The Grass Crown by Colleen McCullough

discovered, surprising comfort. Where possible the Roman nobility on the road stayed in privately owned villas, either belonging to friends or opened by a letter of introduction; it was a form of hospitality sure to be repaid, and therefore not felt to be an imposition. But beyond Beneventum they had mostly to avail themselves of inns, none of which, Julia now realized, could have accommodated them in their old state.
    The heat continued remorselessly, for the southern end of the peninsula was dry and largely lacking in shade along the main roads, but the quicker pace at which the party traveled at least varied the monotony and offered a watery solace more often—a swimming hole in a river, or some flat-roofed, mud-brick town with sufficient business acumen to offer baths.
    So the Greek-colonized fertility of the coastal plains around Tarentum was very welcome, Tarentum even more so. It was still a town more Greek than Roman, of less importance than of yore, when it had been the terminus of the Via Appia. Now most traffic went to Brundisium, the main point of departure between Italy and Macedonia. Whitewashed and austere, a dazzling contrast to the blue of sea and sky, the green of fields and forests, the rusts and greys of mountain crags, Tarentum professed itself delighted to greet the great Gaius Marius. They stayed in the comfortable coolness of the house of the chief ethnarch, though these days he was a Roman citizen, and pretended he was more at ease being called a duumvir than an ethnarch.
    As at many other places along the Via Appia, Marius and the town’s more important men gathered to speak of Rome, and of Italy, and of the strained relations at present existing between Rome and her Italian Allies. Tarentum was a Latin Rights colony, its senior magistrates—the two men called duumviri—entitled to assume the full Roman citizenship for themselves and their posterity. But its roots were Greek, it was as old or older than Rome; it had been an outpost of Sparta, and in culture and habits, the old Spartan mores persisted still.
    There was, Marius discovered, much resentment of the newer Brundisium, and this in turn had led to a great deal of sympathy for the Italian Allied citizens within the lower strata of the town.
    “Too many Italian Allied soldiers have died serving in Roman armies commanded by military imbeciles,” said the ethnarch heatedly to Marius. “Their farms are untended, their sons unsired. And there’s an end to money in Lucania, in Samnium, in Apulia! The Italian Allies are obliged to equip their legions of auxiliaries, and then pay to keep them in the field on Rome’s behalf! For what, Gaius Marius? So that Rome can keep a road between Italian Gaul and Spain open? What use is that to an Apulian or a Lucanian? When is he ever likely to use it? So that Rome can bring wheat from Africa and Sicily to feed Roman mouths? How much grain in time of famine is put into a Samnite mouth? It is many years since a Roman in Italy paid any kind of direct tax to Rome. But we of Apulia and Calabria, Lucania and Bruttium, never cease to pay Roman taxes! I suppose we should thank Rome for the Via Appia—or Brundisium should, at any rate. But how often does Rome appoint a curator of the Via Appia who keeps it in any sort of decent fettle? There’s one section—you must have passed over it—where a flash flood washed out the very roadbed twenty years ago! But has it been repaired? No! And will it be repaired? No! Yet Rome tithes us and taxes us, and takes our young men from us to fight in her foreign wars, and they die, and the next thing we know, some Roman landlord has his foot in our door, and our lands are being gobbled up. He brings slaves in to tend his huge flocks, chains them to work, locks them in barracks to sleep, and buys more when they die. Nothing does he spend with us, nothing does he invest with us. We don’t see one sestertius of the money he rakes in, nor does he use our people as employees. He