"I can't get over the fact that those two socii died for nothing," said Caesar to Nicomedes and Oradaltis. "Why? Tell me why they just didn't produce the girl and show Verres what she was? That would have been the end of the affair! Why did they insist upon turning what ought to have been a comedy with Verres the butt into a tragedy as great as anything Sophocles dreamed of?" "Pride, mostly," said Oradaltis, tears in her eyes. "And perhaps a sense of honor." "It might have been understandable if the girl had looked presentable when she was a baby, but from the moment of her birth they would have known what she was. Why didn't they expose her? No one would have condemned them for it." The only person who might have been able to enlighten you, Caesar, died in the marketplace of Lampsacus," said Nicomedes. "There must have been a good reason, at least inside the mind of Philodamus. A vow to some god a wife and mother determined to keep the child a self inflicted pain who can tell? If we knew all the answers, life would hold no mysteries. And no tragedies." "I could have wept when I saw her. Instead I laughed myself sick. She couldn't tell the difference, but Verres could. So I laughed. He'll hear it inside his head for years, and fear me." "I'm surprised we haven't seen the man," said the King. "You won't see him," said Caesar with some satisfaction. "Gaius Verres has folded his tents and slunk back to Cilicia." "Why?" "I asked him to." The King decided not to probe this remark. Instead he said, "You wish you could have done something to avert the tragedy." "Of course. It's an actual agony to have to stand back and watch idiots wreak havoc in Rome's name. But I swear to you, Nicomedes, that I will never behave so myself when I have the age and the authority!" "You don't need to swear. I believe you." This report had been given before Caesar went to his rooms to remove the ravages of his journey, these being unusually trying. Each of the three nights he had spent in the harborside inn he had woken to find a naked whore astride him and the traitor inside the gates of his body so lacking in discernment that, freed by sleep from his mind's control, it enjoyed itself immensely. With the result that he had picked up an infestation of pubic lice. The discovery of his crop of tiny vermin had induced a horror and disgust so great that he had been able to keep no food down since, and only a sensible sensitivity about the effects of questionable substances upon his genitalia had prevented his seizing anything offered to kill the things. So far they had defied him by living through a dip in every freezing body of water he had encountered between Lampsacus and Nicomedia, and all through his talk with the old King he had been aware of the dreadful creatures prowling through the thickets of his body hair. Now, clenching teeth and fists, he rose abruptly to his feet. "Please excuse me, Nicomedes. I have to rid myself of some unwelcome visitors," he said, attempting a light tone. "Crab lice, you mean?" asked the King, who missed very little, and could speak freely because Oradaltis and her dog had departed some time before. "I'm driven mad! Revolting, sickening things!" Nicomedes strolled from the room with him. "There is really only one way to avoid picking up vermin when you travel," said the King. "It's painful, especially the first time you have it done, but it does work." "I don't care if I have to walk on hot coals, tell me and I'll do it!" said Caesar with fervor. "There are those in your peculiar society who will condemn you as effeminate!" Nicomedes said wickedly. "No fate could be worse than these pests. Tell me!" "Have all your body hair plucked, Caesar. Under the arms and in the groin, on the chest if you have hair there. I will send the man who attends to me and Oradaltis to you if you wish." "At once, King, at once!" Up went Caesar's hand to his head. "What about my hair hair?" "Have you visitors there too?" "I don't think so, but I itch everywhere." "They're different visitors, and can't survive in a bed. I wouldn't think you'll ever play host to them because you're so tall. They can't crawl upward, you see, so the people who pick them up from others are always the same height or shorter than the original host." Nicomedes laughed. "You'd catch them from Burgundus, but from few others. Unless your Lampsacan whores slept with you head to head." "My Lampsacan whores attacked me in my sleep, but I can assure you that they got short shrift the moment I woke!" An extraordinary conversation, but one Caesar was to thank his luck for many times in the years to come. If plucking out his body hair would keep these clinging horrors away, he would pluck, pluck, pluck. The slave Nicomedes sent to him was an expert; under different circumstances Caesar would have banished him from such an intimate task, for he was a perfect pansy. Under the prevailing circumstances, however, Caesar found himself eager to experience his touch. "I'll just take a few out every day," lisped Demetrius. "You'll take the lot out today," said Caesar grimly. "I've drowned all I could find in my bath, but I suppose their eggs stick. That seems to be why I haven't managed to get rid of all of them so far. Pah!" Demetrius squealed, appalled. "That isn't possible!" he cried. "Even when I do it, it's hideously painful!" "The lot today," said Caesar. So Demetrius continued while Caesar lay naked, apparently in no distress. He had self discipline and great courage, and would have died rather than flinch, moan, weep, or otherwise betray his agony. And when the ordeal was over and sufficient time had passed for the pain to die down, he felt wonderful. He also liked the look of his hairless body in the big silver mirror King Nicomedes had provided for the palace's principal guest suite. Sleek. Unashamed. Amazingly naked. And somehow more masculine rather than less. How odd! Feeling like a man released from slavery, he went to the dining room that evening with his new pleasure in himself adding a special light to face and eyes; King Nicomedes looked, and gasped. Caesar responded with a wink.
For sixteen months he remained in or around about Bithynia, an idyll he was to remember as the most wonderful period of his life until he reached his fifty third year and found an even more wonderful one. He visited Troy to do homage to his ancestor Aeneas, he went to Pessinus several times, and back to Byzantium, and anywhere, it seemed, save Pergamum and Tarsus, where Claudius Nero and Dolabella remained an extra year after all. Leaving aside his relationship with Nicomedes and Oradaltis, which remained an enormously satisfying and rewarding experience for him, the chief joy of that time lay in his visit to a man he hardly remembered: Publius Rutilius Rufus, his great uncle on his mother's side. Born in the same year as Gaius Marius, Rutilius Rufus was now seventy nine years old, and had been living in an honorable exile in Smyrna for many years. He was as active as a fifty year old and as cheerful as a boy, mind as sharp as ever, sense of humor as keenly developed as had been that of his friend and colleague, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus. "I've outlived the lot of them," Rutilius Rufus said with gleeful satisfaction after his eyes and mind had approved the look of this fine young great nephew. "That doesn't cast you down, Uncle?" "Why should it? If anything, it cheers me up! Sulla keeps writing to beg me to return to Rome, and every governor and other official he sends out here comes to plead in person." "But you won't go." "I won't go. I like my chlamys and my Greek slippers much more than I ever liked my toga, and I enjoy a reputation here in Smyrna far greater than any I ever owned in Rome. It's a thankless and savage place, young Caesar what a look of Aurelia you have! How is she? My ocean pearl found on the mud flats of Ostia ... That was what I always called her. And she's widowed, eh? A pity. I brought her and your father together, you know. And though you may not know it, I found Marcus Antonius Gnipho to tutor you when you were hardly out of diapers. They used to think you a prodigy. And here you are, twenty one years old, a senator twice over, and Sulla's most prized war hero! Well, well!" "I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm his most prized war hero," said Caesar, smiling. "Oh, but you are! I know! I sit here in Smyrna and hear everything. Sulla writes to me. Always did. And when he was settling the affairs of Asia Province he visited me often it was I gave him his model for its reorganization. Based it on the program Scaurus and I evolved years ago. Sad, his illness. But it hasn't seemed to stop him meddling with Rome!" He continued in the same vein for many days, hopping from one subject to another with the lightness of an easy heart and the interest of a born gossip, a spry old bird the years had not managed to strip of plumage or the ability to soar. If he had a favorite topic, that was Aurelia; Caesar filled in the gaps in his knowledge of her with gracefully chosen words and evident love, and learned in return many things about her he had not known. Of her relationship with Sulla, however, Rutilius Rufus had little to tell and refused to speculate, though he had Caesar laughing over the confusion as to which of his nieces had borne a red haired son to a red haired man. "Gaius Marius and Julia were convinced it was Aurelia and Sulla, but it was Livia Drusa, of course, with Marcus Cato." "That's right, your wife was a Livia." "And the older of my two sisters was the wife of Caepio the Consul, who stole the Gold of Tolosa. You are related to the Servilii Caepiones by blood, young man." "I don't know the family at all." A boring lot no amount of Rutilian blood could leaven. Now tell me about Gaius Marius and the flaminate he wished upon you." Intending to remain only a few days in Smyrna, Caesar ended in staying for two months; there was so much Rutilius Rufus wanted to know, and so much Rutilius Rufus wanted to tell. When finally he took his leave of the old man, he wept. "I shall never forget you, Uncle Publius." "Just come back! And write to me, Caesar, do. Of all the pleasures my life still holds, there is none to equal a rich and candid correspondence with a genuinely literate man."
But every idyll must end, and Caesar's came to a conclusion when he received a letter from Tarsus in April of the year Sulla died; he was in Nicomedia. "Publius Servilius Vatia, who was consul last year, has been sent to govern Cilicia," Caesar said to the King and Queen. "He requests my services as a junior legate it seems Sulla has personally recommended me to him." "Then you don't have to go," said Oradaltis eagerly. Caesar smiled. "No Roman has to do anything, and that is really true from highest to lowest. Service in any institution is voluntary. But there are certain considerations which do tend to influence our decisions, voluntary in name though the duty may be. If I want a public career, I must serve in my ten campaigns, or else steadily for a full six years. No one is ever going to be able to accuse me of circumventing our unwritten laws." "But you're already a senator!" "Only because of my military career. And that in turn means I must continue my military career." "Then you're definitely going," said the King. "At once." "I'll see about a ship." "No. I shall ride overland through the Cilician Gates." "Then I'll provide you with a letter of introduction to King Ariobarzanes in Cappadocia." The palace began to stir, and the dog to mourn; poor Sulla knew the signs that Caesar was about to depart. And once more Caesar found himself committed to return. The two old people pestered him until he agreed he would, then disarmed him by bestowing Demetrius the hair plucker upon him. However, before he left Caesar tried yet again to convince King Nicomedes that the best course for Bithynia after his death would be as a Roman province. "I'll think about it" was as far as Nicomedes would go. Caesar now cherished little hope that the old King would decide in favor of Rome; the events in Lampsacus were too fresh in every non Roman mind and who could blame the King if he could not face the idea of bequeathing his realm to the likes of Gaius Verres?
The steward Eutychus was sent back to Aurelia in Rome; Caesar traveled with five servants (including Demetrius the hair plucker) and Burgundus, and traveled hard. He crossed the Sangarius River and rode first to Ancyra, the largest town in Galatia. Here he met an interesting man, one Deiotarus, leader of the segment Tolistobogii. "We're all quite young these days," said Deiotarus. "King Mithridates murdered the entire Galatian thanehood twenty years ago, which left our people without chieftains. In most countries that would have led to the disintegration of the people, but we Galatians have always preferred a loose confederation. So we survived until the young sons of the chieftains grew up." "Mithridates won't trap you again," said Caesar, who thought this Gaul was as cunning as he was clever. "Not while I'm here, anyway," said Deiotarus grimly. I at least have had the advantage of spending three years in Rome, so I'm more sophisticated than my father ever was he died in the massacre." "Mithridates will try again." "I don't doubt it." "You won't be tempted?" "Never! He's still a vigorous man with many years left to rule, but he seems incapable of learning what I know for a fact that Rome must win in the end. I would rather be in a position where Rome was calling me Friend and Ally." "That's right thinking, Deiotarus." On Caesar went to the Halys River, followed its lazy red stream until Mount Argaeus dominated the sky; from here to Eusebeia Mazaca was only forty miles northward across the wide shallow slope of the Halys basin. Of course he remembered Gaius Marius's many tales of this country, of the vividly painted town lying at the foot of the gigantic extinct volcano, of the brilliant blue palace and that meeting with King Mithridates of Pontus. But these days Mithridates skulked in Sinope and King Ariobarzanes sat more or less firmly on the Cappadocian throne. Less rather than more, thought Caesar after meeting him. For some reason no one could discover, the kings of Cappadocia had been as weak a lot as the kings of Pontus had been strong. And Ariobarzanes was no exception to the rule. He was patently terrified of Mithridates, and pointed out to Caesar how Pontus had stripped the palace and the capital of every treasure, down to the last golden nail in a door. "But surely," said Caesar to the timid king, a small and slightly Syrian looking man, the loss of those two hundred thousand soldiers in the Caucasus will strap Mithridates for many years to come. No proprietor of armies can afford the loss of such a huge number of men especially men who were not only fully trained, but veterans of a good campaign. For they were, isn't that right?" Yes. They had fought to regain Cimmeria and the northern reaches of the Euxine Sea for Mithridates the summer before." "Successfully, one hears." "Indeed. His son Machares was left in Panticapaeum to be satrap. A good choice. I believe his chief task is to recruit a new army for his father." "Who prefers Scythian and Roxolanian troops." They are superior to mercenaries, certainly. Both Pontus and Cappadocia are unfortunate in that the native peoples are not good soldiers. I am still forced to rely upon Syrian and Jewish mercenaries, but Mithridates has had hordes of warlike barbarians at his disposal now for almost thirty years." "Have you no army at the moment, King Ariobarzanes?" "At the moment I have no need of one." "What if Mithridates marches without warning?" "Then I will be off my throne once more. Cappadocia, Gaius Julius, is very poor. Too poor to afford a standing army." "You have another enemy. King Tigranes." Ariobarzanes twisted unhappily. "Do not remind me! His successes in Syria have robbed me of my best soldiers. All the Jews are staying home to resist him." "Then don't you think you should at least be watching the Euphrates as well as the Halys?" "There is no money," said the King stubbornly. Caesar rode away shaking his head. What could be done when the sovereign of a land admitted himself beaten before the war began? His quick eyes noticed many natural advantages which would give Ariobarzanes untold opportunities to pounce upon an invader, for the countryside when not filled with towering snowcapped peaks was cut up into the most bizarre gorges, just as Gaius Marius had described. Wonderful places militarily as well as scenically, yet perceived by the King as no more than ready made housing for his troglodytes. "How do you feel now that you've seen a great deal more of the world, Burgundus?" Caesar asked his hulking freedman as they picked their way down into the depths of the Cilician Gates between soaring pines and roaring cascades. "That Rome and Bovillae, Cardixa and my sons are grander than any waterfall or mountain," said Burgundus. Would you rather go home, old friend? I will send you home gladly," said Caesar. But Burgundus shook his big blond head emphatically. "No, Caesar, I'll stay." He grinned. "Cardixa would kill me if I let anything happen to you." "But nothing is going to happen to me!" "Try and tell her that."
Publius Servilius Vatia was installed in the governor's palace at Tarsus so comfortably by the time Caesar arrived before the end of April that he looked as if he had always been there. "We are profoundly glad to have him," said Morsimus, captain of the Cilician governor's guard and a Tarsian ethnarch. Dark hair grizzled by the passage of twenty years since he had accompanied Gaius Marius to Cappadocia, Morsimus had been on hand to welcome Caesar, to whom the Cilician felt more loyalty than ever he could to a mere Roman governor; here was the nephew by marriage of both his heroes, Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and he would do whatever he could to assist the young man. "I gather Cilicia suffered greatly under Dolabella and Verres," said Caesar. Terribly. Dolabella was out of his mind on drugs most of the time, which left Verres to do precisely what he fancied." "Nothing was done to eject Tigranes from eastern Pedia?" "Nothing at all. Verres was too preoccupied with usury and extortion. Not to mention the pilfering of temple artifacts he considered wouldn't be missed." "I shall prosecute Dolabella and Verres as soon as I go home, so I shall need your help in gathering evidence." Dolabella will probably be in exile by the time you get home," Morsimus said. "The governor had word from Rome that the son of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus and the lady Dalmatica is assembling a case against Dolabella even now, and that Gaius Verres is covering himself in glory by supplying young Scaurus with all his evidence and that Verres will testify in court." "The slippery fellator! That means I won't be able to touch him. And I don't suppose it matters who prosecutes Dolabella, as long as he gets his just deserts. If I'm sorry it won't be me, that's because I'm late into the courts thanks to my priesthood, and victory against Dolabella and Verres would have made me famous." He paused, then said, "Will Vatia move against King Tigranes?" "I doubt it. He's here specifically to eliminate pirates." A statement confirmed by Vatia himself when Caesar sought an interview. An exact contemporary of Metellus Pius the Piglet (who was his close cousin into the bargain), Vatia was now fifty years old. Originally Sulla had intended that Vatia be consul with Gnaeus Octavius Ruso nine years earlier, but Cinna had beaten him in that election, and Vatia, like Metellus Pius, had had to wait a long time for the consulship which was his by birthright. His reward for unswerving loyalty to Sulla had been the governorship of Cilicia; he had preferred this province to the other consular province, Macedonia, which had in consequence gone to his colleague in the consulship, Appius Claudius Pulcher. "Who never got to Macedonia," said Vatia to Caesar. "He fell ill in Tarentum on his way, and returned to Rome. Luckily this happened before the elder Dolabella had left Macedonia, so he's been instructed to stay there until Appius Claudius is well enough to relieve him." "What's the matter with Appius Claudius?" "Something long standing, is all I know. He wasn't a fit man during our consulship never cheered up no matter what I said! But he's so impoverished he has to govern. If he doesn't, he won't be able to repair his fortune." Caesar frowned, but kept his thoughts to himself. These dwelt upon the limitations inherent in a system which virtually forced a man sent to govern a province into a career of clerical crime; tradition had hallowed the right of a governor to sell citizenships, contracts, immunities from taxation and tithe, and pop the proceeds into his own hungry purse. Senate and Treasury unofficially condoned these activities in order to keep Rome's costs down, one of the reasons why it was so hard to get a jury of senators to convict a governor of extortion in his province. But exploited provinces meant hatred of Rome, a rolling reckoning for the future. I take it we are to go to war against the pirates, Publius Servilius?'' Caesar asked. "Correct," said the governor, surrounded by stacks of paper; clearly he enjoyed the clerical side of his duties, though he was not a particularly avaricious man and did not need to augment his fortune by provincial exploitation. Particularly when he was to go to war against the pirates, whose ill gotten gains would give the governor of Cilicia plenty of legitimate spoils. "Unfortunately," Vatia went on, "I will have to delay my campaign because of the straits to which my province has been reduced by the activities of my predecessor in this office. This year will have to be devoted to internal affairs." "Then do you need me?" asked Caesar, too young to relish the idea of a military career spent at a desk. "I do need you," said Vatia emphatically. "It will be your business to raise a fleet for me." Caesar winced. "In that I do have some experience." "I know. That's why I wanted you. It will have to be a superior fleet, large enough to split into several flotillas if necessary. The days when pirates skipped round in open little hemioliai and myoparones have almost gone. These days they man fully decked triremes and biremes even quinqueremes! and are massed in fleets under the command of admirals strategoi they call these men. They cruise the seas like navies, their flagships encrusted in gilt and purple. In their hidden bases they live like kings, employing chained gangs of free men to serve their wants. They have whole arsenals of weapons and every luxury a rich man in Rome might fancy. Lucius Cornelius made sure the Senate understood why he was sending me to a remote, unimportant place like Cilicia. It is here the pirates have their main bases, so it is here we must begin to clear them out." I could make myself useful by discovering whereabouts the pirate strongholds are I'm sure I'd have no trouble managing that as well as the raising of a fleet." "That won't be necessary, Caesar. We already know the location of the biggest bases. Coracesium is notorious though so well fortified by nature and by men that I doubt whether I or any other man will ever succeed in taking it. Therefore I intend to begin at the far end of my territory in Pamphylia and Lycia. There is a pirate king called Zenicetes who controls the whole of the Pamphylian gulf, including Attaleia. It is he who will first feel Rome's wrath." Next year?'' asked Caesar. "Probably," said Vatia, "though not before the late summer, I think. I cannot start to war against the pirates until Cilicia is properly regulated again and I am sure I have the naval and military strength to win." "You expect to be prorogued for several years." The Dictator and the Senate have assured me I will not be hurried. I am to have however many years prove necessary. Lucius Cornelius is now retired, of course, but I do not believe the Senate will go against his wishes."
