The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough Page A

though it was a fact the King preferred to forget. Jugurtha's despised mother had been a simple nomad girl from a backward tribe of the Gaetuli Berbers, a mere nothing of a girl who by some quirk of fate had owned a face and a body akin to Helen of Troy's. And the King's companion on this miserable New Year's Day was his half brother, son of his humble mother and the court baron to whom Jugurtha's father had married her for the sake of convenience.  The half brother's name was Bomilcar, and he was very loyal.
    "Why are we so afraid of them?" Jugurtha asked again, more urgently, more despairingly.
    Bomilcar sighed. "The answer's simple, I would think," he said. "It wears a steel helmet a bit like a basin turned upside down, a brownish-red tunic, and over that a long shirt of knitted chain mail. It carries a silly little short sword, a dagger almost as big, and one or two tiny-headed spears. It isn't a mercenary. It isn't even a pauper. It's called a Roman infantryman."
    Jugurtha grunted, ended in shaking his head. "Only a part of the answer, Baron. Roman soldiers are perishable; they die."
    "They die very hard," said Bomilcar.
    "No, there's more to it than that. I don't understand! You can buy them like bread in a bakery, and that ought to mean they're as soft inside as bread. But they aren't."
    "Their leaders, you mean?"
    "Their leaders. The eminent Conscript Fathers of the Senate. They are utterly corrupt! Therefore they ought to be crawling with decay. Soft to melting, insubstantial. But they aren't. They're as hard as flint, as cold as ice, as subtle as a Parthian satrap. They never give up. Take hold of one, tame him to servility, and the next moment he's gone, you're dealing with a different face in a different set of circumstances."
    "Not to mention that all of a sudden there's one you need whom you can't buy—not because he doesn't have a price, but because whatever his price is, you don't have it—and I'm not referring to money," said Bomilcar.
    "I loathe them all," said Jugurtha between his teeth.
    "So do I. Which doesn't get rid of them, does it?"
    "Numidia is mine!" cried its king. "They don't even want it, you know! All they want to do is interfere. Meddle!"
    Bomilcar spread out his hands. "Don't ask me, Jugurtha, because I don't know. All I do know is that you are sitting here in Rome, and the outcome is on the laps of the gods."
    Indeed it is, thought the King of Numidia, returning to his thoughts.

    When young Adherbal had escaped and gone to Rome six years ago, Jugurtha had known what to do, and had done it quickly. Off to Rome went a team of his ambassadors bearing gold, silver, jewels, works of art, whatever was likely to tickle a Roman noble's fancy. Interesting, that you could never bribe them with women or boys. Only with negotiable goods. The outcome of his embassage had been reasonably satisfactory, given the circumstances.
    They were obsessed with committees and commissions, the Romans, and enjoyed nothing better than to send off a small party of officials to the remotest ends of the earth, there to investigate, pontificate, adjudicate, ameliorate. Anyone else would just march in at the head of an army, but the Romans would turn up in togas escorted only by lictors, nary a soldier within emergency call; they would proceed to issue their orders, and expect to be obeyed just as if they had arrived at the head of an army. And mostly they were obeyed.
    Which returned him to his original question: why are we so afraid of them? Because we are. We are. But why? Maybe because there's always a Marcus Aemilius Scaurus among them?
    It had been Scaurus who prevented the Senate from deciding in favor of Jugurtha when Adherbal had gone bleating to Rome. A lone voice in a body of three hundred men! Yet he had prevailed, kept hammering away at them until he, the lone voice, actually won the lot of them over to his side. Thus it had been Scaurus who forced a compromise acceptable neither to Jugurtha nor to Adherbal: