The Grass Crown Read Free

go about the Forum and the city. Wherever Sulla went, there too would be Dalmatica, all muffled in draperies, hiding behind a plinth or a column, sure that no one noticed her.
    Very quickly Sulla learned to avoid places like the Porticus Margaritaria, where indeed a woman of a noble house might be expected to haunt the jeweler’s shops, and could claim innocent presence. That reduced her chances of actually speaking to him, but to Sulla her conduct was a resurrection of an old and awful nightmare—of the days when Julilla had buried him beneath an avalanche of love letters she or her girl had slipped into the sinus of his toga at every opportunity, in circumstances where he didn’t dare draw attention to their actions. Well, that had ended in a marriage, a virtually indissoluble confarreatio union which had lasted—bitter, importunate, humiliating—until her death by suicide, yet one more terrible episode in an endless procession of women hungry to tame him.
    So Sulla had gone into the mean and stinking, crowded alleys of the Subura, and confided in the only friend he owned with the detachment he needed so desperately at that moment—Aurelia, sister-in-law of his dead wife, Julilla.
    “What can I do?” he had cried to her. “I’m trapped, Aurelia; it’s Julilla all over again! I can’t be rid of her!”
    “The trouble is, they have so little to do with their time,” said Aurelia, looking grim. “Nursemaids for their babies, little parties with their friends chiefly distinguished by the amount of gossip they exchange, looms they have no intention of using, and heads too empty to find solace in a book. Most of them feel nothing for their husbands because their marriages are made for convenience—their fathers need extra political clout, or their husbands the dowries or the extra nobility. A year down the road, and they’re ripe for the mischief of a love affair.” She sighed. “After all, Lucius Cornelius, in the matter of love they can exercise free choice, and in how many areas can they do that? The wiser among them content themselves with slaves. But the most foolish are those who fall in love. And that, unfortunately, is what has happened here. This poor silly child Dalmatica is quite out of her mind! And you are the cause of it.”
    He chewed his lip, hid his thoughts by staring at his hands. “Not a willing cause,” he said.
    “I know that! But does Marcus Aemilius Scaurus?”
    “Ye gods, I hope he knows nothing!”
    Aurelia snorted. “I’d say he knows plenty.”
    “Then why hasn’t he come to see me? Ought I to see him?”
    “I’m thinking about that,” said the landlady of an insula apartment building, the confidante of many, the mother of three children, the lonely wife, the busy soul who was never a busybody.
    She was sitting side-on to her work table, a large area completely covered by rolls of paper, single sheets of paper, and book buckets; but there was no disorder, only the evidence of many business matters and much work.
    If she could not help him, Sulla thought, no one could, for the only other person to whom he might have gone was not reliable in this situation. Aurelia was purely friend; Metrobius was also lover, with all the emotional complications that role meant, as well as the further complication of his male sex. When he had seen Metrobius the day before, the young Greek actor had made an acid remark about Dalmatica. Shocked, Sulla had only then realized that all of Rome must be talking about him and Dalmatica, for the world of Metrobius was far removed from the world Sulla now moved in.
    “Ought I see Marcus Aemilius Scaurus?” Sulla asked again.
    “I’d prefer that you saw Dalmatica, but I don’t see how you possibly can,” said Aurelia, lips pursed.
    Sulla looked eager. “Could you perhaps invite her here?”
    “Certainly not!” said Aurelia, scandalized. “Lucius Cornelius, for a particularly hard-headed man, sometimes you don’t seem to have the sense you