Off went Caesar to raise a fleet, but not with enthusiasm; it would be more than a year before he saw action, and his assessment of Vatia's character was that when war did come, Vatia would lack the speed and initiative the campaign called for. In spite of the fact that Caesar bore no love for Lucullus, there was no doubt in his mind that this second general he was serving under was no match in mind or ability for Lucullus. It was, however, an opportunity to do more traveling, and that was some compensation. The naval power without rival at this eastern end of the Middle Sea was Rhodes, so to Rhodes did Caesar betake himself in May. Always loyal to Rome (it had successfully defied King Mithridates nine years before), Rhodes could be relied upon to contribute vessels, commanders and crews to Vatia's coming campaign, though not marine troops; the Rhodians did not board enemy ships and turn a naval engagement into a land style fight. Luckily Gaius Verres had not had time to visit Rhodes, so Caesar found himself welcomed and the island's war leaders willing to talk. Most of the dickering revolved around whether Rome was to pay Rhodes for its participation, which was unfortunate. Vatia felt none of the allied cities, islands and communities called upon to provide ships was entitled to any sort of payment in moneys; his argument was that every contributor would directly benefit from removal of the pirates, so ought to donate its services free of charge. Therefore Caesar was obliged to negotiate within his superior's parameters. "Look at it this way," he said persuasively. "Success means enormous spoils as well as relief from raids. Rome isn't in a position to pay you, but you will share in the division of the spoils, and these will pay for your participation and give you something over as profit. Rhodes is Friend and Ally of the Roman People. Why jeopardize that status? There are really only two alternatives participation or nonparticipation. And you must decide now which it is going to be." Rhodes yielded. Caesar got his ships, promised for the summer of the following year. From Rhodes he went to Cyprus, unaware that the ship he passed sailing into the harbor of Rhodus bore a precious Roman cargo; none other than Marcus Tullius Cicero, worn down by a year of marriage to Terentia and the delicate negotiations he had brought to a successful conclusion in Athens when his younger brother, Quintus, married the sister of Titus Pomponius Atticus. Cicero's own union had just produced a daughter, Tullia, so he had been able to depart from Rome secure in the knowledge that his wife was fully occupied in mothering her babe. On Rhodes lived the world's most famous teacher of rhetoric, Apollonius Molon, and to his school was Cicero going. He needed a holiday from Rome, from the courts, from Terentia and from his life as it was. His voice had gone, and Apollonius Molon was known to preach that an orator's vocal and physical apparatus had to equal his mental skills. Though he loathed travel and feared that any absence from Rome would undermine his forensic career, Cicero was looking forward very much to this self imposed exile far from his friends and family. Time for a rest. For Caesar there was to be no rest not that one of Caesar's temperament needed a rest. He disembarked in Paphos, which was the seat of Cyprus's ruler, Ptolemy the Cyprian, younger brother of the new King of Egypt, Ptolemy Auletes. More a wastrel than a nonentity, the regent Ptolemy's long residence at the courts of Mithridates and Tigranes showed glaringly during Caesar's first interview with him. Not merely did he understand nothing; he wasn't interested in understanding anything. His education seemed to have been entirely overlooked and his latent sexual preferences had asserted themselves the moment he left the custody of the kings, so that his palace was not unlike the palace of old King Nicomedes. Except that Ptolemy the Cyprian was not a likable man. The Alexandrians, however, had accurately judged him when he had first arrived in Alexandria with his elder brother and their wives; though the Alexandrians had not opposed his appointment as regent of Cyprus, they had sent a dozen efficient bureaucrats to Cyprus with him. It was these men, as Caesar discovered, who really ruled Cyprus on behalf of the island's owner, Egypt. Having artfully evaded the advances of Ptolemy the Cyprian, Caesar devoted his energies to the Alexandrian bureaucrats. Not easy men to deal with and no lovers of Rome they could see nothing for Cyprus in Vatia's coming campaign, and clearly had taken umbrage because Vatia had sent a junior legate twenty one years old as his petitioner. "My youth," said Caesar haughtily to these gentlemen, "is beside the point. I am a decorated war hero, a senator at an age when routine admission to the Senate is not permitted, and Publius Servilius Vatia's chief military assistant. You ought to think yourselves lucky I deigned to drop in!" This statement was duly taken note of, but bureaucratic attitudes did not markedly change for the better. Argue like a politician though he did, Caesar could get nowhere with them. "Cyprus is affected by piracy too. Why can't you see that the pirate menace will be eliminated only if all the lands which suffer from their depredations club together to eliminate them? Publius Servilius Vatia's fleet has to be large enough to act like a net, sweeping the pirates before it into some place from which there is no way out. There will be enormous spoils, and Cyprus will be able to rejoin the trading markets of the Middle Sea. As you well know, at present the Cilician and Pamphylian pirates cut Cyprus off." Cyprus does not need to join the trading markets of the Middle Sea," said the Alexandrian leader. "Everything Cyprus produces belongs to Egypt, and goes there. We tolerate no pirates on the seas between Cyprus and Egypt." Back to the regent Ptolemy for a second interview. This time, however, Caesar's luck asserted itself; the regent was in the company of his wife, Mithridatidis Nyssa. Had Caesar known what was the physical style of the Mithridatidae he would have seen that this young lady was a typical member of her house large in frame, yellow of hair, eyes a greenish gold. Her charms were of coloring and voluptuousness rather than in any claim to true beauty, but Caesar instantly appreciated her charms. So, she made it obvious, did she appreciate Caesar's charms. And when the silly interview with Ptolemy the Cyprian was over, she strolled out with her husband's guest on her arm to show him the spot where the goddess Aphrodite had risen from the foam of the sea to embark upon her divine course of earthly havoc. "She was my thirty nine times great grandmother," said Caesar, leaning on the white marble balustrade which fenced the official site of the goddess's birth off from the rest of the shore. "Who? Not Aphrodite, surely!" "Surely. I am descended from her through her son, Aeneas." "Really?" The slightly protuberant eyes studied his face as if searching for some sign of this staggeringly august lineage. "Very much really, Princess." "Then you belong to Love," purred the daughter of Mithridates, and put out one long, spatulate finger to stroke Caesar's sun browned right arm. The touch affected him, though he did not show it. "I've never heard it put that way before, Princess, but it makes sense," he said, smiling, looking out to the jewel of the horizon where the sapphire of the sea met the aquamarine of the sky. Of course you belong to Love, owning such an ancestress!" He turned his head to gaze at her, eyes almost at the same level as hers, so tall was she. "It is remarkable," he said in a soft voice, that the sea produces so much foam at this place yet at no other, though I can see nothing to account for it." He pointed first to the north and then to the south. "See? Beyond the limits of the fence there is no foam!" "It is said she left it to be here always." "Then the bubbles are her essence." He shrugged off his toga and bent to unbuckle his senatorial shoes. I must bathe in her essence, Princess." If you were not her thirty nine times great grandson, I would tell you to beware," said the Princess, watching him. "Is it religiously forbidden to swim here?" "Not forbidden. Only unwise. Your thirty nine times great grandmother has been known to smite bathers dead." He returned unsmitten from his dip to find she had made a sheet out of her robe to cover the spiky shore grasses, and lay waiting for him upon it. One bubble was left, clinging to the back of his hand; he leaned over to press it gently against her virginally smooth nipple, laughed when it burst and she jumped, shivered uncontrollably. "Burned by Venus," he said as he lay down with her, wet and exhilarated from the caress of that mysterious sea foam. For he had just been anointed by Venus, who had even arranged for this superb woman to be on hand for his pleasure, child of a great king and (as he discovered when he entered her) his alone. Love and power combined, the ultimate consummation. "Burned by Venus," she said, stretching like a huge golden cat, so great was the goddess's gift. "You know the Roman name of Aphrodite," said the goddess's descendant, perfectly poised on a bubble of happiness. "Rome has a long reach." The bubble vanished, but not because of what she said; the moment was over, was all. Caesar got to his feet, never enamored of lingering once the lovemaking was done. "So, Mithridatidis Nyssa, will you use your influence to help me get my fleet?'' he asked, though he did not tell her why this request caused him to chuckle. "How very handsome you are," she said, lying on her elbow, head propped on her hand. "Hairless, like a god." "So are you, I note." "All court women are plucked, Caesar." "But not court men?" "No! It hurts." He laughed. Tunic on, he dealt with his shoes, then began the difficult business of arranging his toga without assistance. "Up with you, woman!" he said cheerfully. "There's a fleet to be obtained, and a hairy husband to convince that all we've been doing is looking at the sea foam." "Oh, him!" She started to dress. "He won't care what we've been doing. Surely you noticed that I was a virgin!" "Impossible not to." Her green gold eyes gleamed. "I do believe," she said, that if I were not in a position to help you raise your fleet, you would have spared me hardly a glance." "I have to deny what you say," he stated, but tranquilly. I was once accused of doing exactly that to raise a fleet, and what I said then is still true I would rather put my sword through my belly than employ women's tricks to achieve my ends. But you, dear and lovely Princess, were a gift from the goddess. And that is a very different thing." "I have not angered you?" "Not in the least, though you're a sensible girl to have assumed it. Do you get your good sense from your father?" "Perhaps. He's a clever man. But he's a fool too." "In what way?" "His inability to listen to advice from others." She turned to walk with him toward the palace. "I'm very glad you came to Paphos, Caesar. I was tired of being a virgin." But you were a virgin. Why then with me?'' "You are the descendant of Aphrodite, therefore you are more than a mere man. I am the child of a king! I can't give myself to a mere man, only to one of royal and divine blood." "I am honored."
The negotiations for the fleet took some time, time Caesar didn't grudge. Every day he and Ptolemy the Cyprian's unenjoyed wife made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of Aphrodite, and every day Caesar bathed in her essence before expending some of his own essence in Ptolemy the Cyprian's greatly enjoyed wife. Clearly the Alexandrian bureaucrats had a great deal more respect for Mithridatidis Nyssa than for her husband which may have had something to do with the fact that King Tigranes was just across the water in Syria. Egypt was remote enough to consider itself safe, but Cyprus was a different matter. He parted from the daughter of King Mithridates amicably, and with a regret which haunted him for a long time. Aside from his physical pleasure in her, he found that he liked and esteemed her unselfconscious assurance, her knowledge that she was any man's equal because she was the child of a great king. A man could not exactly wipe his feet upon a Roman woman, Caesar reflected, but a Roman woman was nonetheless no man's equal. So upon leaving Paphos, he gave Mithridatidis Nyssa an exquisitely carved cameo of the goddess, though he could ill afford the rare and costly striated stone it was worked upon. Understanding much of this, she was immensely pleased, as she wrote to her elder sister, Cleopatra Tryphaena, in Alexandria:
I suppose I will never see him again. He is not the kind of man who goes anywhere or does anything without an excellent reason, and by reason, I mean a man's reason. I think he might have loved me a little. But that would never draw him back to Cyprus. No woman will ever come between him and his purpose. I had not met a Roman before, though I understand that in Alexandria they are to be met fairly frequently, so you probably know quite a few. Is his difference because he is a Roman? Or because he is himself alone? Perhaps you can tell me. Though I think I know what you will answer. I liked best the unassailable quality he owned; and his calmness, which was not matter of fact. Admittedly with my help, he got his fleet. I know, I know, he used me! But there are times, dear Tryphaena, when one does not mind being used. He loved me a little. He prized my birth. And there is not a woman alive who could resist the way he laughs at her. It was a very pleasant interlude. I miss him, the wretch! Do not worry about me. To be on the safe side, I took the medicine after he left. Was I married in truth rather than in name only, I might have been tempted not to Caesar blood is better blood than Ptolemy. As it is, there will never be children for me, alas. I am sorry for your difficulties, and sorry too that we were not reared to understand the situation in Egypt. Not, mind you, that our father, Mithridates, and our uncle, Tigranes, would have cared about these difficulties. We are simply their way to obtain an interest in Egypt, since we do have the necessary Ptolemaic blood to establish our claims. But what we could not know was this business about the priests of Egypt and their hold upon the common people, those of true Egyptian blood rather than Macedonian. It is almost as if there were two countries called Egypt, the land of Macedonian Alexandria and the Delta, and the land of the Egyptian Nile. I do think, dearest Tryphaena, that you ought to proceed to make your own negotiations with the Egyptian priests. Your husband Auletes is not a man for men, so you do have hope of children. You must bear children! But that you cannot do under Egyptian law until after you are crowned and anointed, and you cannot be crowned and anointed until the Egyptian priests agree to officiate. I know the Alexandrians pretended to the embassage from Rome that you were crowned and anointed they had the security of knowing that Marcus Perperna and his other ambassadors are ignorant of Egyptian laws and ways. But the people of Egypt know you have not been confirmed in the monarchy. Auletes is a silly man, somewhat deficient in true intellect and quite without political acumen. Whereas you and I are our father's daughters, and better blessed. Go to the priests and begin to negotiate. In your own name. It is clear to me that you will achieve nothing even children until the priests are brought around. Auletes chooses to believe that he is more important than they, and that the Alexandrians are powerful enough to end in defeating the priests. He is wrong. Or perhaps it might be best to say, Auletes believes it is more important to be the Macedonian King than the Egyptian Pharaoh that if he is King, he must also end in becoming Pharaoh. From your letters to me, I am aware that you have not fallen into this trap. But it is not enough. You must also negotiate. The priests understand that our husbands are the last of the line, and that to establish rival dynasts of Egyptian blood after almost a thousand years of foreign invasions and foreign rulers would be more perilous than sanctioning the last of the Ptolemies. So I imagine that what they really want is to be deferred to rather than ignored or held lightly. Defer to them, dearest Tryphaena. And make your husband defer to them! After all, they have custody of the Pharaoh's treasure labyrinths, of Nilotic income, and of the Egyptian people. The fact that Chickpea succeeded in sacking Thebes seven years ago is beside the point. He was crowned and anointed, he was Pharaoh. And Thebes is not the whole of the Nile! In the meantime continue to take the medicine and do not antagonize either your husband or the Alexandrians. As long as they remain your allies, you have a basis for your negotiations with the priests in Memphis.
By the end of Sextilis, Gaius Julius Caesar had returned to Vatia in Tarsus and could present him with agreements to provide ships and crews at his demand from all the important naval cities and territories in Vatia's bailiwick. Clearly Vatia was pleased, especially at the agreement with Cyprus. But he had no further military duties for his young subordinate, and was besides the harbinger of the news that Sulla was dead in Rome. "Then, Publius Servilius," said Caesar, "with your leave I would like to return home." Vatia frowned. "Why?" "For several reasons," said Caesar easily. "First and most importantly I am of little use to you unless, that is, you intend to mount an expedition to eject King Tigranes from eastern Pedia and Euphratic Cappadocia?" "Such are not my orders, Gaius Julius," said Vatia stiffly. "I am to concentrate upon governing my province and eliminating the pirate menace. Cappadocia and eastern Pedia must wait." "I understand. In which case, you have no military duties for me in the near future. My other reasons for wishing to return home are personal. I have a marriage to consummate and a career in the law courts to embark upon. My time as flamen Dialis has meant that I am already long in the tooth to begin as an advocate. I mean to become consul in my year. It is my birthright. My father was praetor, my uncle consul, my cousin Lucius consul. The Julii are once more in the forefront." "Very well, Gaius Julius, you may go home," said Vatia, who was sensitive to these arguments. "I will be happy to commend you to the Senate, and to classify your gathering of my fleet as campaign duty."
