Menelaos is said to have been blown off course on his return voyage. He wound up in Egypt, where (with Helen) he visited many lands, remaining in the area for eight years. When finally he arrived back in Lakedaimon, it was on the same day that Orestes murdered Klytemnestra. Menelaos and Helen ruled in Lakedaimon, and laid the foundations of the future state of Sparta.

Menestheus didn’t return to Athens. On his way home he accepted the isle of Melos as his new kingdom, and reigned there instead.

Neoptolemos succeeded to the throne of Peleus in Iolkos, but after strife with the sons of Askastos he quit Thessalia to live at Dodona, in Epiros. Later he was killed while looting the sanctuary of the Pythoness at Delphi.

Nestor got back to Pylos quickly and safely. He spent the rest of his very long life ruling Pylos in peace and prosperity.

As his house oracle had foretold, Odysseus was doomed not to see Ithaka for twenty years. After he left Troy he wandered up and down the Mediterranean and had many adventures with sirens, witches and monsters. When he did reach Ithaka he found his palace filled with Penelope’s suitors, anxious to usurp his throne by marrying the Queen. But she had managed to stave off this fate by insisting that she couldn’t remarry until she had finished weaving her own shroud. Every night she unravelled what she had woven the previous day. Assisted by his son, Telemachos, Odysseus killed the suitors. Afterwards he lived happily with Penelope.

Philoktetes was driven out of his kingdom of Hestaiotis and chose to emigrate to the city of Croton, in Lucanian Italy. He took the bow and arrows belonging to Herakles with him.

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Colleen McCullough

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The world cowers before its legions, but Rome is about to be engulfed by a vicious power struggle that will threaten its very existence. At its heart are two exceptional men: Gaius Marius, prosperous but lowborn, a proud and disciplined soldier emboldened by his shrewdness and self-made wealth; and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a handsome young aristocrat corrupted by poverty and vice.

Both are men of extraordinary vision, extreme cunning and ruthless ambition, but both are outsiders, cursed by the insurmountable opposition of powerful and vindictive foes.

If they forge an alliance, Marius and Sulla may just defeat their enemies, but only one of them can become First Man in Rome.

The battle for Rome has just begun.

THE

FIRST YEAR

110 B.C

IN THE CONSULSHIP OF

MARCUS MINUCIUS RUFUS

AND

SPURIUS POSTUMIUS ALBINUS

1

Having no personal commitment to either of the new consuls, Gaius Julius Caesar and his sons simply tacked themselves onto the procession which started nearest to their own house, the procession of the senior consul, Marcus Minucius Rufus. Both consuls lived on the Palatine, but the house of the junior consul, Spurius Postumius Albinus, was in a more fashionable area. Rumor had it Albinus’s debts were escalating dizzily, no surprise; such was the price of becoming consul.

Not that Gaius Julius Caesar was worried about the heavy burden of debt incurred while ascending the political ladder; nor, it seemed likely, would his sons ever need to worry on that score. It was four hundred years since a Julius had sat in the consul’s ivory curule chair, four hundred years since a Julius had been able to scrape up that kind of money. The Julian ancestry was so stellar, so august, that opportunities to fill the family coffers had passed the succeeding generations by, and as each century finished, the family of Julius had found itself ever poorer. Consul? Impossible! Praetor, next magistracy down the ladder from consul? Impossible! No, a safe and humble backbencher’s niche in the Senate was the inheritance of a Julius these days, including that branch of the family called Caesar because of their luxuriantly thick hair.

So the toga which Gaius Julius Caesar’s body servant draped about his left shoulder, wrapped about his frame, hung about his left arm, was the plain white toga of a man who had never aspired to the ivory curule chair of high office. Only his dark red shoes, his iron senator’s ring, and the five-inch-wide purple stripe on the right shoulder of his tunic distinguished his garb from that of his sons, Sextus and Gaius, who wore ordinary shoes, their seal rings only, and a thin purple knight’s stripe on their tunics.

Even though dawn had not yet broken, there were little ceremonies to usher in the day. A short prayer and an offering of a salt cake at the shrine to the gods of the house in the atrium, and then, when the servant on door duty called out that he could see the torches coming down the hill, a reverence to Janus Patulcius, the god who permitted safe opening of a door.

Father and sons passed out into the narrow cobbled alley, there to separate. While the two young men joined the ranks of the knights who preceded the new senior consul, Gaius Julius Caesar himself waited until Marcus Minucius Rufus passed by with his lictors, then slid in among the ranks of the senators who followed him.

*

It was Marcia who murmured a reverence to Janus Clusivius, the god who presided over the closing of a door, Marcia who dismissed the yawning servants to other duties. The men gone, she could see to her own little expedition. Where were the girls? A laugh gave her the answer, coming from the cramped little sitting room the girls called their own; and there they sat, her daughters, the two Julias, breakfasting on bread thinly smeared with honey. How lovely they were!

It had always been said that every Julia ever born was a treasure, for the Julias had the rare and fortunate gift of making their men happy. And these two young Julias bade fair to keep up the family tradition.

Julia Major—called Julia—was almost eighteen. Tall and possessed of grave dignity, she had pale, bronzy-tawny hair pulled back into a bun on the nape of her neck, and her wide grey eyes surveyed her world seriously, yet placidly. A restful and intellectual Julia, this one.

Julia Minor—called Julilla—was half past sixteen. The last child of her parents’ marriage, she hadn’t really been a welcome addition until she became old enough to enchant her softhearted mother and father as well as her three older siblings. She was honey-colored. Skin, hair, eyes, each a mellow gradation of amber. Of course it had been Julilla who laughed. Julilla laughed at everything. A restless and unintellectual Julia, this one.

“Ready, girls?” asked their mother.

They crammed the rest of their sticky bread into their mouths, wiggled their fingers daintily through a bowl of water and then a cloth, and followed Marcia out of the room.

“It’s chilly,” said their mother, plucking warm woolen cloaks from the arms of a servant. Stodgy, unglamorous cloaks.

Both girls looked disappointed, but knew better than to protest; they endured being wrapped up like caterpillars into cocoons, only their faces showing amid fawn folds of homespun. Identically swaddled herself, Marcia formed up her little convoy of daughters and servant escort, and led it through the door into the street.