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Roman Gaius Marius was not.
    “I’ll fix you, boy!” he said aloud, and squeezed Julia.
    “What was that?” she asked.
    “In a few days we’re leaving for Pessinus, you and I and our son,” he said.
    She sat up. “Oh, Gaius Marius! Really? How wonderful! Are you sure you want to take us with you?”
    “I’m sure, wife. I don’t care a rush what the conventions say. We’re going to be away for two or three years, and that’s too long a time at my age to spend without seeing my wife and son. If I were a younger man, perhaps. And, since I’m journeying as a privatus, there’s no official obstacle to my taking my family along with me.” He chuckled. “I’m footing the bill myself.”
    “Oh, Gaius Marius!” She could find nothing else to say.
    “We’ll have a look at Athens, Smyrna, Pergamum, Nicomedia, a hundred other places.”
    “Tarsus?” she asked eagerly. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to travel the world!”
    He still ached, but the sleepiness surged back overwhelmingly. Down went his eyelids; his lower jaw sagged.
    For a few more moments Julia chattered on, then ran out of superlatives, and sat hugging her knees happily. She turned to Gaius Marius, smiling tenderly. “Dear love, I don’t suppose… ?” she asked delicately.
    Her answer was his first snore. Good wife of twelve years that she was, she shook her head gently, still smiling, and turned him onto his right side.

The Grass Crown
    2
    Having stamped out every last ember of the slave revolt in Sicily, Manius Aquillius had come home, if not in triumph, at least in high enough standing to have been awarded an ovation by the Senate. That he could not ask for a triumph was due to the nature of the enemy, who, being enslaved civilians, could not claim to be the soldiers of an enemy nation; civil wars and slave wars occupied a special niche in the Roman military code. To be commissioned by the Senate to put down a civil uprising was no less an honor and no less an undertaking than dealing with a foreign army and enemy, but the general’s right to claim a triumph was nonetheless denied. The triumph was the way the People of Rome were physically shown the rewards of war—the prisoners, the captured money, plunder of all descriptions from golden nails in once-kingly doors to packets of cinnamon and frankincense. For everything taken enriched the coffers of Rome, and the People could see with their own eyes how profitable a business war was—if you were Roman, that is, and being Roman, won. But in civil and slave uprisings there were no profits to be made, only losses to be endured. Property looted by the enemy and recaptured had to be returned to its rightful owners; the State could demand no percentage of it.
    Thus the ovation was invented. Like the triumph, it consisted of a procession along the same route; however, the general didn’t ride in the antique triumphal chariot, did not paint his face, did not wear triumphal garb; no trumpets sounded, only the less inspirational tweetling of flutes; and rather than a bull, the Great God received a sheep, thereby sharing the lesser status of the ceremony with the general.
    His ovation had well satisfied Manius Aquillius. Having celebrated it, he took his place in the Senate once more, and as a consular—an ex-consul—was asked to give his opinion ahead of a consular of equal standing but who had not celebrated a triumph or ovation. Tainted with the lingering odium of his parent, another Manius Aquillius, he had originally despaired of reaching the consulship. Some facts were hard to live down if a man’s family was only moderately noble; and the fact was that Manius Aquillius’s father had, in the aftermath of the wars following the death of King Attalus III of Pergamum, sold more than half the territory of Phrygia to the father of the present King Mithridates of Pontus for a sum of gold he had popped into his own purse. By rights the territory should have gone, together with the rest of King