2
The death of Sulla had marked the end of amicable relations between the consuls Lepidus and Catulus. Not a pair who by nature were intended to get on together, the actual passing of the Dictator saw the first instance of their falling out; Catulus proposed that Sulla be given a State funeral, whereas Lepidus refused to countenance the expenditure of public funds to bury one whose estate could well afford to bear this cost. It was Catulus who won the ensuing battle in the Senate; Sulla was interred at the expense of the Treasury he had, after all, been the one to succeed in filling. But Lepidus was not without support, and Rome was starting to see those return whom Sulla had forced to flee. Marcus Perperna Veiento and Cinna's son, Lucius, were both in Rome shortly after the funeral was over. Somehow Perperna Veiento had succeeded in evading actual proscription despite his tenure of Sicily at the advent of Pompey probably because he had not stayed to contest possession of Sicily with Pompey, and had not enough money to make him an alluring proscription prospect. Young Cinna, of course, was penniless. But now that the Dictator was dead both men formed the nucleus of factions secretly opposed to the Dictator's policies and laws, and naturally preferred to side with Lepidus rather than with Catulus. Not only the senior consul but also armed with a reputation of having stood up to Sulla in the Senate, Lepidus considered himself in an excellent position to lessen the stringency of some of Sulla's legislation now that the Dictator was dead, for his senatorial supporters actually outnumbered those who were for Catulus. "I want," said Lepidus to his great friend Marcus Junius Brutus, "to go down in the history books as the man who regulated Sulla's laws into a form more acceptable to everyone even to his enemies." Fortune had favored both of them. Sulla's last handpicked list of magistrates had included as a praetor the name of Brutus, and when the consuls and praetors had assumed office on the previous New Year's Day, the lots to determine which provinces would go to which executives had been good to both Lepidus and Brutus; Lepidus had drawn Gaul across the Alps and Brutus Italian Gaul, their terms as governors to commence at the end of their terms in office that is, on the next New Year's Day. Gaul across the Alps had not recently been a consul's province, but two things had changed that: the war in Spain against Quintus Sertorius (not going well) and the state of the Gallic tribes, now stirring into revolt and thus threatening the land route to Spain. "We'll be able to work our provinces as a team," Lepidus had said eagerly to Brutus once the lots were drawn. "I'll wage war against rebellious tribes while you organize Italian Gaul to send me supplies and whatever other support I might need." Thus both Lepidus and Brutus looked forward to a busy and rewarding time as governors next year. Once Sulla was buried, Lepidus had gone ahead with his program to soften the harshest of Sulla's laws, while Brutus, president of the Violence court, coped with the amendments to Sulla's laws for that court instituted in the previous year by Sulla's praetor Gnaeus Octavius. Apparently with Sulla's consent, Gnaeus Octavius had legislated to compel some of the proscription profiteers to give back property obtained by violence, force, or intimidation which of course also meant removing the names of the original owners from the lists of the proscribed. Approving of Gnaeus Octavius's measure, Brutus had continued his work with enthusiasm. In June, Sulla's ashes now enclosed in the tomb on the Campus Martius, Lepidus announced to the House that he would seek the House's consent to a lex Aemilia Lepida giving back some of the land Sulla had sequestrated from towns in Etruria and Umbria in order to bestow it upon his veterans. "As you are all aware, Conscript Fathers," Lepidus said to an attentive Senate, "there is considerable unrest to the north of Rome. It is my opinion and the opinions of many others! that most of this unrest stems out of our late lamented Dictator's fixation upon punishing the communities of Etruria and Umbria by stripping from them almost every last iugerum of town land. That the House was not always in favor of the Dictator's measures, the House clearly showed when it opposed the Dictator's wish to proscribe every citizen in the towns of Arretium and Volaterrae. And it is to our credit that we did manage to dissuade the Dictator from doing this, even though the incident occurred when he was at the height of his power. Well, do not think that my new law has anything good to offer Arretium and Volaterrae! They actively supported Carbo, which means they will get nothing from me. No, the communities I am concerned about were at most involuntary hosts to Carbo's legions. I speak about places like Spoletium and Clusium, at the moment seething with resentment against Rome because they have lost their town lands, yet were never traitorous! Just the hapless victims of civil war, in the path of someone's army." Lepidus paused to look along the tiers on both sides of the Curia Hostilia, and was satisfied at what his eyes saw. A little more feeling in his voice, he continued. "Any place which actively supported Carbo is not at issue here, and the lands of these traitors are more than enough to settle Sulla's soldiers upon. I must emphasize that. With very few exceptions, Italy is now Roman to the core, its citizens enfranchised and distributed across the full gamut of the thirty five tribes. Yet many of the districts of Etruria and Umbria in particular are still being treated like rebellious old style Allies, for during those times it was always Roman practice to confiscate a district's public lands. But how can Rome usurp the lands of proper, legal Romans? It is a contradiction! And we, Conscript Fathers of Rome's senior governing body, cannot continue to condone such practices. If we do, there will be yet another rebellion in Etruria and Umbria and Rome cannot afford to wage another war at home when she is so pressed abroad! At the moment we have to find the money to support fourteen legions in the field against Quintus Sertorius. And obviously this is where our precious money must go. My law to give back their lands to places like Clusium and Tuder will calm the people of Etruria and Umbria before it is too late." The Senate listened, though Catulus spoke out strongly against the measure and was followed by the most pro Sullan and conservative elements, as Lepidus had expected. "This is the thin end of the wedge!" cried Catulus angrily. "Marcus Aemilius Lepidus intends to pull down our newly formed constitution a piece at a time by starting with measures he knows will appeal to this House! But I say it cannot be allowed to happen! Every measure he succeeds in having sent to the People with a senatus consultant attached will embolden him to go further!" But when neither Cethegus nor Philippus came out in support of Catulus, Lepidus felt he was going to win. Odd perhaps that they had not supported Catulus; yet why question such a gift? He therefore went ahead with another measure in the House before he had succeeded in obtaining a senatus consultum of approval for his bill to give back the sequestrated lands. It is the duty of this House to remove our late lamented Dictator's embargo upon the sale of public grain at a price below that levied by the private grain merchants," he said firmly, and with the doors of the Curia Hostilia opened wide so that those who listened outside could hear. Conscript Fathers, I am a sane, decent man! I am not a demagogue. As senior consul I have no need to woo our poorest citizens. My political career is at its zenith I am not a man on the rise. I can afford to pay whatever the private grain merchants ask for their wheat. Nor do I mean to imply that our late lamented Dictator was wrong when he fixed the price of public grain to the price asked by the private grain merchants. I think our late lamented Dictator did not realize the consequences, is all. For what in actual fact has happened? The private grain merchants have raised their prices because there is now no governmental policy to oblige them to keep their prices down! After all, Conscript Fathers, what businessman can resist the prospect of greater profits? Do kindness and humanity dictate his actions? Of course not! He's in business to make a profit for himself and his shareholders, and mostly he is too myopic to see that when he raises the price of his product beyond the capacity of his largest market to pay for it, he begins to erode his whole profit basis. "I therefore ask you, members of this House, to give my lex Aemilia Lepida frumentaria your official stamp of approval, enabling me to put it before the People for ratification. I will go back to our old, tried and true method, which is to have the State offer public grain to the populace for the fixed price of ten sesterces the modius. In years of plenty that price still enables the State to make a good profit, and as years of plenty outnumber years of scarcity, in the long run the State cannot suffer financially." Again the junior consul Catulus spoke in opposition. But this time support for him was minimal; both Cethegus and Philippus were in unequivocal favor of Lepidus's measure. It therefore got its senatus consultum at the same session as Lepidus brought it up. Lepidus was free to promulgate his law in the Popular Assembly, and did. His reputation rose to new heights, and when he appeared in public he was cheered. But his lex agraria concerning the sequestrated lands was a different matter; it lingered in the House, and though he put it to the vote at every meeting, he continued to fail to secure enough votes to obtain a senatus consultum which meant that under Sulla's constitution he could not take it to an Assembly. "But I am not giving up," he said to Brutus over dinner at Brutus's house. He ate at Brutus's house regularly, for in truth he found his own house unbearably empty these days. At the time the proscriptions had begun, he, like most of Rome's upper classes, had very much feared he would be proscribed; he had remained in Rome during the years of Marius, Cinna and Carbo and he was married to the daughter of Saturninus, who had once attempted to make himself King of Rome. It had been Appuleia herself who had suggested that he divorce her at once. They had three sons, and it was of paramount importance that the family fortunes remain intact for the younger two of these boys; the oldest had been adopted into the ranks of Cornelius Scipio and was bound to prosper, that family being closely related to Sulla and uniformly in Sulla's camp. Scipio Aemilianus (namesake of his famous ancestor) was fully grown at the time Appuleia suggested the divorce, and the second son, Lucius, was eighteen. The youngest, Marcus, was only nine. Though he loved Appuleia dearly, Lepidus had divorced her for the sake of their sons, thinking that at some time in the future when it was safe, he would remarry her. But Appuleia was not the daughter of Saturninus for nothing; convinced that her presence in the lives of her ex husband and her sons would always place them in jeopardy, she committed suicide. Her death was a colossal blow to Lepidus, who never really recovered emotionally. And so whenever he could he spent his private hours in the house of another man: especially the house of his best friend, Brutus. "Exactly right! You must never give up," said Brutus. "A steady perseverance will wear the Senate down, I'm sure of it." "You had better hope that senatorial resistance crumbles quickly," said the third diner, seated on a chair opposite the lectus medius. Both men looked at Brutus's wife, Servilia, with a concern tempered by considerable respect; what Servilia had to say was always worth hearing. What precisely do you mean?'' asked Lepidus. "I mean that Catulus is girding himself for war." "How did you find that out?" asked Brutus. "By keeping my ears pricked," she said with expressionless face. Then she smiled in her secretive, buttoned up way. "I popped around to visit Hortensia this morning, and she's not the sister of our greatest advocate for no reason like him, she's an inveterate talker. Catulus adores her, so he talks to her too much and she talks to anyone with the skill to pump her." "And you, of course, have that skill," said Lepidus. "Certainly. But more importantly I have the interest to pump her. Most of her female visitors are more fascinated by gossip and women's matters, whereas Hortensia would far rather talk politics. So I make it my business to see her often." "Tell us more, Servilia," said Lepidus, not understanding what she was saying. "Catulus is girding himself for what war? Nearer Spain? He's to go there as governor next year, complete with a new army. So I suppose it's not illogical that he's er, girding himself for war, as you put it." "This war has nothing to do with Spain or Sertorius," said Brutus's wife. "Catulus is talking of war in Etruria. According to Hortensia, he's going to start persuading the Senate to arm more legions to deal with the unrest there." Lepidus sat up straight on the lectus medius. "But that's insanity! There is only one way to keep the peace in Etruria, and that's to give its communities back a good proportion of what Sulla took away from them!" Are you in touch with any of the local leaders in Etruria?" asked Servilia. "Of course." "The diehards or the moderates?" "The moderates, I suppose, if by diehards you mean the leaders of places like Volaterrae and Faesulae." "That's what I mean." I thank you for your information, Servilia. Rest assured, I will redouble my efforts to settle matters in Etruria."
Lepidus did redouble his efforts, but could not prevent Catulus from exhorting the house to start recruiting the legions he believed would be necessary to put down the brewing revolt in Etruria. Servilia's timely warning, however, enabled Lepidus to canvass support among the pedarii and the senior backbenchers like Cethegus; the House, listening to Catulus's impassioned diatribe, was lukewarm. "In fact, Quintus Lutatius," said Cethegus to Catulus, "we are more concerned about the lack of amity between you and our senior consul than we are about hypothetical revolts in Etruria. It seems to us that you have adopted an inflexible policy of opposing whatever our senior consul wants. I find that sad, especially so soon after Lucius Cornelius Sulla went to so much trouble to forge new bonds of co operation between the various members and factions within the Senate of Rome." Squashed, Catulus subsided. Not, as it turned out, for very long. Events conspired to make him seem right and to kill any chance Lepidus had of obtaining that elusive senatus consultum for his law giving back much of the sequestrated lands. For at the end of June the dispossessed citizens of Faesulae attacked the soldier settlements all around it, threw the veterans off their allotments, and killed those who resisted. The deaths of several hundred loyal Sullan legionaries could not be ignored, nor could Faesulae be allowed to get away with outright rebellion. At a moment when the Senate should have been turning its attention toward preparing for the elections to be held in Quinctilis, the Senate forgot all about elections. The lots had been cast to determine which consul would conduct the curule balloting (they fell upon Lepidus), this being a new part of Sulla's constitution, but nothing further was done. Instead, the House instructed both consuls to recruit four new legions each and proceed to Faesulae to put the insurrection down. The meeting was preparing to break up when Lucius Marcius Philippus rose and asked to speak. Lepidus, who held the fasces for the month of Quinctilis, made his first major mistake: he decided to allow Philippus to have his say. "My dear fellow senators," said Philippus in stentorian tones, I beg you not to put an army into the hands of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus! I do not request. I do not ask. I beg! For it is plain to me that our senior consul is plotting revolution has been plotting revolution ever since he was inaugurated! Until our beloved Dictator died, he did and said nothing. But the moment our beloved Dictator died, it started. He refused to countenance the voting of State funds to bury Sulla! Of course he lost but I for one never believed he thought he could win! He used the funeral debate as a signal to all his supporters that he was about to legislate treasonous policies. And he proceeded to legislate treasonous policies! He proposed to give back sequestrated lands to people who had deserved to lose them! And when this body stalled, he sought the adulation of every Class lower than the Second by a trick every demagogue has used, from Gaius Gracchus to Lepidus's father in law Saturninus he legislated cheap State grain! Rome was not supposed to vote money to honor the dead body of her greatest citizen oh, no! But Rome was supposed to spend far more of her public money to dower her worthless proletarii with cheap grain oh, yes!" Lepidus was not the only man stunned by this attack; the whole House was sitting bolt upright in shock. Philippus swept on. "Now, my fellow senators, you want to give this man four legions and send him off to Etruria? Well, I refuse to let you do that! For one thing, the curule elections are due to be held shortly and the lot fell upon him to hold them. Therefore he must remain in Rome to do his duty, not go haring off to raise an army! I remind you that we are about to hold our first free elections in some years, and that it is imperative we hold them on time and with due legality. Quintus Lutatius Catulus is perfectly capable of recruiting and waging war against Faesulae and any other Etrurian communities which may choose to side with Faesulae. It is against Sulla's laws for both consuls to be absent from Rome in order to wage war. Indeed, it was to prevent that from happening that our beloved Dictator incorporated his clause about the specially commissioned command into his opus! We have been provided with the constitutional means to give command in our wars to the most competent man available, even if he is not a member of the Senate. Yet here I find you giving a vital command to a man who has no decent war record! Quintus Lutatius is tried and true, we know him to be competent in military matters. But Marcus Aemilius Lepidus? He's unversed and unproven! He is also, I maintain, a potential revolutionary. You cannot give him legions and send him to wage war in an area where the words out of his own mouth have indicated a treasonous interest in favoring that area over Rome!" Lepidus had listened slack jawed to the opening sentences of this speech, but then with sudden decision had turned to his clerk and snatched the wax tablet and stylus from those hands; for the remainder of the time Philippus spoke he took notes. Now he rose to answer, the tablet held where he could refer to it. "What is your motive in saying these things, Philippus?" he asked, not according Philippus the courtesy of his full name. I confess myself at a loss to divine your motive but you have one, of that I am sure! When the Great Tergiversator rises in this House to deliver one of his magnificently worded and delivered speeches, rest assured there is always a hidden motive! Some fellow is paying him to turn his toga yet again! How rich he has become! how fat! how contented! how sunk in a private mire of voluptuousness! and always in the pay of some creature who needs a senatorial mouthpiece!" The wax tablet was lifted a little; Lepidus glared sternly across its top at the silent senators. Even Catulus, a glance in his direction showed, was flabbergasted by Philippus's speech. Whoever was behind him, it was definitely not Catulus or any member of his faction. "I will deal with Philippus's points in order, Conscript Fathers. One, my passivity before the Dictator died. That is not true! As everyone here knows! Cast your minds back! "Two, the voting of public funds to pay for the Dictator's funeral. Yes, I was opposed. So were many other men. And why not? Are we to have no voices? "As for three my opposition being a signal to my do I have any? supporters that I would undo everything Lucius Cornelius Sulla knitted up what absolute rubbish! I have attempted to have two laws enacted and succeeded with one alone. But have I given the slightest indication to anybody that I intend to overturn Sulla's entire body of laws? Have you heard me criticizing the new court system? Or the new regulations governing the public servants? The Senate? The election process? The new treason laws restraining the actions of provincial governors? The restricted functions of the Assemblies? Even the severely curtailed tribunate of the plebs? No, Conscript Fathers, you have not! Because I do not intend to tamper with these provisions!'' The last sentence was thundered out, so much so that not a few of the men who listened jumped. He paused to allow everyone to recover, then pressed on. "Four, the allegation that my law returning some sequestrated lands some, not all! to their original owners is a treasonous one. That too is rubbish. My lex Aemilia Lepida does not say that any confiscated lands belonging to genuinely treasonous towns or districts should be given back. It concerns only lands belonging to places whose participation in the war against Carbo was innocent or involuntary." Lepidus dropped his voice, put much feeling into it. My fellow senators, stop to think for a moment, please! If we are to see a truly united and properly Roman Italy, we must cease to inflict the old penalties we imposed upon the Italian Allies upon men who under the law are now as Roman as we are ourselves! If Lucius Cornelius Sulla erred anywhere, it was in that. In a man of his age it was perhaps understandable. But it is unpardonable for the majority of us, at least twenty years his junior, to think along the same lines he did. I remind you that Philippus here is also an old man, with an old man's outmoded prejudices. When he was censor he displayed his prejudices flagrantly by refusing to do what Sulla in actual fact did do distribute the new Roman citizens right across the thirty five tribes." He was beginning to sway them, for indeed this was a much younger body than it had been ten years ago. Feeling the worst of his anxiety lift, Lepidus continued. "Five, my grain law. That too righted a very manifest wrong. I believe that had Lucius Cornelius Sulla stayed on as the Dictator for a longer period of time, he would have seen this for himself and done what I did legislated to return cheap grain to the lower classes. The grain merchants were greedy. None can deny it! And indeed this body was wise enough to see the good sense behind my grain law, for you authorized its passage, and thus removed the likelihood that with this coming harvest Rome might have seen violence and riots. For you cannot take away from the common people a privilege that has been with them long enough for them to assume it is a right! "Six, my function as the consul chosen by lot to supervise the curule elections. Yes, the lot did fall upon me, and under our new constitution that means I alone can officiate at the curule elections. But, Conscript Fathers, it was not I who asked to be directed to take four legions and put down the revolt at Faesulae as my first order of business! It was you directed me! Of your own free will! Unsolicited by me! It did not occur to you nor did it occur to me! that business of the nature of the curule elections should take precedence over open revolt within Italy. I confess that I assumed I was first to help put down open revolt, and only then hold the curule elections. There is plenty of time before the end of the year for elections. After all, it is only the beginning of Quinctilis. "Seven, it is not expressly against the laws of Sulla that both consuls should be absent from Rome in order to wage war. Even to wage war outside Italy. According to Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the first duty of the consuls is to care for Rome and Italy. Neither Quintus Lutatius Catulus nor I will be exceeding his authority. The clause providing for the specially commissioned non senatorial commander can only be brought into being if the legally elected magistrates and all other competent senators are not available to wage war. "And finally, point number eight," said Lepidus. "How am I less qualified to command in a war than Quintus Lutatius Catulus? Each of us last saw service during the Italian War, as legates. Neither of us left Rome during the years of Cinna and Carbo. Both of us maintained an honest and obdurate neutrality which Lucius Cornelius Sulla most definitely did not punish us for after all, here we are, his last pair of personally chosen consuls! Our military experience is much of a muchness. There is nothing to say which of us may shine the brighter in the field against Faesulae. It is in Rome's interests to hope that both of us shine with equal brightness, is it not? Normal Roman practice says that if the consuls are willing to assume the mantle of military command at the directive of the Senate, then the consuls must do so. The consuls were so directed by the Senate. The consuls have done so. There is no more to be said." But Philippus was not done. Displaying neither frustration nor anger, smoothly and reasonably he turned the debate around into a lament against the obvious enmity which had flared between the consuls, and labored this point through what seemed like half a hundred concrete examples from mere asides to major clashes. The sun had set (which meant that technically the Senate had to end its deliberations), but both Catulus and Lepidus were unwilling to postpone a decision until the following day, so the clerks of the House kindled torches and Philippus droned on. It was very well done. By the time that Philippus reached his peroration, the senators would have agreed to practically anything to be allowed to go home for food and sleep. "What I propose," he said at last, "is that each of the consuls swears an oath to the effect that he will not turn his army into an instrument of personal revenge against the other. Not a very big thing to ask! But I for one would rest easier if I knew such an oath had been taken." Lepidus rose to his feet wearily. "My personal opinion of your proposal, Philippus, is that it is without a doubt the silliest thing I have ever heard of! However, if it will make the House any happier and allow Quintus Lutatius and me to go about our tasks more expeditiously, then I for one am willing to swear." "I am in full accord, Marcus Aemilius," said Catulus. "Now may we all go home?"
"What do you think Philippus was up to?" asked Lepidus. of Brutus over dinner the following day. "Truly I do not know," said Brutus, shaking his head. "Have you any idea, Servilia?" the senior consul asked. "Not really, no," she answered, frowning. "My husband gave me a general outline of what had been said last night, but I might be able to learn more if you could possibly provide me with a copy of the verbatim proceedings that is, if the clerks took them down." So high had Lepidus's opinion of Servilia's political acumen become that he saw nothing untoward in this request, and agreed to give her the document on the morrow before he left Rome to recruit his four legions. "I am beginning to think," said Brutus, "that you stand no chance to improve the lot of the Etrurian and Umbrian towns which weren't directly involved in Carbo's war. There are just too many men like Philippus in the Senate, and they don't want to hear what you have to say." The pacifying of at least some of the Umbrian districts mattered to Brutus, who was the largest landowner in Umbria after Pompey; he wanted no soldier settlements adjoining his own lands. These were mostly around Spoletium and Iguvium, two areas already sequestrated. That they had not yet received any veteran settlers was due to two factors: the torpor of the commissions set up to deal with apportionment, and the departure of fourteen of Sulla's old legions for service in the Spains twenty months ago. It was only this second factor had enabled Lepidus to bring on his legislation; had all twenty three of Sulla's legions remained in Italy to be demobilized as originally planned, then Spoletium and Iguvium would have seen their full complement of veterans already. "What Philippus had to say yesterday was an absolute shock," said Lepidus, flushing with anger at the memory of it. "I just can't believe those idiots! I truly thought that when I answered Philippus, I would win them around I spoke good sense, Servilia, plain good sense! And yet they let Philippus bluff them into extracting that ridiculous oath we all had to swear this morning up in Semo Sancus Dius Fidius!" "Which means they're ready to be swayed even more," she said. "What worries me is that you won't be in the House to counter the old mischief maker the next time he speaks and speak, he will! He's hatching something." "I don't know why we call him old," said Brutus, who was prone to digress. "He isn't really that old fifty eight. And though he looks as if he might be carried off tomorrow by an apoplexy, it's my guess he won't be. That would be too good to be true!" But Lepidus was tired of digressions and speculations, and suddenly got down to serious business. "I'm off to Etruria to recruit," he said, "and I'd like you to join me as soon as possible, Brutus. We had planned to work as a team next year, but I think it behooves us to start now. There's nothing coming up in your court which won't wait until next year and a new judge, so I shall ask that you be seconded to me as my senior legate immediately." Servilia looked concerned. "Is it wise to recruit your men in Etruria?" she asked. "Why not go to Campania?" "Because Catulus got in ahead of me and took Campania for himself. Anyway, my own lands and contacts are in Etruria, not south of Rome. I'm comfortable there, I know many more people." "But that's what perturbs me, Lepidus. I suspect Philippus might make much of it, continue to throw doubts into everyone's minds as to your ultimate intentions. It doesn't look good to be recruiting in an area seething with potential revolt." "Let Philippus!" said Lepidus scornfully.
