The Grass Crown by Colleen McCullough Page A

decreases our prosperity rather than increases it. The time has come, Gaius Marius, for Rome to be more generous to us, or let us go!”
    Marius had listened impassively to this long and very emotional speech, a more articulate version of the same theme he had heard everywhere along the Via Appia.
    “I will do what I can, Marcus Porcius Cleonymus,” he said gravely. “Indeed, I’ve been trying to do something for a number of years. That I’ve had little success is mostly due to the fact that many members of the Senate, those in senior government in Rome, neither travel the way I do, nor speak to local people—nor, Apollo help them!—use their eyes to see. You do certainly know that I have spoken up time and time again about the unforgivable wastage of lives in our Roman armies. And it would seem, I think, that the days when our armies were commanded by military imbeciles are largely over. If no one else taught the Senate of Rome that, I did. Since Gaius Marius the New Man showed all those noble Roman amateurs what generalship is all about, I notice that the Senate is more eager these days to give Rome’s armies to New Men of proven military worth.”
    “All well and good, Gaius Marius,” said Cleonymus gently, “but it cannot raise the dead from their ashes, nor put sons on our neglected farms.”
    “I know.”
    And as their ship put out to sea and spread its big square sail, Gaius Marius leaned on the rail watching Tarentum and its inlet disappear to a blue smudge, and then a nothing. And thought again about the predicament of the Italian Allies. Was it because he had so often been called an Italian—a non-Roman? Or was it because, for all his faults and weaknesses, he did own a sense of justice? Or was it rather that he simply couldn’t bear the bungling inefficiency behind it all? One thing of which he was utterly convinced: the day would come when Rome’s Italian Allies would demand a reckoning. Would demand the full Roman citizenship for every last man of the whole Italian peninsula, and maybe even Italian Gaul as well.
    A shout of laughter broke into his thoughts; he lifted himself off the rail and turned to find his son demonstrating that he was a good sailor, for the ship was moving in the teeth of a stiff breeze, and a poor sailor would by now have been retching miserably. Julia too was looking well and confident.
    “Most of my family settle down at sea,” she said when Marius joined her. “My brother Sextus is the only poor sailor, probably because of his wheezes.”
    The packet to Patrae plied that same route permanently, and made as much money from passengers as from cargo, so could offer Marius a cabin of sorts on deck; there was no doubt, however, that when Julia disembarked in Patrae, she was glad to do so. As Marius intended to sail down the Gulf of Corinth too, she refused to budge from Patrae until they had journeyed overland to make a pilgrimage to Olympia.
    “It’s so odd,” she said, riding a donkey, “that the world’s greatest sanctuary of Zeus should be tucked away in a backwater of the Peloponnese. I don’t know why, but I always used to think Olympia was at the foot of Mount Olympus.”
    “That’s the Greeks for you,” said Marius, who itched to get to Asia Province as quickly as possible, but didn’t have the heart to deny Julia these obviously welcome treats. Traveling with a woman was not his idea of an enjoyable time.
    In Corinth, however, he brightened up. When Mummius had sacked it fifty years earlier, all its treasures had been spirited back to Rome. The town itself had never recovered. Huddled around the base of the mighty rock called the Acrocorinth, many of its houses lay abandoned and crumbling, doors flapping eerily.
    “This is one of the places I had intended to settle my veterans,” Marius said a little grimly as they walked Corinth’s dilapidated streets. “Look at it! Crying for new citizens! Plenty of land fit for growing, a port on the Aegean side and