During the nineties Marius had gone shopping for real estate on the coast along from Naples. So had most of Rome’s super-rich, of course, but Marius’ investment in an area notorious for its indolence and effeminacy had raised particular eyebrows. Location, location, location: the great general had chosen a spot just south of the Lucrine Lake, where his villa would be conveniently situated not only for Orata’s oyster-beds, but also for the sulphur baths of the nearby spa town of Baiae. The perfect retirement home, in other words – and, as such, a public-relations disaster. Shellfish and health resorts were not what the Romans cared to associate with their war heroes. The satirists had a field day. The man of steel, they jeered, had grown soft and obese.
But this mockery was misdirected. Marius’ weight problems were only common gossip in the first place because, far from lounging by the side of his pool, the old general had chosen to remain in the public eye. Rome was the only conceivable theatre for a man of his fame, and Marius had never had the slightest intention of retiring. Ironically, this could be read in the architecture of the notorious villa itself. Built on a natural promontory, it mimicked the layout as well as the situation of a legionary camp, and displayed an enthusiasm for entrenchment that had always been the hallmark of Marius’ generalship. In its blending of the military virtues with imposing splendour, it was in fact the perfect expression of how the great general liked to see himself.
One of his former officers, inspecting the villa, could only exclaim in rueful approbation that, compared to his old commander, everyone else was blind. In the summer of 89 BC that officer had good reason to appreciate the qualities that made for an exemplary encampment. Down the coast from Marius’ villa, smoke billowed out over the orchards and vineyards of Campania as Lucius Cornelius Sulla, in command of a vast army of thirteen legions, blockaded the rebel-held cities of the plain, forcing their surrender one by one. No more apprenticeships for Sulla. Instead, a career marked by the struggle to emerge from Marius’ shadow had finally brought him a reputation as perhaps the ablest officer in the war. Yet even though the rivalry between the two men, veteran general and ambitious protégé, had long since grown poisonous, Sulla never made the mistake of underestimating his old commander. Where others saw marks of flabby degeneracy in Marius’ villa, Sulla found inspiration.
It was not only that its siting served as an object lesson in the science of entrenchment. On a coastline thronged with the resorts of the ruling classes the magnificence of Marius’ estate stood out. Traditional Roman morality may have frowned upon conspicuous consumption, but it also fostered competition as the essence of life. It was his clients’ scrabbling after status symbols that had enabled Orata to make such a killing. No Roman could afford to lose face, not even when it came to having a swimming pool installed. To the nobility, a villa was less important as a holiday home than as a public display of its owner’s splendour and high birth.
And yet Marius was a provincial. His breeding lacked pedigree, his manners polish. He had won his prestige on raw ability alone. If his villa loomed above those of the aristocracy, then it served as all the more vivid a symbol of the status that an outsider could hope to win in the Roman Republic. And Marius’ status was indisputable. Not only had he won election to just about every magistracy going – often several times over – but he had even married a bona fide Julian, patrician and still proud of it, despite her family’s decline. So it was that a nobody from Arpinum could claim that he slept with a descendant of the goddess of love. Naturally, none of this did anything to boost the great man’s popularity with the establishment. Even so, Marius’ example was one that Sulla, though himself a patrician, would have been eager – and indeed anxious – to absorb.
For the younger man’s career too had been a struggle against the circumstances of his upbringing. Despite his noble birth, his father had died leaving him virtually penniless, and throughout his youth Sulla’s means had been humiliatingly disproportionate to his pretensions. He had gradually sunk into a world of seedy lodgings and even seedier companions – comics, prostitutes and drag-queens – to whom, however, he would display a touching loyalty all his life, to the immense scandal of his peers. Sulla had relished thedemi-monde even as he struggled to escape from it; nor was he ever to lose his taste for slumming. Hard drinking and wisecracking, he combined the aptitudes of a bar-fly with the natural talents of a gigolo, being as physically striking as he was charming, with piercing blue eyes and hair so golden that it was almost red. Ultimately, indeed, it had been sex appeal that had redeemed him from the ranks of the déclassé, for one of Rome’s best-paid courtesans had grown so obsessed with him that in her will she had left him everything she owned. At around the same time Sulla’s stepmother had also died, having similarly appointed him her sole heir. Only at thirty, an age when most nobles had already spent years climbing the slippery pole of advancement, had Sulla at last found himself with the funds to launch his political career.
From that point on he had sought and gained prestige with a rare brilliance. His talents may have been exceptional, but not his ambition, for in Rome a man was reckoned to be nothing without the fame that accrued from glorious deeds. Whether won in warfare or political office, the reward such fame brought was the opportunity to try for ever greater achievements and ever greater renown. And at the summit of this relentless uphill race, a summit to which Sulla was now drawing close, the supreme prize beckoned. This, of course, was the consulship – still, more than four centuries after its inauguration, a magistracy of literally regal scope. If Sulla could only win election to this office, then his authority would be sanctioned by the trappings, as well as the powers, of the ancient kings. Not only would he inherit the toga bordered with royal purple and a special chair of state; he would also be accompanied by lictors, a bodyguard of twelve men, each bearing on his shoulder the fasces, a bundle of scourging rods, most dreaded of all the attributes of monarchy. An escort, in short, sufficient to reassure anyone that he had indeed reached the very top.
Not that he would ever stay there for long. A consul was no tyrant. His fasces served as symbols not of oppression but of an authority freely bestowed by the people. Subject to the whims of the voters, limited to a single year in power, and accompanied in office by colleagues their precise equal, magistrates of the Republic had little choice but to behave in office with scrupulous propriety. No matter how tempestuous a citizen’s ambitions, they rarely broke the bounds of the Romans’ respect for tradition. What the Republic fostered it also served to trammel.
And so it had always been. Rare was a high achiever who had not been oppressed by the resulting sense of tension. The ideals of the Republic served to deny the very hunger they provoked. As a result, the fate of a Roman who had tasted the sweetness of glory might often be a consuming restlessness, the gnawing, unappeasable agony of an addict. So it was that Marius, even in his sixties, and with countless honours to his name, still dreamed of beating his rivals to the command of the war against Mithridates. And so it was that Sulla, even were he to win the consulship, would continue to be taunted by the example of his old commander. Just as Marius’ villa outshone all others on the Campanian coast, so too did his prestige outrank that of any other former consul. Most men were confined by precedent and opportunity to holding the consulship once in their lives. Marius had held the office an unprecedented six times. He liked to claim that a fortuneteller had promised him a seventh.
No wonder that Sulla loathed him. Loathed him, and dreamed of winning the same greatness that Marius had won.