The Grass Crown Read Online Free

for herself (he said), Scaurus then dealt with the girl (kindly yet firmly, he said), and made no secret of it among his friends and in the Forum.
    “Poor little thing, it was bound to happen,” he said warmly to several senators, making sure there were plenty more drifting in the background well within hearing distance. “I could wish she had picked someone other than a mere creature of Gaius Marius’s, but… He’s a pretty fellow, I suppose.”
    It was very well done, so well done that the Forum experts and the members of the Senate decided the real reason behind Scaurus’s opposition to Sulla’s candidacy lay in Sulla’s known association with Gaius Marius. For Gaius Marius, having been consul an unprecedented six times, was in eclipse. His best days were in the past, he couldn’t even gather sufficient support to stand for election as censor. Which meant that Gaius Marius, the so-called Third Founder of Rome, would never join the ranks of the most exalted consulars, all of whom had been censors. Gaius Marius was a spent force in Rome’s scheme of things, a curiosity more than a threat, a man who wasn’t cheered by anyone higher than the Third Class.
    Rutilius Rufus poured himself more wine. “Do you really intend to go to Pessinus?” he asked of Marius.
    “Why not?”
    “Why so? I mean, I could understand Delphi, or Olympia, or even Dodona. But Pessinus! Stuck out there in the middle of Anatolia—in Phrygia! The most backward, superstition-riddled, uncomfortable hole on earth! Not a decent drop of wine or a road better than a bridle track for hundreds of miles! Uncouth shepherds to right and to left, wild men from Galatia milling on the border! Really, Gaius Marius! Is it Battaces you’re anxious to see in his cloth-of-gold outfit with the jewels in his beard? Summon him to Rome again! I’m sure he’d be only too delighted to renew his acquaintance with some of our more modern matrons—they haven’t stopped weeping since he left.”
    Marius and Sulla were both laughing long before Rutilius Rufus reached the end of this impassioned speech; and suddenly the constraint of the evening was gone, they were at ease with each other and in perfect accord.
    “You’re going to have a look at King Mithridates,” said Sulla, and didn’t make it a question.
    The eyebrows writhed; Marius grinned. “What an extraordinary thing to say! Now why would you think that, Lucius Cornelius?”
    “Because I know you, Gaius Marius. You’re an irreligious old fart! The only vows I’ve ever heard you make were all to do with kicking legionaries up the arse, or conceited tribunes of the soldiers up the same. There’s only one reason why you’d want to drag your fat old carcass to the Anatolian wilderness, and that’s to see for yourself what’s going on in Cappadocia, and just how much King Mithridates has to do with it,” said Sulla, smiling more happily than he had in many months.
    Marius turned to Rutilius Rufus, startled. “I hope I’m not so transparent to everyone as I am to Lucius Cornelius!”
    It was Rutilius Rufus’s turn to smile. “I very much doubt that anyone else will even guess,” he said. “I for one believed you—you irreligious old fart!”
    Without volition (or so it seemed to Rutilius Rufus), Marius’s head turned to Sulla, and back they were discussing some grand new strategy. “The trouble is, our sources of information are completely unreliable,” Marius said eagerly. “I mean, who of any worth or ability has been out in that part of the world in years? New Men scrambled up as far as praetor—no one I’d rely on to make an accurate report. What do we really know?”
    “Very little,” said Sulla, utterly absorbed. “There have been some inroads into Galatia by King Nicomedes of Bithynia on the west and Mithridates on the east. Then a few years ago old Nicomedes married the mother of the little King of Cappadocia—she was the regent at the time, I think. And Nicomedes started