The Senate let Philippus. As Quinctilis passed into Sextilis and recruitment proceeded at a great rate, Philippus made it his duty to keep a watchful eye upon Lepidus through, it seemed, an amazingly large and efficient network of agents. No time did he waste upon watching Catulus in Campania; his four legions were filling up rapidly with Sulla's oldest retainers, bored with civilian life and farming, eager for a new campaign not too far from home. The trouble was that the men enlisting in Etruria were not Sulla's veterans. Rather they were green young men of the region, or else veterans who had fought for Carbo and his generals and managed to be missing from the ranks when surrender occurred. Most of Sulla's men resettled in Etruria elected to remain on their allotments to protect them, or else hied themselves off to Campania to enlist in the legions of Catulus. All through September did Philippus roar in the House while both Catulus and Lepidus, their enlistments filled, bent their energies to training and refining their armies. Then at the very beginning of October, Philippus managed to weary the Senate into demanding that Lepidus return to hold the curule elections in Rome. The summons went north to Lepidus's camp outside Saturnia, and Lepidus's answer came back by the same courier. "I cannot leave at this juncture," it said baldly. "You must either wait for me or appoint Quintus Lutatius in my stead." Quintus Lutatius Catulus was ordered to return from Campania but not to hold the elections; it was no part of Philippus's plan to allow Lepidus this grace, and Cethegus had allied himself with Philippus so firmly that whatever Philippus wanted was assented to by three quarters of the House. In all this no move had yet been made against Faesulae, which had locked its gates and sat back to see what happened, very pleased that Rome could not seem to agree upon what to do. A second summons was dispatched to Lepidus demanding that he return to Rome at once to hold the elections; again Lepidus refused. Both Philippus and Cethegus now informed the senators that Lepidus must be considered to be in revolt, that they had proof of his dealings and agreements with the refractory elements in Etruria and Umbria and that his senior legate, the praetor Marcus Junius Brutus, was equally involved. Said Servilia in a letter to Lepidus:
I believe I have finally managed to work out what is behind Philippus's conduct, though I have been able to find no definite proof of my suspicions. However, you may take it that whatever and whoever is behind Philippus is also behind Cethegus. I studied the verbatim text of that first speech Philippus made over and over again, and had many a cozy chat with every woman in a position to know something. Except for the loathsome Praecia, who is now queening it in the Cethegus menage, it would appear exclusively. Hortensia knows nothing because I believe Catulus her husband knows nothing. However, I finally obtained the vital clue from Julia, the widow of Gaius Marius you perceive how far I have extended my net pursuing my enquiries! Her once upon a time daughter in law, Mucia Tertia, is now married to that young upstart from Picenum, Gnaeus Pompeius who has the temerity to call himself Magnus. Not a member of the Senate, but very rich, very brash, very anxious to excel. I had to be extremely careful that I did not give Julia any impression that I might be sniffing for information, but she is a frank person once she reposes her trust in someone, and she was inclined to do so from the outset because of my husband's father's loyalty to Gaius Marius whom, you might remember, he accompanied into exile during Sulla's first consulship. It turns out too that Julia has detested Philippus ever since he sold himself to Gaius Marius many years ago; apparently Gaius Marius despised the man even as he used him. So when at my third visit (I thought it wise to establish Julia's full trust before mentioning Philippus in more than a passing fashion) I drew the conversation around to the present situation and Philippus's possible motives in making you his victim, Julia mentioned that she thought from something Mucia Tertia had said to her during her last visit to Rome that Philippus is now in the employ of Pompeius! As is none other than Cethegus! I enquired no further. It really wasn't necessary. From the time of that initial speech, Philippus has harped tirelessly upon Sulla's special clause authorizing the Senate to look outside its own ranks for a military commander or a governor should a good man not be available within its own ranks. Still puzzled as to what this could have to do with the present situation? I confess I was! Until, that is, I sat and mentally reviewed Philippus's conduct over the past thirty odd years. I concluded that Philippus is simply working for his master, if his master be in truth Pompeius. Philippus is not a Gaius Gracchus or a Sulla; he has no grand strategy in mind whereby he will manipulate the Senate into dismissing all of you currently embroiled in this campaign against Faesulae and appointing Pompeius in your stead. He probably knows quite well that the Senate will not do that under any circumstances there are too many capable military men sitting on the Senate's benches at the moment. If both the consuls should fail and at this stage it is difficult to see why either of you should there is none other than Lucullus ready to step into the breach, and he is a praetor this year, so has the imperium already. No, Philippus is merely making as big a fuss as he can in order to have the opportunity to remind the Senate that Sulla's special commission clause does exist. And presumably Cethegus is willing to support him because he too somehow is caught in Pompeius's toils. Not from want of money, obviously! But there are other reasons than money, and Cethegus's reasons could be anything. Therefore, my dear Lepidus, it seems to me that you are to some extent an incidental victim, that your courage in speaking up for what you believe even though it runs counter to most of the Senate has presented Philippus with a target he can use to justify whatever colossal amount it is that Pompeius is paying him. He's simply lobbying for a man who is not a senator but deems it worthwhile to have a strong faction within the Senate against the day when hi services might be needed. In fairness, I could be completely wrong. However, I do not think I am.
"It makes a great deal more sense than anything else I've heard," said Lepidus to his correspondent's husband after he had read her letter out loud for Brutus's benefit. "And I agree with Servilia," said Brutus, awed. "I doubt she's wrong. She rarely is." "So, my friend, what do I do? Return to Rome like a good boy, hold the curule elections and pass then into obscurity or do I attempt what the Etrurian leaders want of me and lead them against Rome in open rebellion?" It was a question Lepidus had asked himself many times since he had reconciled himself to the fact that Rome would never permit him to restore Etruria and Umbria to some semblance of normality and prosperity. Pride was in his dilemma, and a certain driving need to stand out from the crowd, albeit that crowd be composed of Roman consulars. Since the death of his wife the value of his actual life had diminished in his own eyes to the point where he held it of scant moment; he had quite lost sight of the real reason for her suicide, which was that their sons should be freed from political reprisals at any time in the future. Scipio Aemilianus and Lucius were with him wholeheartedly and young Marcus was still a child; he it was who fulfilled the Lepidus family's tradition by being the male child born with a caul over his face, and everyone knew that phenomenon meant he would be one of Fortune's favorites throughout a long life. So why ought Lepidus worry about any of his sons? For Brutus the dilemma was somewhat different, though he did not fear defeat. No, what attracted Brutus to the Etrurian scheme was the culmination of eight years of marriage to the patrician Servilia: the knowledge that she considered him plain, humdrum, unexciting, spineless, contemptible. He did not love her, but as the years went by and his friends and colleagues esteemed her opinions on political matters more and more, he came to realize that in her woman's shell there resided a unique personage whose approval of him mattered. In this present situation, for instance, she had written not to him but to the consul, Lepidus. Passing him over as unimportant. And that shamed him. As he now understood it shamed her also. If he was to retrieve himself in her eyes, he would have to do something brave, high principled, distinctive. Thus it was that Brutus finally answered Lepidus's question instead of evading it. He said, I think you must attempt what the elders want of you and lead Etruria and Umbria against Rome." "All right," said Lepidus, "I will. But not until the New Year, when I am released from that silly oath."
When the Kalends of January arrived, Rome had no curule magistrates; the elections had not been held. On the last day of the old year Catulus had convened the Senate and informed it that on the morrow it would have to send the fasces to the temple of Venus Libitina and appoint the first interrex. This temporary supreme magistrate called the interrex held office for five days only as custodian of Rome; he had to be patrician, the leader of his decury of senators, and in the case of the first interrex, the senior patrician in the House. On the sixth day he was succeeded as interrex by the second most senior patrician in the House also leader of his decury; the second interrex was empowered to hold the elections. So at dawn on New Year's Day the Senate formally appointed Lucius Valerius Flaccus Princeps Senatus the first interrex and those men who intended to stand for election as consuls and praetors went into a flurry of hasty canvassing. The interrex sent a curt message to Lepidus ordering him to leave his army and return to Rome forthwith, and reminding him that he had sworn an oath not to turn his legions upon his colleague. At noon on the third day of Flaccus Princeps Senatus's term, Lepidus sent back his reply.
I would remind you, Princeps Senatus, that I am now proconsul, not consul. And that I kept my oath, which does not bind me now I am proconsul, not consul. I am happy to give up my consular army, but would remind you that I am now proconsul and was voted a proconsular army, and will not give up this proconsular army. As my consular army consisted of four legions and my proconsular army also consists of four legions, it is obvious that I do not have to give up anything. However, I am willing to return to Rome under the following circumstances: that I am re elected consul; that every last iugerum of sequestrated land throughout Italy be returned to its original owner; that the rights and properties of the sons and grandsons of the proscribed be restored to them; and that their full powers be restituted to the tribunes of the plebs.
"And that," said Philippus to the members of the Senate, "should tell even the densest senatorial dunderhead what Lepidus intends! In order to give him what he demands, we would have to tear down the entire constitution Lucius Cornelius Sulla worked so hard to establish, and Lepidus knows very well we will not do that. This answer of his is tantamount to a declaration of war. I therefore beseech the House to pass its senatus consultant de re publica defendenda." But this required impassioned debate, and so the Senate did not pass its Ultimate Decree until the last day of Flaccus's term as first interrex. Once it was passed the authority to defend Rome against Lepidus was formally conferred upon Catulus, who was ordered to return to his army and prepare for war. On the sixth day of January, Flaccus Princeps Senatus stood down and the Senate appointed its second interrex, who was Appius Claudius Pulcher, still lingering in Rome recovering from his long illness. And since Appius Claudius was actually feeling much better, he flung himself into the task of convening the Centuriate Assembly and holding the curule elections. These would occur, he announced, within the Servian Walls on the Aventine in two days' time, this site being outside the pomerium but adequately protected from any military action by Lepidus. "It's odd," said Catulus to Hortensius just before he left for Campania, "that after so many years of not enjoying the privilege of free choice in the matter of our magistrates, we should find it so difficult to hold an election at all. Almost as if we were drifting into the habit of allowing someone to do everything for us, like a mother for her babies." "That," said Hortensius in freezing tones, "is sheer fanciful claptrap, Quintus! The most I am prepared to concede is that it is an extraordinary coincidence that our first year of free choice in the matter of our magistrates should also throw up a consul who ignored the tenets of his office. We are now conducting these elections, I must point out to you, and the governance of Rome will proceed in future years as it was always intended to proceed!" "Let us hope then," said Catulus, offended, "that the voters will choose at least as wisely as Sulla always did!" But it was Hortensius who had the last word. "You are quite forgetting, my dear Quintus, that it was Sulla chose Lepidus!" On the whole the leaders of the Senate (including Catulus and Hortensius) professed themselves pleased with the wisdom of the electors. The senior consul was an elderly man of sedentary habit but known ability, Decimus Junius Brutus, and the junior consul was none other than Mamercus. Clearly the electors held the same high opinion of the Cottae as Sulla had, for last year Sulla had picked Gaius Aurelius Cotta as one of his praetors, and this year the voters returned his brother Marcus Aurelius Cotta among the praetors; the lots made him praetor peregrinus. Having remained in Rome to see who was returned, Catulus promptly offered supreme command in the war against Lepidus to the new consuls. As he expected, Decimus Brutus refused on the grounds of his age and lack of adequate military experience; it was Mamercus who was bound to accept. Just entering his forty fourth year, Mamercus had a fine war record and had served under Sulla in all his campaigns. But unforeseen events and Philippus conspired against Mamercus. Lucius Valerius Flaccus the Princeps Senatus, colleague in the second last consulship of Gaius Marius, dropped dead the day after he stepped down from office as first interrex, and Philippus proposed that Mamercus be appointed as a temporary Princeps Senatus. "We cannot do without a Leader of the House at this present time," Philippus said, "though it has always been the task of the censors to appoint him. By tradition he is the senior patrician in the House, but legally it is the right of the censors to appoint whichever patrician senator they consider most suitable. Our senior patrician senator is now Appius Claudius Pulcher, whose health is not good and who is proceeding to Macedonia anyway. We need a Leader of the House who is young and robust and present in Rome! Until such time as we elect a pair of censors, I suggest that we appoint Mamercus Aemilius Lepidus Livianus as a caretaker Princeps Senatus. I also suggest that he should remain within Rome until things settle down. It therefore follows that Quintus Lutatius Catulus should retain his command against Lepidus." "But I am going to Nearer Spain to govern!" cried Catulus. "Not possible," said Philippus bluntly. "I move that we direct our good Pontifex Maximus Metellus Pius, who is prorogued in Further Spain, to act as governor of Nearer Spain also until we can see our way clear to sending a new governor." As everyone was in favor of any measure which kept the stammering Pontifex Maximus a long way from Rome and religious ceremonies, Philippus got his way. The House authorized Metellus Pius to govern Nearer Spain as well as his own province, made Mamercus a temporary Princeps Senatus, and confirmed Catulus in his command against Lepidus. Very disappointed, Catulus took himself off to form up his legions in Campania, while an equally disappointed Mamercus remained in Rome.
Three days later word came that Lepidus was mobilizing his four legions and that his legate Brutus had gone to Italian Gaul to put its two garrison legions at Bononia, the intersection of the Via Aemilia and the Via Annia, where they would be perfectly poised to reinforce Lepidus. Still toying with revolt because they had suffered the loss of all their public lands, Clusium and Arretium could be expected to offer Brutus every assistance in his march to join Lepidus and to block any attempt by Catulus to prevent his joining up with Lepidus. Philippus struck. "Our supreme commander in the field, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, is still to the south of Rome has not in fact yet left Campania. Lepidus is moving south from Saturnia already," said Philippus, "and will be in a position to stop our commander in chief sending any of his troops to deal with Brutus in Italian Gaul. Besides which, I imagine our commander in chief will need all four of his legions to contain Lepidus himself. So what can we possibly do about Brutus, who holds the key to Lepidus's success in his hands? Brutus must be dealt with and dealt with smartly! But how? At the moment we have no other legions under the eagles in Italy, and the two legions of Italian Gaul belong to Brutus. Not even a Lucullus were he still in Rome instead of on his way to govern Africa Province could assemble and mobilize at least two legions quickly enough to confront Brutus."
The House listened gloomily, having finally been brought to realize that the years of civil strife were not over just because Sulla had made himself Dictator and striven mightily with his laws to stop another man from marching on Rome. With Sulla not dead a year yet, here was another man coming to impose his will upon his hapless country, here were whole tracts of Italy in arms against the city the Italians had wanted to belong to so badly in every way. Perhaps there were some among the voiceless ranks who were honest enough to admit that it was largely their own fault Rome was brought to this present pass; but if there were, not one of them spoke his thoughts aloud. Instead, everyone gazed at Philippus as if at a savior, and trusted to him to find a way out. "There is one man who can contain Brutus at once," said Philippus, sounding smug. "He has his father's old troops and indeed his own old troops! working for him on his estates in northern Picenum and Umbria. A much shorter march to Brutus than from Campania! He has been Rome's loyal servant in the past, as was his father Rome's loyal servant before him. I speak, of course, of the young knight Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. Victor at Clusium, victor in Sicily, victor over Africa and Numidia. It was not for nothing that Lucius Cornelius Sulla permitted this young knight to triumph! This young knight is our brightest hope! And he is in a position to contain Brutus within days!" The newly appointed temporary Princeps Senatus and junior consul shifted on his curule chair, frowning. "Gnaeus Pompeius is not a member of the Senate," Mamercus said, "and I cannot like the idea of giving any kind of command to someone outside our own." "I agree with you completely, Mamercus Aemilius!" said Philippus instantly. "No one could like it. But can you offer a better alternative? We have the constitutional power in times of emergency to look outside the Senate for our military answer, and this power was given to us by none other than Sulla himself. No more conservative man than Sulla ever lived, nor a man more attached to the perpetuation of the mos maiorum. Yet he it was who foresaw just this present situation and he it was who provided us with an answer." Philippus stayed by his stool (as Sulla had directed all speakers must), but he turned around slowly in a circle to look at the tiers of senators on both sides of the House. As orator and presence he had grown in stature since the time when he had set out to ruin Marcus Livius Drusus; these days there were no ludicrous temper tantrums, no storms of abuse. "Conscript Fathers," he said solemnly, "we have no time to waste in debate. Even as I speak, Lepidus is marching on Rome. May I respectfully ask the senior consul Decimus Junius Brutus to put a motion before the House? Namely, that this body authorize the knight Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus to raise his old legions and march to contend with Marcus Junius Brutus in the name of the Senate and People of Rome. Further, that this body confer a propraetorian status upon the knight Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus." Decimus Brutus had opened his mouth to consent when Mamercus prevented him, one hand on the senior consul's arm. "I will agree to your putting that motion before the House for a vote, Decimus Junius," he said, "but not until Lucius Marcius Philippus has clarified one phrase he used in wording his motion! He said, 'to raise his old legions' instead of specifying how many legions! No matter how stellar Gnaeus Pompeius's military record might be, he is not a member of the Senate! He cannot be given the authority to raise legions in Rome's name to however many he may himself consider enough. I say that the motion must specify the exact number of legions this House authorizes Gnaeus Pompeius to raise, and I say further that the number of legions be limited to two. Brutus the governor of Italian Gaul has two legions of relatively inexperienced soldiers, the permanent garrison of that province. It ought not to take more than two legions of hoary old Pompeian veterans to deal with Brutus." This perceptive opposition did not please Philippus, but he deemed it wise to accede; Mamercus was of that slow and steady kind who somehow always managed to accumulate a lot of senatorial clout and he was married to Sulla's daughter. "I beg the House's pardon!" cried Philippus. "How sloppy of me! And I thank our esteemed Princeps Senatus and junior consul for his timely intervention. I meant to say two legions, of course. Let the motion be put to the House, Decimus Junius, with that exact number of legions." The motion was put, and the motion was passed without one single dissenting voice. Cethegus had raised his arms above his head in a stretch and a yawn, the signal to all his followers on the back benches that they were to vote in the affirmative. And because the motion dealt with war, the senatorial resolution carried the force of law with it; in war and in foreign matters the various Assemblies of the Roman People no longer had a say.
