Free The Tribune's Curse by John Maddox Roberts Page A

to depart for his province without interference.”
    “They just shouldn’t be allowed to take office, eh?” I said, studying the fine new scar on his forehead. In the elections of the year before, he had tried to stop Pompey and Crassus from standing for consul. In the subsequent riot he had been badly injured.
    “It was Crassus’s hired thugs who started the brawl,” Cato said, stiffly.
    “I’m sorry I missed it.” I sighed.
    “You’d have been in your element.” He looked uphill. “Here they come.”
    A hush fell over the great mob as the procession made its way down the steeply sloping Capitoline Street. First came two files of lictors, twelve in each file. One file, Pompey’s, wore togas. The lictors of Crassus wore red tunics cinched with broad, black leather belts studded with bronze—field dress for lictors accompanying a promagistrate in his province. Behind them strode the consuls.
    “Pompey is with him,” Cato said, relieved. “He may make it to the gate yet.”
    It was a splendid gesture on Pompey’s part. He had set aside his personal animosity to see his colleague safely out of Rome. Pompey was still an immensely popular man, and his presence just might avert violence. Close behind Pompey, I saw an enormous man who had a mustache in the Gallic fashion. He wore a toga the size of a ship’s sail, so I knew he was a citizen. I hadnever before seen a Roman citizen wearing a mustache.
    “Who’s the hairy-lipped giant?” I asked.
    “Lucius Cornelius Balbus,” Cato said. “He’s a close friend of Pompey and Caesar. He soldiered under Pompey against Sertorius. Pompey gave him citizenship as a reward for heroism.” Of course, I had heard the name, and Caesar had spoken to me of him often, but this was the first look I’d had of him. He was from Gades, in Spain. The people around there are a mixture of Carthaginian and Greek and Gallic, with the latter predominating and probably accounting for his lip adornment.
    The year’s praetors walked behind the consuls, and I saw Milo and Metellus Scipio and a few others I knew. One of the Censors, Messala Niger, was with them, but his colleague, Servilius Vatia Isauricus, was not. Vatia was very elderly and probably had stayed home. I saw a man come from the crowd and fall in beside Milo. It was his brother-in-law, the almost equally handsome Faustus Sulla.
    “Senators!” Cato called. “Let us fall in behind the serving officials. We must not allow the dignity of public office to be molested by an unruly mob.”
Nicely put
, I thought. Nothing to indicate support for Pompey or Crassus, whom everyone knew to be among his personal enemies. Cato stepped forth fearlessly, muttering out of the side of his mouth: “Decius, stay close to me. Allienus, Fonteius, Aurelius Strabo, and Aurelius Flaccus, come to the front.” He called for others, assembling all the Senate’s most notorious veteran street brawlers; there was no lack of such men in that august body. When a man like Milo could make it all the way to praetor, you can imagine what the back benches were like.
    Slowly, we walked behind the men with the purple borders on their togas. There was still grumbling from the crowd, and Crassus made a show of ignoring it, but the presence of Pompey kept things from getting violent. I almost thought they were going to pull it off.
    The first disturbance came before we were out of the Forum. As if by magic the crowd parted before the lictors, and there stood the tribunes Ateius and Gallus with their staffs ranged behind them. Ateius raised a palm and cried out: “Marcus Licinius Crassus! As Tribune of the People, I forbid you to leave the City of Rome!”
    “Stand aside, Tribune!” Pompey shouted in a parade-ground voice that cracked through the Forum like a stone from a catapult.
    Ateius pointed at Crassus. “Arrest that man!” The tribunal assistants surged forward, but the lictors closed ranks. With a few brisk strokes of the
fasces
, Silvius and his