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

to Rome, where he was to be made to provide Gaius Memmius with the names of all those he had bribed throughout the years. Had he been required to answer before the Senate, the situation would not have been so perilous; but Jugurtha was to answer before the People.
    When Cassius the praetor arrived in Cirta and served the King with his summons, Jugurtha could not refuse to accompany him back to Rome. Only why! Why were they all so afraid? What could Rome actually do? Invade Numidia? There were always more Bestias in office than there were Gaius Memmiuses! Why then were they all so afraid? Was it the gall of the Romans, that they could calmly dispatch a single man to snap his fingers at the ruler of a great and rich land, and bring him to heel?
    Jugurtha had come to heel, meekly packed his trunks, tapped a few barons on the shoulder to accompany him, selected the fifty best men in the Royal Numidian Guard, and taken ship with Cassius the praetor. That had been two months ago. Two months in which very little had happened.
    Oh, Gaius Memmius had lived up to his word! He had summoned an Assembly of the Plebs in the Circus Flaminius, which lay outside the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city, and therefore constituted a venue Jugurtha the anointed sovereign could attend in person. The purpose of the meeting was to enable every interested Roman from highest to lowest personally to hear the King of Numidia answer Gaius Memmius's questions: whom had he bribed, how much money had he paid over? Everyone in Rome knew exactly the sort of questions Gaius Memmius was going to ask. So the Assembly in the Circus Flaminius was extremely well attended, the arena crowded, with latecomers accommodated in the wooden tiers of seats hoping even at the distance to be able to hear.
    However, Jugurtha still knew how to go about his defense; Spain and the years since had taught him too well ever to forget. He bought himself a tribune of the plebs.
    On the face of it, tribunes of the plebs were junior in the magisterial hierarchy and in senatorial rank. Tribunes of the plebs had no imperium—now there was a word the Numidian language had no equivalent for! Imperium! Imperium meant—well, the kind of authority a god on earth might possess. It was why a lone praetor could summon a great king to go with him. Provincial governors had imperium. Consuls had imperium. Praetors had imperium. The curule aediles had imperium. But each possessed a different strength or kind of imperium. The only tangible evidence of imperium was the lictor. Lictors were professional attendants who walked ahead of the owner of imperium to clear a path for him, carrying on their left shoulders the fasces, the bundles of rods lashed together with crimson cords.
    The censors didn't have imperium. Nor did the plebeian aediles. Nor did the quaestors. Nor—most important for Jugurtha's purposes—did the tribunes of the plebs. These last were the elected representatives of the plebs, that vast bulk of the Roman citizen body unable to claim the high distinction of being a patricius, a patrician. The patrician was the antique aristocrat, one whose family was listed among the Fathers of Rome. Four hundred years ago, when the Republic had been brand new, only the patrician had mattered. But as some plebeians gained money and power, and forced their way into Senate and curule chair, they wanted to be aristocrats too. The result: the nobilis, the nobleman. Thus was the patrician joined by the nobleman in a dual aristocracy. To be a nobleman, all that was necessary was to have a consul in the family, and there was nothing to stop a plebeian's becoming consul. Plebeian honor—and ambition—were satisfied.
    The plebs had their own assembly of government; no patrician could attend it, or vote in it. Yet so powerful had the plebs become—and so eclipsed the patricians—that this young body, the Plebeian Assembly, passed almost all the laws. Ten tribunes of the plebs were elected to look