* * *
It was, after all that political maneuvering, a hasty and pathetic little war, hardly deserving of the name. Even though Lepidus had started out to march on Rome considerably earlier than Catulus left Campania, still Catulus beat him to Rome and occupied the Campus Martius. When Lepidus did appear across the river in Transtiberim (he had come down the Via Aurelia), Catulus barred and garrisoned all the bridges, and thereby forced Lepidus to march north to the Mulvian Bridge. Thus it was that the two armies came to grips on the northeastern side of the Via Lata under the Servian Walls of the Quirinal; in that place most of the fighting occurred. Some fierce clashes of arms elevated the battle beyond a rout, but Lepidus turned out to be a hopeless tactician, incapable of deploying his men logically and quite incapable of winning. An hour after the two sides met, Lepidus was in full retreat back to the Mulvian Bridge, with Catulus in hot pursuit. North of Fregenae he turned and fought Catulus again, but only to secure his flight to Cosa. From Cosa he managed to escape to Sardinia, accompanied by twenty thousand of his foot soldiers and fifteen hundred cavalry troopers. It was his intention to restructure his army in Sardinia, then return to Italy and try again. With him went his middle son, Lucius, the Carboan ex governor Marcus Perperna Veiento, and Cinna's son. But Lepidus's eldest son, Scipio Aemilianus, declined to leave Italy. Instead he barricaded himself and his legion inside the old and formidable fortress on the Alban Mount above Bovillae, and there withstood siege. The much publicized return to Italy from Sardinia never came to pass. The governor of Sardinia was an old ally of Lucullus's, one Lucius Valerius Triarius, and he resisted Lepidus's occupation bitterly. Then in April of that unhappy year Lepidus died still in Sardinia; his troops maintained that what killed him was a broken heart, mourning for his dead wife. Perperna Veiento and Cinna's son took ship from Sardinia to Liguria, and thence marched their twenty thousand foot and fifteen hundred horse along the Via Domitia to Spain and Quintus Sertorius. With them went Lucius, Lepidus's middle son. The eldest son, Scipio Aemilianus, proved the most militarily competent of the rebels, and held out in Alba Longa for some time. But eventually he was forced to surrender; following orders from the Senate, Catulus executed him. If ignominy was to set the standard of events, Brutus fared far the worst. While ever he heard nothing from Lepidus he held his two legions in Italian Gaul at the major intersection of Bononia; and thus allowed Pompey to steal a march on him. That young man (now some twenty eight years old) had of course already been mobilized when Philippus secured him his special commission from the Senate. But instead of bringing his two legions up from Picenum to Ariminum and then inland along the Via Aemilia, Pompey chose to go down the Via Flaminia toward Rome. At the intersection of this road with the Via Cassia north to Arretium and thence to Italian Gaul, he turned onto the Via Cassia. By doing this he prevented Brutus from joining Lepidus had Brutus ever really thought he might. When he heard of Pompey's approach up the Via Cassia, Brutus retreated into Mutina. This big and extremely well fortified town was stuffed with clients of the Aemilii, Lepidus as well as Scaurus. It therefore welcomed Brutus gladly. Pompey duly arrived; Mutina was invested. The city held out until Brutus heard of the defeat and flight of Lepidus, and his death in Sardinia. Once it became clear that Lepidus's troops were now absolutely committed to Quintus Sertorius in Spain, Brutus despaired. Rather than put Mutina through any further hardship, he surrendered. "That was sensible," said Pompey to him after Pompey had entered the city. "Both sensible and expedient," said Brutus wearily. "I fear, Gnaeus Pompeius, that I am not by nature a martial man." "That's true." "I will, however, go to my death with grace." The beautiful blue eyes opened even wider than usual. ' To your death?'' asked Pompey blankly. ' There is no need for that, Marcus Junius Brutus! You're free to go." It was Brutus's turn to open his eyes wide. "Free? Do you mean it, Gnaeus Pompeius?" "Certainly!" said Pompey cheerfully. "However, that does not mean you're free to raise fresh resistance! Just go home." "Then with your permission, Gnaeus Pompeius, I will proceed to my own lands in western Umbria. My people there need calming." "That's fine by me! Umbria is my patch too." But after Brutus had ridden out of Mutina's western gate, Pompey sent for one of his legates, a man named Geminius who was a Picentine of humble status and inferior rank; Pompey disliked subordinates whose station in life was equal to his own. "I'm surprised you let him go," said Geminius. "Oh, I had to let him go! My standing with the Senate is not yet so high that I can order the execution of a Junius Brutus without overwhelming evidence. Even if I do have a propraetorian imperium. So it's up to you to find that overwhelming evidence." "Only tell me what you want, Magnus, and it will be done." "Brutus says he's going to his own estates in Umbria. Yet he's chosen to head northwest on the Via Aemilia! I would have said that was the wrong way, wouldn't you? Well, perhaps he's heading cross country. Or perhaps he's looking for more troops. I want you to follow him at once with a good detachment of cavalry five squadrons ought to be enough," said Pompey, picking his teeth with a thin sliver of wood. I suspect he's looking for more troops, probably in Regium Lepidum. Your job is to arrest him and execute him the moment he seems treasonous. That way there can be no doubt that he's a double traitor, and no one in Rome can object when he dies. Understood, Geminius?'' "Completely." What Pompey did not explain to Geminius was the ultimate reason for this second chance for Brutus. Kid Butcher was aiming for the command in Spain against Sertorius, and his chances of getting it were much greater if he could find an excuse for not demobilizing. Could he make it appear that Italian Gaul was potentially rebellious right along the length of the Via Aemilia, then he had every excuse for lingering there with his army now that the war was over. He would be far enough away from Rome not to seem to present any threat to the Senate, yet he would still be under arms. Ready to march for Spain. Geminius did exactly as he was told. When Brutus arrived in the township of Regium Lepidum some distance to the northwest of Mutina, he was welcomed joyfully. As the name of the place indicated, it was populated by clients of the Aemilii Lepidi, and naturally it offered to fight for Brutus if he wished. But before Brutus could answer, Geminius and his five squadrons of cavalry rode in through the open gates. There in the forum of Regium Lepidum, Geminius publicly adjudged Marcus Junius Brutus an enemy of Rome, and cut his head off. Back went the head to Pompey in Mutina, together with a laconic message from Geminius to the effect that he had surprised Brutus in the act of organizing a fresh insurrection, and that in Geminius's opinion Italian Gaul was unstable. Off went Pompey's report to the Senate:
For the time being I consider it my duty to garrison Italian Gaul with my two legions of veterans. The troops Brutus commanded I disbanded as disloyal, though I did not punish them beyond removing their arms and armor. And their two eagles of course. I consider the conduct of Regium Lepidum a symptom of the general unrest north of the border, and hope this explains my decision to stay. I have not dispatched the head of the traitor Brutus with this record of my deeds because he was at the time of his death a governor with a propraetorian imperium, and I don't think the Senate would want to pin it up on the rostra. Instead, I have sent the ashes of body and head to his widow for proper interment. In this I hope I have not erred. It was no part of my intentions to execute Brutus. He brought that fate upon himself. May I respectfully request that my own imperium be permitted to stand for the time being? I can perform a useful function here in Italian Gaul by holding the province for the Senate and People of Rome.
The Senate under Philippus's skillful guidance pronounced those men who had taken part in Lepidus's rebellion sacer, but because the horrors of the proscriptions still lingered, did not exact any reprisals against their families; the crude pottery jar containing his ashes in her lap, the widow of Marcus Junius Brutus could relax. Her six year old son's fortune was safe, though it would be up to her to ensure that he did not suffer political odium when he grew up. Servilia told the child of his father's death in a way which gave him to understand that he was never to admire or assist his father's murderer, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, the Picentine upstart. The boy listened, nodding solemnly. If the news that he now had no father upset him or grieved him, he gave no sign. He had not yet sprung into speedy growth, but remained a weedy, undersized little boy with spindly legs and a pouting face. Very dark of hair and eye and olive of skin, he had produced a certain juvenile prettiness which his besotted mama saw as permanent beauty, and his tutor spoke highly of his ability to read and write and calculate (what the tutor did not say, however, was that little Brutus entirely lacked an original bent, and imagination). Naturally Servilia had no intention of ever sending Brutus to school with other boys; he was too sensitive, too intelligent, too precious someone might pick on him! Only three members of her family had come to pay their condolences to Servilia, though two of those were, strictly speaking, not close relatives. After the last of their various parents, grandparents and others had died, the only surviving person linked to them by blood, Uncle Mamercus, had placed the six orphaned children of his brother and sister in the charge of a Servilius Caepio cousin and her mother. These two women, Gnaea and Porcia Liciniana, now came to call a courtesy Servilia could well have done without. Gnaea remained the dour and silent subordinate of her overpowering mother; at almost thirty years of age, she was even plainer and flatter of chest than she had been in her late adolescence. Porcia Liciniana dominated the conversation. As she had done all of her life. "Well, Servilia, I never thought to see you a widow at such an early age, and I'm sorry for you," said this formidable lady. "It always seemed remarkable to me that Sulla spared your husband and his father from the proscription lists, though I assumed that was because of you. It might have been awkward even for Sulla! to proscribe the father in law of his own son in law's niece, but he really ought to have done so. Old Brutus stuck to Gaius Marius and then Carbo like a moth melted into a wax candle. It had to have been his son's marriage to you saved them both. And you would think the son would have learned, wouldn't you? But no! Off he went to serve an idiot like Lepidus! Anyone with any sense could have seen that business would never prosper." "Quite so," said Servilia colorlessly. "I'm sorry too," said Gnaea gruffly, contributing her mite. But the glance Servilia bestowed upon this poor creature held neither love nor pity; Servilia despised her, though she did not loathe her as she did the mother. What will you do now?'' asked Porcia Liciniana. "Marry again as soon as I can." "Marry again! That is not fitting for one of your rank. I did not remarry after I was widowed." "I imagine no one asked you," said Servilia sweetly. Thick skinned though she was, Porcia Liciniana nonetheless felt the sting of the acid in this statement, and rose majestically to her feet. "I've done my duty and paid my condolences," she said. "Come, Gnaea, it's time to go. We mustn't hinder Servilia in her search for a new husband." "And good riddance to you, you old verpa!" said Servilia to herself after they had gone. Quite as unwelcome as Porcia Liciniana and Gnaea was her third visitor, who arrived shortly afterward. The youngest of the six orphans, Marcus Porcius Cato was Servilia's half brother through their common mother, sister to Drusus and Mamercus. "My brother Caepio would have come," said young Cato in his harsh and unmelodic voice, "except that he's out of Rome with Catulus's army a contubernalis, if you know that term." "I know it," said Servilia gently. But the thickness of Porcia Liciniana's skin was as air compared to Marcus Porcius Cato's, so this sally was ignored. He was now sixteen years old and a man, but he still lived in the care of Gnaea and her mother, as did his full sister, Porcia. Mamercus had sold Drusus's house as too large some time ago; they all occupied Cato's father's house these days. Though the massive size of his blade thin eagle's nose would never allow him to be called handsome, Cato was actually a most attractive youth, clear skinned and wide shouldered. His large and expressive eyes were a soft grey, his closely cropped hair an off red that shaded to chestnut, and his mouth quite beautiful. To Servilia, however, he was an absolute monster loud, slow to learn, insensitive, and so pugnaciously quarrelsome that he had been a thorn in the side of his older siblings from the time he began to walk and talk. Between them lay ten years of age and different fathers, but more than that; Servilia was a patrician whose family went back to the time of the Kings of Rome, whereas Cato's branch of his family went back to a Celtiberian slave, Salonia, who had been the second wife of Cato the Censor. To Servilia, this slur her mother had brought upon her own and her husband's families was an intolerable one, and she could never set eyes upon any of her three younger siblings without grinding her teeth in rage and shame. For Cato these feelings were undisguised, but for Caepio, supposed to be her own full brother (she knew he was not), what she felt had to be suppressed. For decency's sake. Rot decency! Not that Cato felt any social stigma; he was inordinately proud of his great grandfather the Censor, and considered his lineage impeccable. As noble Rome had forgiven Cato the Censor this second marriage (founded as it had been in a sly revenge against his snobbish son by his first wife, a Licinia), young Cato could look forward to a career in the Senate and very likely the consulship. Uncle Mamercus turned out to have picked you an unsuitable husband," said Cato. "I deny that," said Servilia in level tones. "He suited me well. He was, after all, a Junius Brutus. Plebeian, perhaps, but absolutely noble on both sides." "Why can you never see that ancestry is far less important than a man's deeds?" demanded Cato. "It is not less important, but more." "You're an insufferable snob!" "I am indeed. I thank the gods for it." "You'll ruin your son." "That remains to be seen." "When he's a bit older I'll take him under my wing. That will knock all the social pretensions out of him!" "Over my dead body." "How can you stop me? The boy can't stay plastered to your skirts forever! Since he has no father, I stand in loco parentis." "Not for very long. I shall remarry." "To remarry is unbecoming for a Roman noblewoman! I would have thought you would have set out to emulate Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi." "I am too sensible. A Roman noblewoman of patrician stock must have a husband to ensure her pre eminence. A husband, that is, who is as noble as she is." He gave vent to a whinnying laugh. "You mean you're going to marry some overbred buffoon like Drusus Nero!" "It's my sister Lilla who is married to Drusus Nero." "They dislike each other." "My heart bleeds for them." "I shall marry Uncle Mamercus's daughter," said Cato smugly. Servilia stared, snorted. "You will not! Aemilia Lepida was contracted to marry Metellus Scipio years ago, when Uncle Mamercus was with his father, Pius, in Sulla's army. And compared to Metellus Scipio, Cato, you're a complete mushroom!" "It makes no difference. Aemilia Lepida might be engaged to Metellus Scipio, but she doesn't love him. They fight all the time, and who does she turn to when he makes her unhappy? To me, of course! I shall marry her, be sure of it!" "Is there nothing under the sun that can puncture your unbelievable complacence?" she demanded. "If there is, I haven't met it," he said, unruffled. "Don't worry, it's lying in wait somewhere." Came another of those loud, neighing laughs. "You hope!" "I don't hope. I know." "My sister Porcia is all settled," Cato said, not wanting to change the subject, simply imparting fresh information. "To an Ahenobarbus, no doubt. Young Lucius?" "Correct. To young Lucius. I like him! He's a fellow with the right ideas." "He's almost as big an upstart as you are." "I'm off," said Cato, and got up. "Good riddance!" Servilia said again, but this time to its object's face rather than behind his back. Thus it was that Servilia went to her empty bed that night plunged into a mixture of gloom and determination. So they did not approve of her intention to remarry, did they? So they all considered her finished as a force to be reckoned with, did they? "They're wrong!" she said aloud, then fell asleep. In the morning she went to see Uncle Mamercus, with whom she had always got on very well. "You are the executor of my husband's will," she said. "I want to know what becomes of my dowry." "It's still yours, Servilia, but you won't need to use it now you're a widow. Marcus Junius Brutus has left you sufficient money in your own right to live comfortably, and his son is now a very wealthy young boy." "I wasn't thinking of continuing to live alone, Uncle. I want to remarry if you can find me a suitable husband." Mamercus blinked. "A rapid decision." "There is no point in delaying." "You can't marry again for another nine months, Servilia." "Which gives you plenty of time to find someone for me," said the widow. "He must be at least as wellborn and wealthy as Marcus Junius, but preferably somewhat younger." "How old are you now?" "Twenty seven." "So you'd like someone about thirty?" "That would be ideal, Uncle Mamercus." "Not a fortune hunter, of course." She raised her brows. "Not a fortune hunter!" Mamercus smiled. "All right, Servilia, I'll start making enquiries on your behalf. It ought not to be difficult. Your birth is superlative, your dowry is two hundred talents, and you have proven yourself fertile. Your son will not be a financial burden for any new husband, nor will you. Yes, I think we ought to be able to do quite well for you!" "By the way, Uncle," she said as she rose to go, "are you aware that young Cato has his eye on your daughter?" "What?" "Young Cato has his eye on Aemilia Lepida." "But she's already engaged to Metellus Scipio!" "So I told Cato, but he seems not to regard this engagement as an impediment. I don't think, mind you, that Aemilia Lepida has any idea in her mind of exchanging Metellus Scipio for Cato. But I would not be doing my duty to you, Uncle, if I failed to inform you what Cato is going around saying." "They're good friends, it's true," said Mamercus, looking perturbed, "but he's exactly Aemilia Lepida's age! That usually means girls aren't interested." "I repeat, I don't know that she is interested. All I'm saying is that Cato is interested. Nip it in the bud, Uncle nip it in the bud!" And that, said Servilia to herself as she emerged into the quiet street on the Palatine where Mamercus and Cornelia Sulla lived, will put you in your place, Marcus Porcius Cato! How dare you look as high as Uncle Mamercus's daughter! Patrician on both sides! Home she went, very pleased with herself. In many ways she was not sorry that life had served this turn of widowhood upon her; though at the time she married him Marcus Junius Brutus had not seemed too old, eight years of marriage had aged him in her eyes, and she had begun to despair of bearing other children. One son was enough, but there could be no denying several girls would contribute much; if well dowered they would find eligible husbands who would prove of use politically to her son. Yes, the death of Brutus had been a shock. But a grief it was not. Her steward answered the door himself. "What is it, Ditus?" "Someone has called to see you, domina." "After all these years, you Greek idiot, you ought to know better than to phrase your announcement that way!" she snapped, enjoying his involuntary shiver of fear. "Who has called to see me?'' "He said he was Decimus Junius Silanus, lady." "He said he was Decimus Junius Silanus. Either he is who he says he is, or he is not. Which is it, Epaphroditus?" "He is Decimus Junius Silanus, lady." "Did you put him in the study?" "Yes, lady." Off she went still wrapped in her black palla, frowning as she strove to place a face together with the name Decimus Junius Silanus. The same Famous Family as her late husband, but of the branch cognominated Silanus because the original bearer of that nickname had been, not ugly like the leering Silanus face which spouted water into every one of Rome's drinking and washing fountains, but apparently too handsome. Owning the same reputation as the Memmii, the Junii Silani men continued to be too handsome. He had called, he said, extending his hand to the widow, to give her his condolences and offer her whatever assistance he might. "It is very difficult for you, I imagine," he ended a little lamely, and blushed. Certainly from his face he could not be mistaken for any but a Junius Silanus, for he was fair of hair and blue of eye and quite startlingly handsome. Servilia liked blond men who were handsome. She placed her hand in his for exactly the proper length of time, then turned and shed her palla upon the back of her late husband's chair, revealing herself clad in more black. The color suited her because her skin was clear and pale, yet her eyes and hair were as jet as her widow's weeds. She also had a sense of style which meant she dressed smartly as well as becomingly, and she looked to the dazzled man as elegantly perfect in the flesh as she had in his memory. "Do I know you, Decimus Junius?" she asked, gesturing that he sit on the couch, and herself taking up residence on a chair. "You do, Servilia, but it was some years ago. We met at a dinner party in the house of Quintus Lutatius Catulus in the days before Sulla became Dictator. We didn't talk for long, but I do remember that you had recently given birth to a son." Her face cleared. "Oh, of course! Please forgive me for my rudeness." She put a hand to her head, looked sad. "It's just that so much has happened to me since then." "Think nothing of it," he said warmly, then sat without a thing to say, his eyes fixed upon her face. She coughed delicately. "May I offer you some wine?" "Thank you, no." I see you have not brought your wife with you, Decimus Junius. Is she well?" "I have no wife." "Oh!" Behind her closed and alluringly secretive face, the thoughts were racing. He fancied her! There could be no doubt about it, he fancied her! For some years, it seemed. An honorable man too. Knowing she was married, he had not ventured to increase his acquaintance with her or with her husband. But now that she was a widow he intended to be the first and stave off competition. He was very wellborn, yes but was he wealthy? The eldest son, since he bore the first name of Decimus: Decimus was the first name of the eldest son in the Junii Silani. He looked to be about thirty, and that was right also. But was he wealthy? Time to fish. "Are you in the Senate, Decimus Junius?" "This year, actually. I'm a city quaestor." Good, good! He had at least a senatorial census. "Where are your lands, Decimus Junius?" "Oh, all over the place. My chief country estate is in Campania, twenty thousand iugera fronting onto the Volturnus between Telesia and Capua. But I have river frontage lands on the Tiber, a very big place on the Gulf of Tarentum, a villa at Cumae and another at Larinum," he said eagerly, keen to impress her. Servilia leaned back infinitesimally in her chair and exhaled very cautiously. He was rich. Extremely rich. "How is your little boy?" he asked. That obsession she could not conceal, it flamed behind her eyes and suffused her face with a passion that sat ill upon her naturally enigmatic features. "He misses his father, but I think he understands." Decimus Junius Silanus rose to his feet. "It is time I went, Servilia. May I come again?" Her creamy lids fell over her eyes, the black lashes fanning upon her cheeks. A faint pink came into them, a faint smile turned up the corners of her little folded mouth. "Please do, Decimus Junius. It would please me greatly," she said. And so much for you, Porcia Liciniana! she said to herself exultantly as she let her visitor personally out of her house. I have found my next husband, though I have not yet been a widow for a month! Wait until I tell Uncle Mamercus!
