But as the mob approached, there were cries of “Swift justice!” and “Push him over!” and “Kill him now!”
Titus, already light-headed from running, glanced over the precipice and staggered back. He was dizzy and his heart was pounding.
“Now we see what sort of men you really are,” said Gnaeus. “Cold-blooded murderers!”
“No one will be murdered!” insisted Icilius. He pushed his way to the front of the crowd. The mob surged behind him. He lowered his voice. “Senator, I am barely able to restrain these men. Do nothing to provoke them further! For your own safety, Senator, you must come with me.”
“I will not! I recognize the authority of no man to arrest a Roman citizen simply for speaking his mind. Call off your curs, tribune, and leave me in peace!”
“You dare to call us dogs?” One of the men behind Icilius threw his cudgel. It missed Gnaeus but struck a glancing blow to Titus’s temple. Titus staggered back and tottered on the precipice. Gnaeus leaped to catch him, and for an instant it appeared that both of them would fall. Gnaeus at last gained his balance and pulled Titus to safety.
The mob, which had watched in breathless excitement, now roared with disappointment and surged forward. Icilius held out his arms to restrain them, but there were too many.
Suddenly, there was a commotion at the back of the crowd. The consul Cominius had arrived with his lictors. The cudgels of the mob were no match for the axes of the lictors, who cleared a path through the crowd.
“Tribune, what is happening here?” demanded Cominius.
“I am placing this man under arrest.”
“That’s a lie!” shouted Gnaeus. “These hooligans chased my colleague and me all the way from the Forum, with the clear intention of murdering us. Before you arrived, they were about to throw us from the Tarpeian Rock.”
“A traitor’s death is what you deserve!” shouted one of the men. “Death to any man who tries to take away the protectors of the people!”
“Stand down!” cried Cominius. “Spurius Icilius, stop this madness. Call off your men. Retract the arrest.”
“Do you dare to interfere with the lawful duties of a tribune, Consul?” Icilius locked his gaze on Cominius, who eventually lowered his eyes.
“Let there be a trial, if you insist,” said Cominius. “But in the meantime, let Coriolanus go free.”
Icilius stared for a long moment at Gnaeus, then nodded. “Very well. Let the people decide his fate.”
Gradually, grumbling and spitting contemptuously at the feet of the lictors, the mob dispersed, and Icilius withdrew. Gnaeus burst out laughing and strode forward to hug his old commander, but the consul’s expression was grim.
Titus, feeling a bit sick from the blow to his head, sat down on the Tarpeian Rock. The others seemed like phantoms from a dream. He found himself staring at the temple and the magnificent quadriga of Jupiter atop the pediment. How he loved the building that Vulca had made!
“Sometimes I think that even the gods have turned against me,” whispered Gnaeus. He paced back and forth across the moonlit garden. His face was in shadow, as were the faces of those who had come in answer to his summons. No lamps had been lit; the least flicker of light might alert his enemies to the midnight meeting in the house of Gnaeus Marcius.
Titus was there. So were Appius Claudius and the consul Cominius. There were also a number of men dressed in full armor, as if ready to ride into battle. There seemed to be a great many of them, pressed together under the colonnade that surrounded the garden. By the light of the full moon upon their limbs Titus could see that most were young, and by the quality of their armor, he could see that all were men of means.
In recent days, Gnaeus had attracted a large following of young warriors, most of them patricians, or men like himself, of plebeian rank but with patrician blood. Their devotion to Gnaeus—or Coriolanus, as they always called him—was fanatical. No less fanatical was the determination of the tribune Icilius and his plebeian followers to see Gnaeus destroyed. The raging dispute over his fate had torn Roma apart. His trial was to be held the next day.
“The gods have nothing to do with this farce,” said Appius Claudius bitterly. “Men are to blame. Weak and foolish men! You should have been applauded as a hero by the Senate, Gnaeus. Instead, they’ve abandoned you.”
“The matter was never that simple,” said Cominius with a sigh. “The right to elect the tribunes was won by the plebs only after a fierce struggle. Gnaeus stepped into the path of a raging bull when he decided to take them on.”
“And are we to do nothing while that bull tramples the best man in Roma?” said Titus, his voice breaking. The day the mob chased them to the Tarpeian Rock had marked a turning point in his life. A great anger had welled up inside him; it hardened Titus’s heart against the plebs and drew him closer than ever to his boyhood friend. How had he been blind for so long to the threat posed by the plebs? How had he failed to see that Gnaeus was right all along? Titus felt guilty for not having supported Gnaeus more enthusiastically from the beginning. When Gnaeus was booed by weaker men for speaking the truth in the Senate, Titus should have been ready with his own speech to back him up.
“Don’t worry about the rampaging bull, Titus,” said Gnaeus. He placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “The beast will never touch me! I’ll sooner die by my own sword than submit to the punishment of that rabble.”
“That ‘rabble,’ as you call it, is the people’s assembly,” said Cominius, “and I fear that their right to try you is beyond dispute. The matter has been fully debated in the Senate—”
“Shameful!” muttered Appius Claudius. “I did my best to sway them, but to no avail!”
“And so this mockery of justice, this so-called trial, will take place tomorrow,” said Gnaeus. “Is there truly no hope, Cominius?”
“None. Icilius has stirred the plebs into a frenzy. I had hoped the influence of their betters might serve to cool their thirst for your blood, but even outright bribery has failed. Tomorrow you’ll be tried before the people’s assembly and found guilty of impugning the dignity and endangering the persons of the tribunes. Your property will be confiscated and auctioned; the proceeds will be donated to the fund for the poor in the Temple of Ceres. Your mother and wife will be left with nothing.”
“And I?”
Cominius hung his head. “You will be publicly scourged and executed.”
“No! Never!” cried one of the young warriors from the shadows of the colonnade. His colleagues joined him with cries of outrage.
Gnaeus raised his hands to quiet them. He turned to Cominius. “And if I leave Roma tonight, of my own volition? If I flee into exile?”
Cominius drew a deep breath. “Icilius could try you in absentia, but I think I can convince him not to. He will have scored the victory he seeks, establishing the inviolability of the tribunes. If there is no trial, your property will remain intact. Your mother and wife will be provided for.”
“I care nothing for my own life,” said Gnaeus. “Let them flay me and eat my flesh, if they wish. But I will never allow my property to be put into the hands of the aediles, to feed the lazy rabble of Roma!” He turned his face up to stare at the full moon. By its white light, his handsome features looked as though they had been sculpted from marble. “Exile!” he whispered. “After all I’ve done for Roma!” He lowered his face, so that it was once again in shadow. He addressed the warriors who surrounded him.
“Some of you, when last we met, made a pledge that you would raise a sword and spill plebeian blood rather than see me executed, or, failing that, that you would follow me into exile. But now that the moment of decision has arrived, I do not hold any man to that pledge.”
“We made a vow!” objected one of the men. “A Roman never breaks his oath!”
“But if we leave Roma, never to return, are we still Romans? Think what it means to be a man without a city! This fate was thrust upon me. I cannot thrust it upon anyone else.”