Inbred and obsessed with blood lineage, the path to the senate and, ultimately, to the post of consul, also requires an impeccable pedigree. This is the critical juncture that novelist Colleen McCullough- she, primarily, of the enormously popular “The Thorn Birds”-has chosen as the take-off point for her awesome and epic new work, “The First Man in Rome.” And, for her protagonist, she has wisely zeroed in on a most unusual man living in a most unusual time frame: Gaius Marius, tremendously gifted both militarily and organizationally and, alas, doomed in spite of his wealth to second-rate political status.įor it is not enough in this flaccid period of the Republic to have vote-buying and favor-granting wealth, alone. It is, instead, the city-state of Rome in 110 BC, and the republic that has endured for more than 300 years has become fat, corrupt and inept, and is beginning to unravel faster than a 39-cent pair of socks. But it’s not Washington, D.C., 1990, where dug-in incumbents defy political unknowns with lean pocketbooks to unseat them. In at least one respect the parallel is discomfiting: a national political leadership in which great wealth is essential to achieve power.
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