Said Lucius Marcius Philippus to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus in a letter written a month after the death of Marcus Junius Brutus:
It is true that we are into the second half of the year, but things are proceeding quite well, all considered. I had hoped to tie Mamercus permanently to Rome, but after word came that Brutus as well as Lepidus was dead, he refused to believe that his role as Princeps Senatus tied him to Rome any longer, and asked the Senate for permission to prepare for the war against Sertorius. Our senatorial goats promptly turned into sheep and gave Mamercus the four legions belonging to Catulus, these still being under arms in Capua waiting for discharge. Catulus, I hasten to add, is well satisfied with his little campaign against Lepidus; he (undeservedly) earned an imposing military reputation without needing to venture further from Rome than the Campus Martius, and urged the Senate to give Mamercus the governance of Nearer Spain and the command against Sertorius. It is possible that Mamercus might be what Spain needs. Therefore I must ensure that he never gets there. For I must procure for you a special commission in Spain before Lucullus can come back from Africa. Fortunately I think the right tool to foil Mamercus's ambitions has just come into my hand. He yes, naturally it is a man is one of this year's crop of twenty quaestors, by name Gaius Aelius Staienus. And he was assigned by lot to the army of the consul, no less! In other words he has been in Capua working for Catulus since the beginning of his term, and in future he will be working for Mamercus. A trustier, bigger villain you are unlikely to meet, my dear Magnus! Quite up there with Gaius Verres who, having secured the conviction and exile of the younger Dolabella by testifying against him in the prosecution brought by young Scaurus, now struts around Rome engaged to a Caecilia Metella, if you please! The daughter of Metellus Caprarius the Billy goat, and sister of those three up and coming young men who are, alas, the best the Caecilii Metelli have produced in this generation. Quite a comedown. Anyway, my dear Magnus, I have approached our villain Gaius Aelius Staienus and secured his services. We didn't get around to precise amounts of money, but he won't come cheap. He will, however, do whatever has to be done. Of that I am sure. His idea is to foment a mutiny among the troops as soon as Mamercus has been in Capua long enough for it to appear that Mamercus is the reason for the mutiny. I did venture to say that these were Sulla's veterans and I didn't think they'd turn on their beloved Sulla's son in law, but Staienus just laughed at my doubts. My misgivings quite melted away, it was such a hearty and confident laugh. Not to mention that one cannot but expect great things from a man who arranged his own adoption into the Aelii, and tries to have people call him Paetus rather than Staienus! He impresses all sorts of men, but particularly those of low class, who approve of his style of oratory and are easily enflamed by it. Thus having until I found Staienus opposed the Mamercus command, I have now changed my tune and press for it eagerly. Every time I see the dear fellow I ask him why he's still lingering in Rome instead of taking himself off to Capua to train his troops. I think we can be sure that by September at the latest Mamercus will be the victim of a massive mutiny. And the moment I hear of it, I will start urging the Senate to turn its mind toward the special commission clause. Luckily things continue to go from bad to worse in the Spains, which will make my task easier. So be patient and sanguine, my dear Magnus, do! It will happen, and it will happen early enough in the year for you to cross the Alps before the snows close the passes.
The mutiny when it came a little after the beginning of the month Sextilis was very cleverly engineered by Gaius Aelius Staienus, for it was neither bloody nor bitter, and smacked of such sincerity that its victim, Mamercus, found himself unwilling to discipline the men. A deputation had come to him and announced with absolute firmness that the legions would not go to Spain under any general save Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus because they believed no one except Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus could beat Quintus Sertorius. "And perhaps," said Mamercus to the House when he came to Rome to report he was shaken enough to speak honestly "they are quite right! I confess I do not blame them. They were very properly respectful. Enlisted men of their experience have a nose for such matters, and it is not as if they do not know me. If they think I cannot deal with Quintus Sertorius, then I too must wonder if I can. If they think Gnaeus Pompeius is the only man for the job, then I must wonder if they are not right." Those quiet and frank words had a profound effect upon the senators, who found themselves even in their front ranks bereft of indignation and the inclination to debate. Which made it easy for Philippus to be heard. "Conscript Fathers," he commenced with love in his voice, "it is high time we took stock of the situation in Spain with no passion and no prejudices. What a sober and uplifting experience it has been for me to listen to our very dear and very intelligent junior consul, our Princeps Senatus, Mamercus Aemilius Lepidus Livianus! Let me therefore continue in that same measured and thoughtful vein." Round he went in a circle, looking into every face he could manage to see from his position in the front row on the left side. "The early successes of Quintus Sertorius after he re entered Spain to join the Lusitani three and a half years ago were fairly easy to understand. Men like Lucius Fufidius held him lightly and offered battle precipitately. But by the time that our Pontifex Maximus, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius, arrived to govern Further Spain, and his colleague Marcus Domitius Calvinus arrived to govern Nearer Spain, we knew Quintus Sertorius was going to be hard to beat. And then in that first campaigning summer Sertorius's legate Lucius Hirtuleius attacked Calvinus's six legions with a mere four thousand men! and trounced him. Calvinus died on the field. So did most of his troops. Sertorius himself moved against Pius, though he preferred to concentrate upon Pius's valued legate, Thorius. Thorius died on the field and his three legions were badly mauled. Our beloved Pius was forced to retreat for the winter into Olisippo on the Tagus, with Sertorius on his tail. The following year which was last year saw no big battles. But no big successes either! Pius spent the time trying to stay out of Sertorius's clutches while Hirtuleius overran central Spain and established Sertorius's ascendancy among the Celtiberian tribes. Sertorius already had the Lusitani in the palm of his hand, and now almost all of Spain bade fair to being his save for the lands between the Baetis River and the Orospeda Mountains, where Pius concentrated himself too strongly to tempt Sertorius. "But last year's governor of Gaul across the Alps, Lucius Manlius, thought he could deal a blow at Sertorius. So he crossed the Pyrenees into Nearer Spain with four good legions. Hirtuleius met him on the Iberus River and beat him so soundly Lucius Manlius was forced to retreat immediately back into his own province. Where, he soon discovered, he was no longer safe! Hirtuleius followed him and inflicted a second defeat. "This year has been no better for us, Conscript Fathers. Nearer Spain has not yet received a governor and Further Spain remains with the prorogued Pius, who has not moved west of the Baetis nor north of the Orospeda. Unopposed, Quintus Sertorius marched through the pass at Consabura into Nearer Spain and has set up a capital at Osca for he has actually had the audacity to organize his occupation of Rome's territories along Roman lines! He has an official capital city and a senate even a school in which he intends to have the children of barbarian chieftains taught Latin and Greek so that they will be able to take their places as the leaders of Sertorian Spain! His magistrates bear Roman titles, his senate consists of three hundred men. And now he has been joined by Marcus Perperna Veiento and the forces of Lepidus that managed to escape from Sardinia." None of this was new, all of it was well known. But no one had drawn it all together and condensed it into a few moments of crisp, dispassionate speech. The House heaved a collective sigh and huddled down on its stools, defenseless. Conscript Fathers, we have to send Nearer Spain a governor! We did try, but Lepidus made it impossible for Quintus Lutatius to go, and a mutiny has made it impossible for our Princeps Senatus to go. It is obvious to me that this next governor will have to be a very special man. His duties must be first to make war, and only after that to govern. In fact, almost his sole duty will be to make war! Of the fourteen legions which went with Pius and Calvinus two and a half years ago, it seems perhaps seven are left, and all of these are with Pius in Further Spain. Nearer Spain is garrisoned by Quintus Sertorius. There is no one in the province to oppose him. "Whoever we send to Nearer Spain will have to bring an army with him we cannot take troops off Pius. And we have the nucleus of that army sitting in Capua, four good legions mostly composed of Sullan veterans. Who have steadfastly refused to go to Spain under the command of any other man than Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. Who is not a senator, but a knight." Philippus paused for a long time, unmoving, to let this sink in. When he resumed his voice was brisker, more practical. "So there, my fellow senators, we have one suggestion, courtesy of the Capuan army Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. However, the law as Lucius Cornelius Sulla wrote it stipulates that command must go first to someone who is a member of the Senate, who is willing to take the command, and who is militarily qualified to take the command. I intend to discover now if there is such a man in the Senate." He turned to the curule podium and looked at the senior consul. "Decimus Junius Brutus, do you want the command?" "No, Lucius Marcius, I do not. I am too old, too untalented." "Mamercus?" "No, Lucius Marcius, I do not. My army is disaffected." "Urban praetor?" Even if my magistracy permitted me to leave Rome for more than ten days, I do not," said Gnaeus Aufidius Orestes. "Foreign praetor?" "No, Lucius Marcius, I do not," said Marcus Aurelius Cotta. After which six more praetors declined. Philippus turned then to the front rows and began to ask the consulars. "Marcus Tullius Decula?" "No." "Quintus Lutatius Catulus?" "No." And so it went, one nay after another. Philippus presumed to ask himself, and answered: "No, I do not! I am too old, too fat and too militarily inept." He turned then from one side of the House to the other. "Is there any man present who feels himself qualified to take this high command? Gaius Scribonius Curio, what about you?" Nothing would Curio have liked better than to say yes: but Curio had been bought, and honor dictated his reply. "No." There was one very young senator in attendance who had to sit on both his hands and bite his itching tongue to remain still and silent, but he managed it because he knew Philippus would never countenance his appointment. Gaius Julius Caesar was not going to draw attention to himself until he stood at least an outside chance of winning. "So then," said Philippus, "it comes back to the special commission and to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. With your own ears you have heard man after man disqualify himself. Now it may be that among those senators and promagistrates at this moment on duty abroad, there is a suitable man. But we cannot afford to wait! The situation must be dealt with now or we will lose the Spains! And it is very clear to me that the only man available and suitable is Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus! A knight rather than a senator. But he has been under arms since his sixteenth year, and since his twentieth year he has led his own legions into battle after battle! Our late lamented Lucius Cornelius Sulla preferred him over all other men. Rightly so! Young Pompeius Magnus has experience, talent, a huge pool of veteran soldiers, and Rome's best interests at heart. We own the constitutional means to appoint this young man governor of Nearer Spain with a proconsular imperium, to authorize him to command however many legions we see fit, and to overlook his knight status. However, I would like to request that we do not word his special commission to suggest that we deem him to have already served as consul. Non pro consule, sed pro consulibus not as a consul after his year in office, but rather on behalf of the consuls of the year. That way he is permanently reminded of his special commission." Philippus sat down; Decimus Junius Brutus the senior consul stood up. "Members of this house, I will see a division. Those in favor of granting a special commission with a proconsular imperium and six legions to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, knight, stand to my right. Those opposed, stand to my left." No one stood to Decimus Brutus's left, even the very young senator Gaius Julius Caesar.
PART VI from SEPTEMBER 77 B.C. until WINTER 72 71 B.C.
There was no one with whom Pompey could share the news when Philippus's letter arrived in Mutina, and no one when the Senate's decree came through on the Ides of Sextilis. He was still trying to persuade Varro that the expedition to Spain would be as interesting as it was beneficial to an up and coming author of natural and man made phenomena, but Varro's responses to his many missives were lukewarm. Varro's children had arrived at an age he found delightful and he had no wish to absent himself from Rome for what might be a long time. The new proconsul who had never been consul was very well prepared, and knew exactly how he intended to proceed. First, he wrote to the Senate and informed it that he would take three of the four legions which had belonged to Catulus and then to Mamercus, and three legions made up of his own veterans. However, he said, the kind of war Metellus Pius was waging in Further Spain did not seem to be an attacking one, and the emphasis had shifted from the Further to the Nearer province since Metellus Pius's early days; therefore he requested that the Senate instruct Metellus Pius to give up one of his seven legions to Pompey. That worthy's brother in law, Gaius Memmius, was now a tribune of the soldiers with Metellus Pius, but the following year would see him old enough to stand for quaestor; would it be possible that Gaius Memmius be allowed to stand for quaestor in absentia, and then join Pompey's staff as quaestor for Nearer Spain? The Senate's assent (it was now clay in Philippus's hands) came back before Pompey quit Mutina, bolstering his conviction that whatever he wanted would be given to him. Now the father of a son almost two years old and a daughter born earlier in this year, Pompey had left Mucia Tertia at his stronghold in Picenum and issued firm orders that she was not to visit Rome in his absence. He expected a long campaign and could see no virtue in exposing his beautiful and enigmatic wife to temptation. Though he had already raised a thousand horse troopers from among his old cavalry units, it was Pompey's intention to add to their number by recruiting in Gaul across the Alps, one good reason why he preferred to go to Spain by the land route. He was also a poor sailor, dreaded the sea, and did not trust it as a way of reaching his new province, though the winter winds favored it. Every map had been studied, every trader and frequenter of the land route to Spain had been interviewed. The Via Domitia was, however, fraught with difficulties: as Pompey now knew. After Marcus Perperna Veiento had crossed with the remnants of Lepidus's army from Sardinia to Liguria and headed off in the direction of Spain, he had taken great delight in working as much mischief for Rome along the way as he could. The result was that all the principal tribes of Gaul across the Alps were in revolt Helvii, Vocontii, Salluvii, Volcae Arecomici. The worst aspect of tribal unrest in the further Gallic province lay in the delays Pompey would suffer as he fought his way to Spain through territory full of hostile and formidably warlike peoples. Of eventual success he had no doubt, but he desperately wanted to arrive in Nearer Spain before this coming winter cracked down; if he was to make sure that he and not Metellus Pius won the war against Sertorius, he could not afford to spend a whole year getting to Spain, and that seemed a likely prospect given the unrest in Gaul across the Alps. All the passes through the Alps were in the custody of one or another of the tribes at present in revolt; the headhunting Salluvii controlled the lofty ranges of the Alpes Maritimae closest to the sea, the Vocontii occupied the valley of the Druentia River and the Mons Genava Pass, the Helvii guarded the middle reaches of the Rhodanus Valley, and the Volcae Arecomici lay athwart the Via Domitia to Spain below the central massif of the Cebenna. It would add laurels to his brow if he suppressed all these barbarian insurrections, of course but not laurels of high enough quality. They lay in the purlieu of Sertorius. Therefore how to avoid a long and costly transit of Gaul across the Alps? The answer had occurred to Pompey before he marched from Mutina in the first part of September: he would avoid the usual roads by blazing a new one. The largest of the northern tributaries which fed into the Padus River was the Duria Major, which came down rushing and roaring from the highest alps of all, those towering between the bowl of western Italian Gaul and the lakes and rivers feeding eastern Gallia Comata Lake Lemanna, the upper Rhodanus River, and the mighty Rhenus River which divided the lands of the Gauls from the lands of the Germans. The beautiful cleft carved out of the mountains by the Duria Major was always known as the Vale of the Salassi because it was inhabited by a Gallic tribe called the Salassi; when a generation ago gold had been found in the stream as an alluvium and Roman prospectors had begun to cull it, the Salassi had so strenuously resisted this Roman intrusion that no one any longer tried to retrieve the gold much further up the Vale than the town of Eporedia. But at the very top of the Vale of the Salassi there were said to be two passes across the Alpes Penninae. One was a literal goat track which led over the very highest mountains and down to a settlement of the tribe Veragri called Octodurum, and then followed the source stream of the Rhodanus until it entered the eastern end of Lake Lemanna; because of its ten thousand foot altitude this pass was only open during summer and early autumn, and was too treacherous to permit the passage of an army. The second pass lay at an altitude of about seven thousand feet and was wide enough to accommodate wagons, though its road was not paved or Roman surveyed; it led to the northern sources of the Isara River and the lands of the Allobroges, then to the Rhodanus about halfway down its course to the Middle Sea. The German Cimbri had fled through this pass after their defeat by Gaius Marius and Catulus Caesar at Vercellae, though their progress had been slow and most of them had been killed by the Allobroges and the Ambarri further west. During the first interview Pompey conducted with a group of tamed Salassi, he abandoned any thought of the higher pass; but the lower one interested him mightily. A path wide enough for wagons no matter how rough or perilous it might prove to be meant that he could traverse it with his legions and, he hoped, his cavalry. The season was about a month behind the calendar, so he would cross the Alpes Graiae in high summer if he got going by early September, and the chances of snow even at seven thousand feet were minimal. He decided not to cart any baggage by wagon, trusting that he would be able to find his heavier provisions and equipment around Narbo in the far Gallic province, and thus commandeered every mule he could find to serve as a pack animal. "We're going to move fast, no matter how difficult the terrain," he told his assembled army at dawn on the day he marched. "The less warning the Allobroges have of our advent, the better our chances of not becoming bogged down in a war I'd much rather not fight. Nothing must be allowed to prevent us reaching the Pyrenees before the lowest pass into Spain is closed! Gaul across the Alps morally belongs to the Domitii Ahenobarbi and as far as I'm concerned, they can keep it! We want to be in Nearer Spain by winter. And be in Nearer Spain by winter we will be!" The army crossed the lower of the two passes at the top of the Vale of the Salassi at the end of September and encountered surprisingly little opposition from either the route itself or the people who lived along it. When Pompey descended into the Isara valley and the lands of the fierce Allobroges, he caught them so much by surprise that they brandished their spears in the direction of his dust and never succeeded in catching up with him. It was not until he reached the Rhodanus itself that he chanced upon organized opposition. This came from the Helvii, who lived on the great river's western bank and in part of the Cebenna massif behind. But they proved easy meat for Pompey, who defeated several contingents of Helvii warriors sent against him, then demanded and took hostages against future good behavior. The Vocontii and Salluvii courageous enough to venture down onto the Rhodanus plains met the same fate, as did the Volcae Arecomici after Pompey's army had crossed the causeway through the marshes between Arelate and Nemausus. Past the last danger, Pompey then bundled up his cache of several hundred child hostages and sent them to Massilia for custody. Before winter he had crossed the Pyrenees and found himself an excellent campsite among the civilized Indigetes around the township of Emporiae. Pompey was into Nearer Spain, but barely. The proconsul who had never been a senator let alone a consul sat down to write to the Senate of his adventures since leaving Italian Gaul, with heavy emphasis upon his own courage and daring in blazing a new way across the Alps, and upon the ease with which he had defeated Gallic opposition. Missing the finishing touches Varro had always applied to his bald and fairly limited prose, Pompey then wrote to the other proconsul, Metellus Pius the Piglet in Further Spain.
