Many Mariuses — Caesar I: Fifty Talents
Rome, late 82 BC. A whitewashed board hangs in the Forum, and more names are added to it every day. Anyone on the list may be killed in the street, and the killer receives a reward and part of the victim’s property. The sons of the condemned may not hold office. These are Sulla’s proscriptions.
Sulla has won the second civil war and become dictator. Marius has been dead for four years, but that does not shield him from revenge: according to Cicero, Sulla has his ashes thrown into the river Anio. Now he settles accounts with Marius’s men. Hundreds die, perhaps thousands. Some land on the list not for their politics but for a handsome villa.
Plutarch tells of a man who read his own name on the board and cried out that his villa near Alba had been his undoing. A few steps farther on, someone killed him.
Sulla’s dictatorship is not the one Rome had known. In the past a dictator was appointed for six months to bring the state through a crisis. Sulla holds power with no time limit, and his decrees may not be challenged. Caesar will remember this when he himself becomes dictator one day.
The eighteen-year-old Caesar is doubly unlucky: Marius was the husband of his aunt, and Cinna was his father-in-law. Not everyone ends up on Sulla’s lists, though. Sometimes humility is enough. He demands one simple thing of Caesar: divorce Cornelia, Cinna’s daughter. Young Pompey, the dictator’s favorite, had divorced on a similar order and married Sulla’s stepdaughter. Friends tell Caesar: it is only a political marriage, say yes and live.
The price of refusal comes at once. Caesar loses Cornelia’s dowry and his family inheritance, and with them the priesthood of the flamen. Then he has to flee. He hides in the Sabine hills, northeast of Rome, shaken by a quartan fever, which today we would call malaria. According to Suetonius, he changes his hiding place almost every night. In the end he falls into the hands of Sulla’s men. Their commander, a certain Cornelius, lets him go for a bribe. The sum, two talents, is given only by Plutarch.
Why did Caesar refuse? The sources do not say, and historians guess. Perhaps out of love for Cornelia, with whom he later had a daughter, Julia. Perhaps out of pride. Perhaps out of cold calculation that whoever yields to a dictator once will go on yielding forever. Suetonius says only that nothing could make him do it.
Meanwhile in Rome, his mother is at work. The house of the Aurelii has influence with the dictator’s men. Relatives of Caesar’s mother, Aurelius Cotta and Mamercus Aemilius, plead for him, and so do the Vestal Virgins, whose pleas no one can decently refuse. Sulla holds out for a long time and finally gives way. But as he does, he speaks a sentence that will go down in history.
Did Sulla really say it? Both authors set down these words about two centuries later, and prophecies are easy to add when you know the ending. Suetonius also cites a second warning from Sulla: beware the badly belted boy (45). Both may have been invented after the fact. Yet there is something in them: Sulla sees a man who refused a dictator when others bent. Such a man cannot be bought with fear.
To be safe, Caesar leaves Italy and serves in the army in the province of Asia, under Marcus Thermus, and later in Cilicia. In 80 BC, at the storming of Mytilene on Lesbos, he saves the life of a Roman soldier and receives the civic crown of oak leaves. Mytilene was then the last city of Asia still resisting Rome after the war with Mithridates.
From the same service comes a rumor that will dog him to the end of his life. His commander sends Caesar to Bithynia, to King Nicomedes IV, to fetch ships. Caesar stays at the court suspiciously long. In Rome people begin to say he was the king’s lover. His enemies will call him “the queen of Bithynia,” and at his Gallic triumph in 46 BC his soldiers will sing bawdy songs about it.
Is it true? Suetonius collects these rumors with care, but they come from Caesar’s political enemies, and there is no proof. Historians cannot settle it. All we know for certain is that Caesar raged at these jibes and, according to Cassius Dio, denied them even under oath.
In 78 BC Sulla dies in his bed. Caesar returns to Rome but does not join the consul Lepidus, who is preparing an uprising: he trusts neither the man nor his chances. Instead, in 77 he goes to court and prosecutes the corrupt Dolabella, a former consul and governor of Macedonia. He loses, but according to Plutarch his speeches earn him fame as an excellent orator. He draws a cool conclusion: in Rome, without an army, power comes from the spoken word, and words must be honed by the best. The best teacher of oratory lives on Rhodes. Caesar decides to go to Rhodes.
He will not get there as fast as he planned. In winter, on the way to Rhodes, his ship will approach the island of Pharmacusa.