The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough Read Free Book Online Page B

mistress? He shrugged, sneered. There were worse fates, worse places. But not, said a voice at the back of his mind, for a man who should be entering the Senate today.

    3

    The trouble with being an anointed sovereign visiting the city of Rome was that one could not cross its pomerium, its sacred boundary. So Jugurtha, King of Numidia, was forced to spend his New Year's Day kicking his heels in the outrageously expensive villa he was renting on the higher slopes of the Pincian Hill, overlooking the huge bend in the Tiber which enclosed the Campus Martius. The agent who had secured the villa for him had raved about its outlook, the view into the distance of the Janiculum and the Vatican Hill, the green sward of both the little Tiber-bounded plains, Martius and Vaticanus, the broad blue band of the big river. Bet there were no rivers the size of dear old Father Tiber in Numidia! the presumptuous little agent had burbled, all the while concealing the fact that he was acting for a senator who professed undying loyalty to Jugurtha's cause, yet was mighty anxious to close a deal for his villa that would keep him well supplied with the most costly of freshwater eels for months to come. Why did they think any man—let alone a king!—who was not a Roman was automatically a fool and a dupe? Jugurtha was well aware of who owned the villa, well aware too that he was being swindled in the matter of its rent; but there were times and places for frankness, and Rome at the moment when he closed the deal for the villa was not a place or a time for frankness.
    From where he sat on the loggia in front of the vast peristyle-garden, his view was unimpeded. But to Jugurtha it was a small view, and when the wind was right the stench of the nightsoil fertilizing the market gardens of the outer Campus Martius around the Via Recta was strong enough to make him wish he had elected to live further out, somewhere around Bovillae or Tusculum. Used to the enormous distances of Numidia, he thought the fifteen-mile ride from Bovillae or Tusculum into Rome a mere trifle. And—since it turned out he could not enter the city anyway—what was the point in being housed close enough to spit over their accursed sacred boundary?
    If he turned ninety degrees he could, of course, see the back cliffs of the Capitol and the wrong end of the mighty temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus—in which, at this very moment, his agents assured him, the new consuls were holding the first senatorial meeting of their year in office.
    How did one deal with the Romans? If he only knew that, he wouldn't be the worried man he admitted to himself he was.

    In the beginning it had seemed simple enough. His grandfather had been the great Masinissa, who had forged the Kingdom of Numidia out of the wreckage left strewn up and down two thousand miles of North African coast by Rome's defeat of Punic Carthage. At first Masinissa's gathering of power to himself had been with the open connivance of Rome; though later, when he had grown uncomfortably powerful and the Punic flavor of his organization gave Rome flutters of disquiet about the rise of a new Carthage, Rome turned somewhat against him. Luckily for Numidia, Masinissa had died at the right moment, and, understanding only too well that a strong king is always succeeded by a weakling, he left Numidia to be divided by Scipio Aemilianus among his three sons. Clever Scipio Aemilianus! He didn't carve up Numidia's territory into thirds; he carved up the kingly duties instead. The eldest got custody of the treasury and the palaces; the middle son was appointed Numidia's war leader; and the youngest inherited all the functions of law and justice. Which meant the son with the army didn't have the money to foment rebellion, the son with the money didn't have the army to foment rebellion, and the son with the law on his side had neither money nor army to foment rebellion.
    Before time and accumulating resentment might have fomented rebellion