I have arrived at Emporiae and gone into winter camp. I intend to spend the winter toughening my troops for next year's campaigns. I believe the Senate has ordered you to give me one of your legions. By now my brother in law Gaius Memmius will have been elected quaestor. He is to be my quaestor, and can lead your donated legion to me. Obviously the best way to defeat Quintus Sertorius is for us to work in concert. That is why the Senate did not appoint one of the two of us senior to the other. We are to be co commanders and work together. Now I have spent a great deal of time talking to men who know Spain, and I have devised a grand strategy for us in this coming year. Sertorius does not care to penetrate the Further province east of the Baetis because it is so densely settled and Romanized. There are not enough savages there to make it receptive to Sertorius. It behooves you, Quintus Caecilius, to look after your Further province and do nothing which might provoke Sertorius to invade your lands east of the Baetis. I will eject him from coastal Nearer Spain this year. It will not be an arduous campaign from the point of view of supplies, as this coastal area contains excellent forage growing on good terrain. I will march south in the spring, cross the Iberus River and head for New Carthage, which I ought to reach comfortably by midsummer. Gaius Memmius will take the one legion you owe me and march from the Baetis via Ad Fraxinum and Eliocroca to New Carthage, which of course is still our town. Just isolated from the rest of the Nearer province by Sertorius's forces. After I join up with Gaius Memmius in New Carthage we will return to winter at Emporiae, strengthening the various coastal towns as we go.
The following year I will eject Sertorius from inland Nearer Spain and drive him south and west into the lands of the Lusitani. In the third year, Quintus Caecilius, we will combine our two armies and crush him on the Tagus.
When Metellus Pius received this communication midway through January he retired to his study in the house he occupied in the town of Hispalis, there to peruse it in private. He didn't laugh; its contents were too serious. But smile sourly he did, unaware that Sulla had once got a letter not unlike this one, full of airy information about a country Sulla knew far better than Pompey did. Ye gods, the young butcher was sure of himself! And so patronizing! Three years had now gone by since Metellus Pius and his eight legions had arrived in Further Spain, three years which had seen Sertorius outgeneral and outthink him. No one had a more profound respect for Quintus Sertorius and his legate Lucius Hirtuleius than did Metellus Pius the Piglet. And no one knew better than he how hard it would be even for a Pompey to beat Sertorius and Hirtuleius. As far as he was concerned, the tragedy lay in the fact that Rome had not given him long enough. According to Aesop slow but steady won the race, and Metellus Pius was the embodiment of slow but steady. He had licked his wounds and reorganized his forces to absorb the loss of one legion, then skulked in his province without provoking Sertorius. Very deliberately. For while he waited and assembled the intelligence reports detailing Sertorius's movements, he thought. He did not believe it impossible to beat Sertorius; rather, he believed Sertorius could not be beaten by orthodox military methods. And, he had become convinced, the answer lay at least partly in establishing a more cunning and devious intelligence network the kind of intelligence network which would make it impossible for Sertorius to anticipate his troop movements. On the surface, a tall order, as the natives were the key to intelligence for both himself and Sertorius. But not an insuperable task! Metellus Pius was working out a way. Now Pompey had entered upon the Spanish stage, empowered by the Senate (or rather, by Philippus) with an equal imperium, and quite sure his own talents far outshone Sertorius, Hirtuleius and Metellus Pius combined. Well, time would teach Pompey what Metellus Pius knew full well Pompey was not at the moment willing to hear; time and a few defeats. Oh, there could be no doubt that the young man was as brave as a lion but the Piglet had known Sertorius since his eighteenth year, and knew that Sertorius too was as brave as a lion. What was more important by far, he was Gaius Marius's military heir; he understood the art of war as few in the history of Rome ever had. However, Metellus Pius had begun to sniff out Sertorius's weakness, and was almost sure it lay in his ideas about himself. Could those royal and magical ideas be undermined, Sertorius might unravel. But Sertorius would not unravel, Metellus Pius decided, because a Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus opposed him on a battlefield. His son came in, having knocked and been bidden to enter; Metellus Pius was a stickler for the correct etiquette. Known to everyone as Metellus Scipio (though in private his father addressed him as Quintus), the son's full name was majestic: Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Cornelianus Scipio Nasica. Now nineteen years old, he had traveled out the year before to join his father's staff as a contubernalis, very pleased that as his own father had done before him he could serve his military training under his father. The paternal bond was not a close blood tie, for Metellus Pius had adopted the eldest son of his wife Licinia's sister, married to Scipio Nasica. Why the elder Licinia was fertile enough to have produced many children and the younger Licinia barren, the Piglet did not know. These things happened, and when they did a man either divorced his barren wife or if he loved her, as the Piglet did his Licinia adopted. On the whole the Piglet was pleased at the result of this adoption, though he might perhaps have wished that the boy was ever so slightly more intelligent and considerably less naturally arrogant. But the latter could be expected; Scipio Nasica was arrogant. Tall and well built, Metellus Scipio owned a certain haughtiness of expression which had to serve as a substitute for good looks, of which he had none. His eyes were blue grey and his hair quite light, so he didn't look at all like his adoptive father. And if some of his contemporaries (like young Cato) had been heard to say that Metellus Scipio always walked around as if he had a bad smell under his nose, it was generally agreed that he did have something to turn up his nose about. Since his tenth birthday he had been contracted in betrothal to the daughter of Mamercus and his first wife, a Claudia Pulchra, and though the two young people did a great deal of squabbling, Metellus Scipio was genuinely very attached to Aemilia Lepida, as she was to him. "A letter from Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus in Emporiae," said Metellus Pius to his son, waving it in the air but showing no inclination to allow his son to read it. The superior expression on Metellus Scipio's face increased; he sniffed contemptuously. "It is an outrage, Father," he said. In one way yes, Quintus my son. However, the contents of his letter have cheered me up considerably. Our brilliant young military prodigy obviously deems Sertorius a military dunce no equal for himself!" "Oh, I see." Metellus Scipio sat down. "Pompeius thinks he'll wrap Sertorius up in one short campaign, eh?" "No, no, my son! Three campaigns," said the Piglet gently.
Sertorius had spent the winter in his new capital of Osca together with his most valued legate, Lucius Hirtuleius, another extremely capable legate, Gaius Herennius, and the relative newcomer, Marcus Perperna Veiento. When Perperna had first arrived things had not gone well, for Perperna had automatically assumed that his gift of twenty thousand infantry and fifteen hundred cavalry would remain in his own personal command. But, "I cannot allow that," had Sertorius said. Perperna had reacted with outrage. "They are my men, Quintus Sertorius! It is my prerogative to say what happens to them and how they should be used! And I say they still belong to me!" "Why are you trying to emulate Caepio the Consul before the battle of Arausio?" asked Sertorius. "Don't even think of it, Veiento! In Spain there is only one commander in chief and one consul me!" This had not ended the matter. Perperna maintained to all and sundry that Sertorius did not have the right to refuse him an equal status or take his army off him. Then Sertorius had aired it before his senate. "Marcus Perperna Veiento wishes to make war against the Roman presence in Spain as a separate entity and with a rank equal to mine," he said. "He will not take orders from me or follow my strategies. I ask you, Conscript Fathers, to inform this man that he must subordinate himself to me or leave Spain." Sertorius's senate was happy so to inform Perperna, but still Perperna had refused to accept defeat. Sure that right and custom were on his side, he appealed to his army in assembly. And was told by his men in no uncertain terms that Sertorius was in the right of it. They would serve Quintus Sertorius, not Perperna. So Perperna had finally subsided. It had seemed to everyone (including Sertorius) that he gave in with good grace and held no grudges. But underneath his placid exterior Perperna smouldered still, keeping the coals of his outrage from dying out. As far as he was concerned, in Roman terms he ranked exactly with Quintus Sertorius: both of them had been praetors, neither consul. Unaware that Perperna still boiled, Sertorius proceeded that winter Pompey had arrived in Spain to draw up his plans for the coming year's campaign. "I don't know Pompeius at all," said the commander in chief without undue concern. However, after looking at his career, I don't think he'll be hard to beat. Had I deemed Carbo capable of winning against Sulla, I would have remained in Italy. He had some good men in Carrinas, Censorinus and Brutus Damasippus, but by the time he himself deserted which is really when we might have seen what Pompeius was made of he left an utterly demoralized command and soldiery behind. Even if one goes back to Pompeius's earliest battles it becomes obvious that he has never faced a truly able general or an army with an indestructable spirit." "All that will change!" said Hirtuleius, grinning. "It certainly will. What do they call him? Kid Butcher? Well, I don't think I'll glorify him to that extent I'll just call him a kid. He's cocksure and conscienceless, and he has no respect for Roman institutions. If he did, he wouldn't be here with an imperium equal to the old woman's in Further Spain. He manipulated the Senate into giving him this command when he has absolutely no right to it, no matter what special clauses Sulla might have incorporated into his laws. So it's up to me to show him his proper place. Which is not nearly as high as he thinks." "What will he do, any idea?" asked Herennius. "Oh, the logical thing," said Sertorius cheerfully. "He'll march down the east coast to take it off us." What about the old woman?'' asked Perperna, who had adopted Sertorius's name for Metellus Pius with glee. "Well, he hasn't exactly shone so far, has he? Just in case Pompeius's advent has emboldened him, however, we'll pin him down in his province. I'll mass the Lusitani on his western borders. That will oblige him to leave the Baetis and take up residence on the Anas, an extra hundred miles on the march from the coast of Nearer Spain if he's tempted to aid Pompeius. I don't think he will be tempted, mind you. The old woman is unadventurous and cautious. And why would he strain at the bit to help a kid who has managed to prise identical imperium out of the Senate? The old woman is a stickler, Perperna. He'll do his duty to Rome no matter who has been given identical imperium. But he won't do one iota more. With the Lusitani swarming on the far side of the Anas, he'll see his first duty as containing them." The meeting broke up and Sertorius went to feed his white fawn. This creature, magical enough by virtue of its rare color, had assumed enormous importance in the eyes of his native Spanish followers, who regarded it as evidence of Sertorius's divinely bestowed magical powers. He had not lost his knack with wild animals over the years, and by the time he arrived in Spain the second time he was well aware of the profound effect his ability to snap his fingers and call up wild creatures to him had on the native peoples. The white fawn, apparently motherless, had come to him two years ago out of the mountains in central Spain, tiny and demure; dazzled by its beauty, he had gone down on his knees to it without pausing to think what he was doing, only concerned to put his arms around it and comfort it. But his Spaniards had murmured in awe and looked at him quite differently from that day forward. For the white fawn, they were convinced, was no one less than a personification of their chief goddess, Diana, who was showing Sertorius her special favor and raising him above all other men. And he had known who the white fawn was! For he had gone down on his knees in humble worship. The white fawn had been with him ever since, followed him about like a dog. No other man or woman would it permit to go near it; only Sertorius. And more magical still! it had never grown, remained a dainty ruby eyed mite which frisked and cavorted around Sertorius begging to be hugged and kissed, and slept on a sheepskin at the side of his bed. Even when he campaigned it was with him. During battles he tied it to a post in some safe place, for if he left it free it would always try to reach him in the fray, and he could not afford the risk of its dying; did it die, his Spaniards would deem him deserted by the goddess. In truth he had begun to think himself that the white fawn was a sign of divine blessing, and believed in it more and more; he called it, of course, Diana, and referred to himself when he spoke to it as Daddy. "Daddy's here, Diana!" he called. And Diana came to him eagerly, asking to be kissed. He knelt down to its level and put his arms about its shivering form, put his lips to the soft sleekness of its head, one hand pulling on its ear in rhythmic caresses it loved. He always excluded it from his house when he conferred with his legates, and it would mope, sure it had in some inexplicable way offended Daddy. The frenzy of guilt and contrition with which it greeted him afterward had to be dealt with in extra hugs and many murmured words of love; only then would it eat. Perhaps understandably, he thought more of Diana than he did of his German wife and his half German son there was nothing god given about them. Only his mother did he love more than he did Diana, and her he had not seen in seven years.
The white fawn nosing contentedly at its rich dried grasses (for winter in Osca meant snow and ice, not grazing), Sertorius sat down on a boulder outside his back door and tried to insert himself inside Pompey's mind. A kid! Did Rome truly believe that a kid from Picenum could defeat him! By the time he rose he had concluded that Rome and the Senate had been tricked by the shell game Philippus performed so well. For of course Sertorius maintained contact with certain people inside Rome and they were neither humble nor obscure. Beneath Sulla's blanket many malcontents moved invisibly, and some of them had made it their business to keep Sertorius informed. Since the appointment of Pompey the tenor of these communications had changed a little; a few important men were beginning to hint that if Quintus Sertorius could defeat the new champion of the Senate, Rome might be glad to welcome him home as the Dictator. But he had thought of something else too, and privately summoned Lucius Hirtuleius to see him. "We'll make absolutely sure the old woman stays in Further Spain," he said to Hirtuleius, "for it may be that the Lusitani won't be discouragement enough. I want you and your brother to take the Spanish army to Laminium in the spring and station yourselves there. Then if the old woman does decide to try to help the kid, you'll contain him. Whether he attempts to break out of his province via the headwaters of the Anas or the Baetis, you'll be in his way." The Spanish army was just that, forty thousand Lusitanian and Celtiberian tribesmen whom Sertorius and Hirtuleius had painfully but successfully trained to fight like Roman legions. Sertorius had other Spanish forces which he had retained in their native guise, superb at ambush and guerrilla warfare; but he had known from the beginning that if he was to beat Rome in Spain, he must also have properly trained Roman legions at his disposal. Many men of Roman or Italian nationality had drifted to enlist under him since Carbo's final defeat, but not enough. Thus had Sertorius generated his Spanish army. "Can you do without us against Pompeius?" asked Hirtuleius. "Easily, with Perperna's men." "Then don't worry about the old woman. My brother and I will make sure he stays in Further Spain."
"Now remember," said Metellus Pius to Gaius Memmius as that worthy prepared to march for New Carthage, "that your troops are more precious than your own skin. If things should take a turn for the worse that is, if Pompeius should not do as well as he thinks he will get your men into shelter strong enough to keep them safe from attack. You're a good reliable fellow, Memmius, and I'm sorry to lose you. But don't forget your men." Handsome face solemn, Pompey's new quaestor who happened to be his brother in law as well led his single legion eastward across country commonly held to be the richest and most fertile on earth richer than Campania, richer than Egypt, richer than Asia Province. With exactly the right summer and winter climates, lavish water from rivers fed by perpetual snow and deep alluvial soils, Further Spain was a breadbasket, green in spring and early summer, golden at the bountiful harvest. Its beasts were fat and productive, its waters teemed with fish. With Gaius Memmius there journeyed two men who were neither Roman nor Spanish; an uncle and nephew of almost the same age, both named Kinahu Hadasht Byblos. By blood they were Phoenician and by nationality citizens of the great city port of Gades, which had been founded as a Phoenician colony nearly a thousand years before and still kept its Punic roots and customs very much in the foreground of Gadetanian life. The rule of the Carthaginians had not been difficult to accept, as the Carthaginians were also of Punic stock. Then had come the Romans, who proved to suit the people of Gades too; Gades prospered, and gradually the noble Gadetani had come to understand that the destiny of their city was inextricably bound to Rome's. Any civilized people of the Middle Sea was preferable to domination by the barbarian tribesmen of eastern and central Spain, and the chief fear of the Gadetani remained that Rome would eventually deem Spain not worth the keeping, would withdraw. It was for that reason that the uncle and nephew named Kinahu Hadasht Byblos traveled with Gaius Memmius and his single legion to make themselves useful in any way they could. Memmius had gladly handed them the responsibility for procuring supplies, and used them also as interpreters and sources of information. Because he could not comfortably pronounce their Punic name, and because they spoke Latin (quite well, both of them!) with a lisp emerging from their own lisping language, Pompey's new quaestor had nicknamed them Balbus, which indicated a speech impediment; though he couldn't work out why, Memmius had learned that they were enormously pleased to be dowered with a Latin cognomen. Gnaeus Pompeius has instructed me to proceed through Ad Fraxinum and Eliocroca," said Memmius to the elder Balbus. "Is that really the way we ought to go?" "I think so, Gaius Memmius," said the foreign looking Balbus, whose hooked nose and high cheekbones proclaimed his Semitic blood, as did his very large dark eyes. "It means we'll follow the Baetis almost all the way to its western sources, then cross the Orospeda Mountains where they are narrowest. It is a watershed, but if we march from Ad Fraxinum to Basti we can pick up a road leading across the watershed to Eliocroca on the far side. From Eliocroca we descend rapidly onto the Campus Spartarius. That is what the Romans call the plains of the Contestani around New Carthage. There are no advantages to going any other way." "How much opposition are we likely to encounter?" "None until we cross the Orospeda. Beyond that, who knows?" "Are the Contestani for us or against us?" Balbus shrugged in a very foreign way. "Can one be sure of any Spanish tribe? The Contestani have always dwelt in proximity to civilized men, which ought to count for something. But one must call Sertorius a civilized man too, and all the Spanish admire him very much." "Then we shall see what we shall see," said Memmius, and worried no more about it; first reach Eliocroca. Until Gaius Marius had opened up the mines in the ranges between the Baetis and the Anas (called the Marian Mountains after him), the Orospeda Mountains had been the chief source of lead and silver exploited by Rome. As a result the southern part of the ranges was thin of forest, and that included Memmius's line of march. Altogether he had a distance of three hundred miles to negotiate, two hundred less than Pompey, but because the terrain was more difficult Memmius had started out somewhat earlier than Pompey, in mid March. At the end of April, not having hurried at all, he came down from the Orospeda to the little town of Eliocroca on a southern branch of the Tader River; the Campus Spartarius stretched before him. Having been in Spain too long to trust any native people, Memmius tightened his ranks up and marched defensively toward New Carthage, some thirty miles away to the southwest. Wisely, as he soon discovered. Not far down the good mining road from Eliocroca he found the Contestani lying in wait for him, and promised an offering to Jupiter Optimus Maximus of a bull calf if he kept his legion intact until he could reach safety. Safety obviously was New Carthage itself; Gaius Memmius wasted no time thinking about remaining anywhere outside its island peninsula. They were a very long twenty five miles, but the two hundred Gallic cavalry he had with him he sent ahead to guard the approach to the bridge between the mainland and the city, deeming his plight hopeless only if the Contestani cut him off at that one narrowest point. He had started at a brisk pace from Eliocroca at dawn, encountered the massed tribesmen five miles further on, then fought his way crablike with his cohorts in square on the road, the men forming its sides within the moving column spelling the men on its exposed sides. Foot soldiers themselves and unused to pitched battle, the Contestani could not break his formation. When he reached the bridge he found it uncontested and passed across to safety, his legion intact. The elder Balbus he sent to Gades aboard a dowdy ship which reeked of garum, the malodorous fish paste so prized by every cook in the world; the letter Balbus carried to Metellus Pius was a whiffy one, but no less important for that. It explained the situation, asked for help, and warned Metellus Pius that New Carthage could not last out until winter unless it got food. The younger Balbus he sent on a more perilous mission, to penetrate the boiling tribes north of New Carthage and try to reach Pompey.
