Free Fortune's Favorites by Colleen McCullough Page B

of Rome; each of them had been doing it for thirty years. Philippus was the more straightforward of the two, had been consul after several fruitless tries and even became censor under Cinna and Carbo, the zenith of a man's political career. Whereas Cethegus-a patrician Cornelius remotely related to Sulla-had remained in the background, preferring to wield his power by manipulating his fellow backbenchers in the Senate. They lay together talking loudly and ignoring everybody else.
    Three young ones also lay together ignoring everybody else-what a lovely trio! Verres, Catilina and Ofella. Villains all, Varro was sure of it, though Ofella was more concerned about his dignitas than any future pickings. Of Verres and of Catilina there could be no doubt; the future pickings ruled them absolutely.
    Another couch held three estimable, upright men- Mamercus, Metellus Pius and Varro Lucullus (an adopted Varro, actually the brother of Sulla's loyalest follower, Lucullus). They patently disapproved of Pompey, and made no attempt to conceal it.
    Mamercus was Sulla's son-in-law, a quiet and steady man who had salvaged Sulla's fortune and got his family safely to Greece.
    Metellus Pius the Piglet and his quaestor Varro Lucullus had sailed from Liguria to Puteoli midway through April, and marched across Campania to join Sulla just before Carbo's Senate mobilized the troops who might otherwise have stopped them. Until Pompey had appeared today, they had basked in the full radiance of Sulla's grateful approval, for they had brought him two legions of battle-hardened soldiers. However, most of their attitude was founded in the who of Pompey, rather than in the what or even in the why. A Pompeius from northern Picenum? An upstart, a parvenu. A non-Roman! His father, nicknamed The Butcher because of the way he conducted his wars, might have achieved the consulship and great political power, but nothing could reconcile him and his to Metellus Pius or Varro Lucullus. No genuine Roman, of senatorial family or not, would have, at the age of twenty-two, taken it upon himself-absolutely illegally!-to bring the great patrician aristocrat Lucius Cornelius Sulla an army, and then demand to become, in effect, Sulla's partner. The army which Metellus Pius and Varro Lucullus had brought Sulla automatically became his, to do with as he willed; had Sulla accepted it with thanks and then dismissed Metellus Pius and Varro Lucullus, they would perhaps have been angered, but they would have gone at once. Punctilious sticklers, both of them, thought Varro. So now they lay on the same couch glaring at Pompey because he had used the troops he had brought Sulla to elicit a top command neither his age nor his antecedents permitted. He had held Sulla to ransom.
    Of all of them, however, by far the most intriguing to Varro was Marcus Licinius Crassus. In the autumn of the previous year he had arrived in Greece to offer Sulla two and a half thousand good Spanish soldiers, only to find his reception little warmer than the one he had received from Metellus Pius in Africa during the summer.
    Most of the chilly welcome was due to the dramatic failure of a get-rich-quick scheme he and his friend the younger Titus Pomponius had engineered among investors in Cinna's Rome. It had happened toward the end of the first year, which saw Cinna joined with Carbo in the consulship, when money was beginning rather coyly to appear again; news had come that the menace of King Mithridates was no more, that Sulla had negotiated the Treaty of Dardanus with him. Taking advantage of a sudden surge of optimism, Crassus and Titus Pomponius had offered shares in a new Asian speculation. The crash occurred when word came that Sulla had completely reorganized the finances of the Roman province of Asia, that there would be no tax-gathering bonanza after all.
    Rather than stay in Rome to face hordes of irate creditors, both Crassus and Titus Pomponius had decamped. There was really only one place to go,