Roma.The novel of ancient Rome, стр. 120

“What place is this?” he whispered.

“The Grove of the Furies,” said Gaius in a hollow voice. “Tisiphone, Megaera, and Allecto: the vengeful sisters who punish sinful mortals with madness. Only black sheep can be sacrificed to them. Do you see their images on the altar? They carry whips and torches. Their hair is made of snakes. They’re older than Jupiter. They were born of the blood that was spilled when Cronus the Titan castrated his father Uranus-born of a crime of a son against his father. Yet I’ve always honored my father, and my grandfather! Why have the Furies led me here?”

He dropped to his knees before the altar. Shouts echoed amid the treetops. Their pursuers were drawing near.

“Philocrates, do you have my sword?”

The young slave quailed. “Master, please-”

“Put an end to me, Philocrates. At the Temple of Diana, I lost my nerve. I let them stop me. Do it for me, Philocrates. Do it now!” He threw back his head and raised his chest.

“Master, I can’t bear to do it.”

“I command you, Philocrates!”

Weeping and trembling, the young slave turned the blade on himself and fell forward. His cry of anguish reverberated though the woods. The pursuers heard and shouted to one another. They were very close.

Gaius knelt over the slave. He stroked the youth’s hair, then pulled the sword from his chest. He looked up at Lucius and extended the hilt toward him.

“This is what the Furies want,” Gaius whispered. “This is what they demand of you, Lucius. You brought about this crisis, when you slew Antyllius. Now you must end it.”

“By doing the thing I least desire in all the world to do?” cried Lucius.

“Would you allow me to be tortured and torn to pieces by my enemies?”

Lucius took the sword. He could not look at Gaius’s face. He circled him, knelt behind him, and clutched him tightly with one arm. He raised the blade to Gaius’s throat.

With his last breath, Gaius hissed a curse. “Let them be slaves of the Senate forever!”

Lucius drew the blade across Gaius’s throat. Gaius convulsed. Blood flowed warm and wet over Lucius’s encircling arm.

Lucius drew back and staggered to his feet. Still twitching, Gaius’s body fell beside that of the dead slave. Lucius dropped the blade between them.

He stepped back into the shadows and hid himself amid the foliage just as the pursuers entered the little clearing.

“Numa’s balls! Dead already!” one of them shouted. “Look at the two of them-he let the slave kill him, then the slave killed himself. The coward cheated us!”

“Doesn’t matter,” said another. “The bounty’s just as good, no matter who killed him. The consul Opimius promised a fat reward for the head of each and every citizen on his list, and the fattest reward of all is for the head of Gaius Gracchus. I claim it!”

Beating back the others with a snarl, the man raised his sword and hacked at Gaius’s neck until the head came free. He lifted it by the hair and swung the trophy in a circle over his head, whooping with triumph. Blood and bits of gore spattered the onlookers and stained the altar. A few drops penetrated the foliage and struck Lucius in the face, but he did not flinch.

“What about the slave?” someone said, giving the corpse a kick.

“Worthless. Leave it for now. Back to the city, my friends, where there’s plenty more killing to do!”

Nauseated, burning with anger, paralyzed by fear, Lucius remained silent and unseen in the shadows. After the men had gone, he reached up to touch his breast, and felt the fascinum beneath his tunic. Amazed that he was still alive, he whispered a prayer to whatever power had seen fit to protect him.

In the days that followed, under sanction of the Ultimate Decree, more than three thousand Roman citizens were put to death. The Gracchan movement was obliterated.

Remarkably, Lucius survived the massacre unscathed. For many days he remained secluded in his house, waiting for a banging on the door that never came. His name never appeared on the official list of enemies of the state. He could not account for this omission. To be sure, toward the end, his relationship with Gaius had grown less public and more private. For whatever reason, Gaius’s enemies overlooked him, a stroke of good fortune over which Lucius never ceased to puzzle.

It seemed to Lucius there was no rhyme or reason to his destiny. He had shunned Tiberius and Blossius, and by doing so had survived their follies, to his shame and regret; he had boldly embraced the cause of Gaius, and yet had survived his downfall, to even greater shame and regret. Lucius concluded that his was a charmed life, curiously immune to ordinary reversals of fortune. In the years that remained to him, he turned his back on politics and devoted himself to his career, which kept him very busy; there were always more roads to be built. He also became more religious. Each night, before going to bed, he said a prayer of thanksgiving to the god of the fascinum who had saved his life when death was very near. It was in his bed that he died many years later, a beloved husband and father, an accomplished builder of roads, and a much respected member of the Equestrian order.

The consul Opimius was eventually brought to trial for perpetrating the slaughter of Roman citizens, but he was acquitted; the Ultimate Decree was upheld as a legal act, and thus shielded him from punishment. Later in his career, however, he was convicted for taking bribes while serving as ambassador to King Jugurtha of Numidia. Opimius became a bitter and much hated man in his twilight years, and he died in disgrace. His legacy to Roma was his authorship of the Ultimate Decree, which, as Gaius had predicted, was to be invoked repeatedly in the increasingly chaotic, increasingly bloody years to come.

Following the example of her father at the end of his life, Cornelia departed from Roma and retired to a villa on the coast, at a promontory called Misenum, taking Menenia with her for companionship. At Misenum she entertained visiting dignitaries and philosophers, and became legendary for her Stoic fortitude in the face of so much tragedy. To those who asked, she was happy to share her memories of her father, but she was even happier to talk about her sons. She spoke of Tiberius and Gaius without grief or tears, as if she were speaking of great men from the early days of the Republic. After her death, a statue of her was placed in the city and became a beloved shrine for the women of Roma.

Cornelia had often expressed her desire to be remembered not as the daughter of Africanus, but as the mother of the Gracchi. So it came to pass. In death, the two brothers remained as fervently beloved, and as viciously hated, as they had been in life, and the double tragedy of their deaths made them figures of legend. Like their mother, they were immortalized with statues, and shrines were established on the spots where they died.

Either as exemplars of evil or paragons of virtue, the names of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus would be invoked in speeches and debates for as long as the Republic would endure.

HEADS IN THE FORUM

81 B.C.

“How did it come to this?” muttered Lucius Pinarius, talking to himself to keep up his courage as he hurried across the Forum. Despite the mild spring weather, he wore a hooded cloak. He nervously fingered the fascinum that hung at his breast-a family keepsake from his late grandfather-and whispered a prayer to the gods to keep him safe.

The lowering sun of late afternoon loomed blood-red above the rooftops, casting long shadows. Quickening his pace, Lucius passed the Rostra. Nowadays, the beaks of captured ships were not the only trophies that adorned the speaker’s platform. Lucius tried not to look, but despite himself he took a quick glance at the severed heads planted on the row of tall spikes that now encircled the platform. Some of the heads had been on the Rostra for a month or more and were in an advanced state of decay, the features no longer recognizable. Others, dripping blood, had been placed there so recently that their gaping mouths and wide-open eyes still expressed shock and horror.