
joyously brandishing aloft the laurel branch and the scepter. Yes, he believed
this if he believed anything. Up to this same Capitol he would mount one day,
here to sacrifice his oxen before the sublime temple and to consecrate his own
great victories to Rome’s gods, stirring victories won on far fields of
battle, and the people of Rome would cry in his honor: “Hail the triumph!” And
“Scipio! Scipio!” Of
course, in his grand vision it was his fourteen-year-old self under the minim,
a slight figure beneath the purple. There
was only one negative voice among the cheers he heard in his head. In winning
the spolia opima, Marcus Marcellus had equaled Romulus, the
great founder of Rome. The little voice in Scipio’s head kept insistently
asking: “Why did you live in an age that contained Marcellus? How can you
possibly ever exceed Marcellus? And yet you must.” He
raised both fists above his head. The laurel and the scepter. Blood, not his
own, would have begun to dry on his hands. “I
will.” Only
how, he still wondered, and wondered more every day. Why does Marcellus have to
be so good? It’s not fair! Scipio
remembered too the day he and Lucius had ridden out with their father to meet
Uncle Gnaeus and Marcellus coming home at the head of their legions for that
triumphal parade. How the crowds lining the road into the city had cheered as
they came marching into the Campus Martius, Scipio thrilling to the feel of
riding at the head of legions even though they were not his own. “Marcellus!
Marcellus!” they cried. What was a Hannibal beside that? The
trouble was, as Scipio kept thinking as he followed Lucius and Marcus Livius
across the bridge from Tiber Island again and all the way home—the same
thoughts that had obsessed him for three long years since Marcellus’s master
stroke: What was a Scipio beside that, and what of Scipio’s dreams? Next section of II. Scipio, Rome, 219 - 218 B.C. Back to Top
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