#human!marius

[fenicenera83]

MARIUS de ROMANUS Appreciation Week:

DAY 1 - I am a son of Rome - A young Marius during his service in the Roman army.

[mariusistotallyhip]

What’s a guy like you do in a Popina like this?

Marius’s father hated that he would frequent the popinas on the edge of Rome. In the heart of the city these types of places were most frequently visited by slaves who had leave to do so and by the lower classes of working men and, ahem, ‘working women’. Being the bastard son of a respected senator Marius wasn’t denied access to the finer bath houses (and he enjoyed those spaces very much) but he also wasn’t warmly welcomed by the other patrons, either.

Here, in the popina that was the last thing travelers and traders saw on their way in to the proper borders of the city of Rome he stood out much less. A good place to refresh oneself and eat and drink something a bit cheaper than they’d find in the city, the popina had men and sometimes women from all over the world and so a blond-haired, blue-eyed giant didn’t stand out quite as much here in the relative diversity of patrons as he would in a more reputable establishment.

He wasn’t interested in drinking to excess or in the paid company of women, but here was the best place to have his first pick of the exotic spices to take home to their cook, or finely crafted jewelry or his favorite, scrolls with both real and fictional accounts of what was happening over seas or supposedly amung the gods.

While he was praised by his father’s friends for his fine collection of reading material on subjects of history and philosophy and even war these same men were unwilling to visit such an establishment, they would wait until the goods made their way to the respectable market and so he would always beat them to the best finds - and that was just fine by him.

And so there he was, a man of 20, in his red linen tunic and fine leather belt and sandals, reading through a scroll he had only recently purchased, a detailed account of Spartacus and his life and death. Though Spartacus had died 40 years before Marius was born he was one of Marius’s favorite topics to read about and of course the literature on him ranged from strictly factual to urban legend in quality, but what more could a man hope for after his death than that people would not only write about you but would spin epic stories of your life that mixed fact and fiction - usually in glowing terms?