Pompey left the vicinity of Emporiae fairly early in April, his local advisers having informed him that the volume of the Iberus would be low enough by the end of April to allow him to ford it comfortably. He had satisfactorily solved the problem of his legates by commissioning none but Picentines or Italians and investing as his two senior legates Lucius Afranius and Marcus Petreius, both viri militares from Picenum who had been under Pompeian eagles for some years. Caesar's messmate from Mitylene, Aulus Gabinius, came from a Picentine family; Gaius Cornelius was not one of the patrician Cornelii, nor was Decimus Laelius related to the Laelii who had risen into prominence under Scipio Africanus and Scipio Aemilianus. Militarily all had proven themselves or showed promise, but socially none of them save perhaps Aulus Gabinius (whose father and uncle were senators) could hope to advance in Rome without large rations of Pompey's patronage. Things went very well. Advancing rapidly down the coast, Pompey and his six legions and his fifteen hundred cavalrymen actually reached Dertosa on the north bank of the Iberus before encountering any opposition at all. As Pompey began to ford the Iberus some two legions commanded by Herennius attempted to thwart him, but were easily beaten off; Pompey's chest swelled and he proceeded south in optimistic mood. Not far down the road Herennius reappeared, this time reinforced by two legions under Perperna, but when the soldiers in their vanguard began to fall, they drew off southward in a hurry. Pompey's scouts were excellent. As he moved steadily further from the Iberus they brought him word that Herennius and Perperna had gone to earth in the big enemy town of Valentia, almost a hundred miles to the south of Pompey's position. As Valentia lay on the Turis River and the wide alluvial plains of the Turis were rich and intensively farmed, Pompey increased his speed. When he reached Saguntum near the mouth of a small, short river which lay in the midst of fairly poor country he learned from his trusty scouts that Sertorius himself was completely out of range, could not possibly assist Herennius and Perperna to hold Valentia. Apparently afraid that Metellus Pius was going to invade northern Spain from the headwaters of the Tagus, Sertorius had positioned his own army on the upper reaches of the Salo at Segontia, where he would be able to intercept the Piglet as he emerged from the narrow bridge of mountains which separated the Tagus from the Iberus. Crafty, thought Pompey smugly, but you really ought to be within hailing distance of Herennius and Perperna, Sertorius! It was now the middle of May, and Pompey was learning how cruelly hot the long summer of the Spanish lowlands could be. He was also learning how much water his men could drink in one short day, and how quickly they could devour his food supplies. With the harvest still several months off, foraging for grain had yielded little from the granaries of what towns he had passed through once he left the Iberus. This coast which had looked so rich on his maps and sounded so rich when his advisers spoke of it was no Italy; if he had always thought of the Adriatic coast as poor and underpopulated, it was fairer and denser by far than the littoral of eastern Spain. Protesting itself loyal to Rome, Saguntum was unable to give him grain. Pirates had raided its storage silos, the people of the town would eat sparingly until their crops came in. Thus Valentia and the plains of the Turis beckoned; Pompey struck camp and marched. If the sight of the formidable crags inland gave even a remote promise of how tortuous and difficult it would be for any army to march through central Spain, then Sertorius, sitting in Segontia in early May, could not hope to relieve Valentia before the end of June and that, his scouts assured Pompey, only if Sertorius learned to fly! Unable to credit that any general could lead men faster than he could, Pompey believed his scouts, who may have been genuinely of that opinion or who more likely were secretly working for Sertorius. Be that as it may, not one day south of Saguntum, Pompey learned that Sertorius and his army were already between him and Valentia and busy attacking the loyal Roman town of Lauro! What Pompey could not have been brought to understand was that Sertorius knew every kink, every valley, every pass and every track between the Middle Sea and the mountains of western Spain and that he could move through them at seemingly incredible speed because each village and hamlet he encountered would if asked give him all its food, would push him onward with a love which amounted to adulation. No Celtiberian or Lusitanian welcomed the Roman presence in Spain; every Celtiberian and Lusitanian realized that Rome was in Spain only to exploit the country's riches. That this bright white hope, Sertorius, was himself a Roman the native Spanish peoples saw as a special gift from their gods. For who knew how to fight the Romans better than a Roman? When the scouts reported back that Sertorius led but two small legions, Pompey gasped. The cheek of it! The gall of it! To lay siege to a Roman town not far from six crack Roman legions and fifteen hundred horse ! It beggared description! Off went Pompey to Lauro in a fever of anticipation, exultant because Fortune had given him Sertorius as his adversary so early in the war. A cool dispassionate look at Lauro and Sertorius's lines from atop a vantage point to the north of the little plain was more than enough to reinforce Pompey's confidence. A mile to the east of Lauro's walls lay the sea, while to the west there reared a high but flat topped hill. To one looking down on the situation from Pompey's superior height, the hill to the west was the ideal base from which to conduct operations. Yet Sertorius had quite ignored it! Mind made up, Pompey hustled his army west of the city walls intent upon occupying the hill, and sure that the hill was already his. Riding upon his big white bedizened Public Horse, the twenty nine year old general led his troops and cavalry himself and at the double striding out in front so that those who were massed atop Lauro's walls would be sure to see him in person. Though he was looking at the hill all the way to its foot, Pompey had actually arrived there before he saw its flat top bristling with spears. And suddenly the air was rent by boos, jeers, catcalls: Sertorius and his men were shouting down to Pompey that he'd have to be speedier than that if he wanted to take a hill from Quintus Sertorius! "Did you think I wouldn't realize you'd make for it, kid?" came one lone voice from the top. "You're too slow! Think you're as clever as Africanus and as brave as Horatius Cocles, don't you, kid? Well, Quintus Sertorius says you're an amateur! You don't know what real soldiering is! But stay in the vicinity, kid, and let a professional show you!" Not foolish enough to attempt to storm Sertorius in such an impregnable position, Pompey had no other choice than to retreat. Eyes straight ahead, aware that his face was burning, he wheeled his horse and ploughed straight through the ranks of his own men and did not stop until he stood once more upon his original vantage point. By now the sun was past its zenith, but the day was long enough to fit one more maneuver into the hours left, and pride dictated that Pompey should fit it in. Chest heaving as he fought to discipline his emotions, he surveyed the scene again. Below him his own army stood at ease, gulping the last of the water from shrinking, wrinkled skins athwart each water donkey, and all too obviously talking to each other as they exposed their steaming heads to the drying rays of the sun and leaned upon their spears or shields. Talking about their lovely young general and his humiliation, wondering if this was going to be the first campaign their lovely young general couldn't win. Wishing they had made their wills, no doubt. He hadn't wanted Afranius or Petreius with him, couldn't even bear the thought of the younger ones, especially Aulus Gabinius. But now he beckoned to Afranius and Petreius to ride up to him, and when they had ranged themselves one on either side of his Public Horse, he pointed with a stick at the scene in the distance. Not one word did his senior legates say, just waited dumbly to be told what Pompey wanted to do next. "See where Sertorius is?" Pompey asked, but rhetorically only; he didn't expect a reply. "He's busy along the walls, I think sapping them. His camp is right there. He's come down from his hill, I see! He doesn't really want it, he's interested in taking the town. But I won't fall for that trick again!" This was said through clenched teeth. "The distance we have to march before we engage him is about a mile, and the length of his line is about half that he's spread awfully thin, which is to our advantage. If he's to stand any chance at all he'll have to tighten up when he sees us coming and we have to presume that he thinks he stands a chance, or he wouldn't be there. He can scatter either west or east, or in both directions at once. I imagine he'll go both ways I would." That popped out; Pompey reddened, but went on smoothly. "We'll advance on him with our wings projecting ahead of our center, cavalry distributed equally between them on their tips, infantry one legion to each wing forming the densest part of the wings closest to the center, where I'll put my other four legions. When an army is approaching across flat ground it's hard to tell how far ahead of the center the wings are, and we'll extend them further forward the closer we get. If he holds me light and he seems to hold me light! he won't believe me capable of military guile. Until my wings enfold him on both sides and prevent his escaping to either the west or the east. We'll roll him up against the walls, which leaves him nowhere to go." Afranius ventured a remark. "It will work," he said. Petreius nodded. "It will work," he said. That was all the confirmation Pompey needed. At the foot of his vantage point he had the buglers blow form ranks and fall into line," and left Afranius and Petreius to issue his orders to the other legates and the leading centurions. Himself he busied in summoning six mounted heralds. Thus it was that by the time Afranius and Petreius returned to him it was too late and too public to dissuade him from what he had done; appalled, Afranius and Petreius watched the heralds ride away, hoping desperately that for Pompey's sake Pompey's new maneuver worked. While the army moved out, the heralds under a flag of truce rode right up to the outer defenses of Sertorius's camp. There they brayed their message to the inhabitants of Lauro standing on top of Lauro's walls. "Come out, all you people of Lauro!" they bellowed. "Come out! Line your battlements and watch while Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus teaches this renegade wolfshead who calls himself a Roman what being a true Roman is! Come out and watch Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus inflict absolute defeat upon Quintus Sertorius!" It was going to work! thought Pompey, smarting enough to ride once again in the forefront of his army. His wings extended further and further forward as the legions advanced, and still Sertorius made no move to order his men to flee east and west. They would be enclosed! Sertorius and all his soldiers would die, die, die! Oh, Sertorius would learn in the most painful and final way what it was like to anger Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus! The six thousand men Sertorius had held in reserve completely hidden from Pompey's scouts as well as from Pompey's high vantage point had fallen on Pompey's unprotected rear and were tearing it into pieces before Pompey in the vanguard even knew. When he was apprised of it, there was nothing he could do to avert disaster. His wings were now so far forward that he was powerless to reverse their thrust, and they had turned inward, were busy engaging Sertorius's men under Lauro's walls their battlements now black with observers of the debacle, thanks to Pompey's heralds. When attempt after attempt to wheel failed, the most Pompey and his legates could do was to struggle frantically to form the four legions of the center into square. To make matters worse, squadrons of Sertorian cavalry were riding into view from behind Lauro and falling upon Pompey's horse from the rear of his wing tips. Disaster piled upon disaster. But they were good men and ably served by good centurions, those veteran Roman legions Pompey led; they fought back bravely, though their mouths gaped from lack of water and a terrible dismay had filled their hearts because someone had outgeneraled their lovely young man, and they hadn't thought there was anyone alive could do that. So Pompey and his legates managed in the end to form their square, and somehow even to pitch a camp. At dusk Sertorius drew off, left them to finish the camp amid mountainous heaps of dead. And amid jeers and boos which now came not only from Sertorius's soldiers, but also from the citizens of Lauro. Pompey couldn't even escape to weep in private, found himself too mortified to throw his scarlet general's cape over his head and weep beneath its cover. Instead he forced himself to move here and there with smiles and encouraging words, cheering the parched men up, trying to think where he might find water, unable to think how he might extricate himself from shame. In the first light of dawn he sent to Sertorius and asked for time to dispose of his dead. His request was granted with sufficient generosity to enable him to shift his camp clear of the reeking field, and to a site well provided with potable water. But then a black depression descended upon him and he left it to his legates to count and bury the dead in deep pits and trenches; there was no timber nearby for burning, no oil either. As they toiled he withdrew to his command tent while his uninjured men terribly, terribly few constructed a stout camp around him to keep Sertorius at bay after the armistice was ended. Not until sunset, the battle now a day into the past, did Afranius venture to seek an audience. He came alone. "It will be the nundinae before we're finished with the burial details," said the senior legate in a matter of fact voice. The general spoke, equally matter of fact. "How many dead are there, Afranius?" "Ten thousand foot, seven hundred horse." "Wounded?" "Five thousand fairly seriously, almost everybody else with cuts or bruises or scratches. Those troopers who lived are all right, but they're short of mounts. Sertorius preferred to kill their horses." "That means I'm down to four legions of foot one legion of which is seriously wounded and eight hundred troopers who cannot all be provided with horses." "Yes." "He whipped me like a cur." Afranius said nothing, only looked at the leather wall of the tent with expressionless eyes. "He's Gaius Marius's cousin, isn't he?" "That's right." "I suppose that accounts for it." "I suppose it does." Nothing more was said for quite a long time. Pompey broke the silence. "How can I explain this to the Senate?" It came out half whisper, half whimper. Afranius transferred his gaze from the tent wall to his commander's face, and saw a man a hundred years old. His heart smote him, for he genuinely did love Pompey, as friend and overlord. Yet what alarmed him more than his natural grief for friend and overlord was his sudden conviction that if Pompey was not shored up, not given back his confidence and his inborn arrogance, the rest of him would waste away and die. This grey faced old man was someone Afranius had never met. So Afranius said, "If I were you, I'd blame it on Metellus Pius. Say he refused to come out of his province to reinforce you. I'd triple the number of men in Sertorius's army too." Pompey reared back in horror. "No, Afranius! No! I could not possibly do that!" "Why?" asked Afranius, amazed; a Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus in the throes of moral or ethical dilemmas was an utter unknown. "Because," said Pompey in a patient voice, "I am going to need Metellus Pius if I am to salvage anything out of this Spanish commission. I have lost nearly a third of my forces, and I cannot ask the Senate for more until I can claim at least one victory. Also because it is possible someone who lives in Lauro will escape to Rome. His story will have credence when he tells it. And because, though I am not a sage, I do believe that truth will out at exactly the worst moment." "Oh, I understand!" cried Afranius, enormously relieved; Pompey was not experiencing moral or ethical scruples, he was just seeing the facts as the facts were. Then you already know what you have to explain to the Senate," he added, puzzled. "Yes, yes, I know!" snapped Pompey, goaded. "I simply don't know how to explain it! In words, I mean! Varro isn't here, and who else is there with the right words?" "I think," said Afranius delicately, "that your own words are probably the right words for news like this. The connoisseurs of literature in the Senate will just assume that you've chosen a plain style for the plain truth that's how their minds work, if you ask me. As for the rest of them they're not connoisseurs, so they won't see anything wrong with your words anyway." This splendidly logical and pragmatic analysis went far toward cheering Pompey up, superficially at least. The deeper and more cruelly lacerated layers, incorporating as they did pride, dignitas, confidence, and many complicated images of self, would be slow to mend; some layers would mend maimed, some layers would perhaps not mend at all. Thus Pompey sat down to begin his report to the Senate with his nostrils assailed by the perpetual stench of rotting flesh, and did not spare himself even by omitting his rashness in sending heralds to cry to the citizens of Lauro, let alone his mistaken tactics on the battlefield itself. He then sent the draft, written with a stylus upon wax smeared and gouged by many erasures, to his secretary, who would copy it in fair script (with no spelling or grammatical errors) in ink upon paper. Not that he finished the missive; Lauro wasn't finished. Sixteen days went by. Sertorius continued his investment of Lauro while Pompey did not move out of his camp. That this inertia could not last Pompey was well aware; he was rapidly running out of food, and his mules and horses were growing thinner almost as one looked at them. Yet he couldn't retreat not with Lauro under siege and Sertorius doing exactly as he liked. He had no choice but to forage. Upon pain of threatened torture his scouts swore to him that the fields to the north were entirely free of Sertorian patrols, so he ordered a large and well armed expedition of cavalry to forage in the direction of Saguntum. The men had not been gone for two hours when a frantic message for help came: Sertorius's men were swarming everywhere, picking off the troopers one by one. Pompey sent a full legion to the rescue, then spent the next hours pacing up and down the ramparts of his camp looking anxiously northward. Sertorius's heralds gave him the verdict at sunset. "Go home, kid! Go back to Picenum, kid! You're fighting real men now! You're an amateur! How does it feel to run up against a professional? Want to know where your foraging party is, kid? Dead, kid! Every last one of them! But you needn't worry about burying them this time, kid! Quintus Sertorius will bury them for you, free of charge! He's got their arms and armor in payment for the service, kid! Go home! Go home!" It had to be a nightmare. It could not truly be happening! Where had the Sertorian forces come from when none of those who had fought on the battlefield, even the hidden cavalry, had moved from the siegeworks before Lauro? "These were not his legionaries or his regular cavalry, Gnaeus Pompeius," said the chief scout, shivering in dread. These were his guerrillas. They come out of nowhere, they ambush, they kill, they vanish again." Thoroughly disenchanted with his Spanish scouts, Pompey had all of them executed and vowed that in future he would use his own Picentines as scouts; better to use men he trusted who didn't know the countryside than men he couldn't trust even if they did know the countryside. That was the first lesson of warfare in Spain he had really absorbed, though it was not to be the last. For he was not going home to Picenum! He was going to stay in Spain and have it out with Sertorius if he died in the effort! He would fight fire with fire, stone with stone, ice with ice. No matter how many blunders he made, no matter how many times that brilliant personification of anti Roman evil might run tactical rings around him, he would not give up. Sixteen thousand of his soldiers were dead and almost all his cavalry. But he would not give up until the last man and the last horse were dead. The Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus who retreated slowly from Lauro at the end of Sextilis with the screams of the dying city echoing in his ears was a very different one from the man who had strutted south in the spring so full of his own importance, so confident, so careless. The new Gnaeus Pompeius could even listen with a look of alert interest on his face to the stentorian voices of the Sertorian heralds who dogged his footsteps detailing to his soldiers the hideous fate in store for the women of Lauro when they reached their new owners in far western Lusitania. No other Sertorian personnel even bothered about his footsteps as he hastened north past Saguntum, past Sebelaci, past Intibili, across the Iberus. In less than thirty days Pompey brought his exhausted, half starved men into their winter camp at Emporiae, and moved no more that awful year. Especially after he heard that Metellus Pius had won the only battle he had been called upon to fight and won it brilliantly.
It was after Metellus Pius had seen Balbus Senior and read Memmius's letter that he began to think about how he might extricate Memmius from his incarceration in New Carthage. There had been changes in the man Sertorius dismissed as an old woman too, changes wrought by the crushing blow to his pride the Senate had dealt him in bestowing an equal imperium upon Kid Butcher, of all people. Perhaps nothing less than this monumental insult could have stripped away sufficient layers of the Piglet's defensive armor to allow the metal inside to show, for the Piglet had been cursed or blessed with an autocratic father of superb courage, incredible haughtiness and a stubbornness that had sometimes amounted to intellectual imbecility. Metellus Numidicus had been cheated of his war against Jugurtha by Gaius Marius, cheated time and time again or so he had seen it by that same New Man. And in turn cheated his son of anything more than a reputation for filial devotion in piously striving to have his hugely admired father recalled from an exile inflicted by Gaius Marius. Then just when the son might have congratulated himself that he stood highest in Sulla's estimation, along came the twenty two year old Pompey with a bigger and better army to offer. His punctilious attention to what was the proper thing for a Roman nobleman to do forbade Metellus Pius the satisfaction of trying to make his tormentor, Pompey, look insignificant by any underhanded means. And so without his realizing it a new and better general was busy jerking and tugging himself free of the Piglet's tired old stammering skin. To make Pompey look small by winning more battles more decisively was unimpeachable, a fitting revenge because it emerged out of what a Roman nobleman could be when he was pushed to it by a Picentine upstart. Or an upstart from Arpinum, for that matter! Having learned that particular lesson very early on, he chose his scouts from among the ranks of his own Roman men and the men of Phoenician Gades who feared the Spanish barbarians far more than they did the Romans. So it was that Metellus Pius had learned the whereabouts of Lucius Hirtuleius and his younger brother not very long after they had sat themselves down with the Spanish army in the neighborhood of Laminium, in south central Spain. With one of his new sour smiles, the Piglet leaned back and appreciated this strategy to the full before flicking a mental obscene gesture in the direction of Laminium and vowing that ten years would not see him fool enough to venture up the headwaters of either Anas or Baetis. Let Hirtuleius rot from sheer inactivity! He had ensconced himself on the Anas fairly close to its mouth, thinking that it was wiser to let the Lusitani see how well prepared he was to deal with them than to reside more comfortably along the Baetis, a hundred miles to the east. But he had busied himself to such purpose by June that he felt the defenses of his province were in good enough state to resist the wall of waiting Lusitani without his personal presence on the Anas and without more than two of his six remaining legions to garrison his fortifications. By now the old woman of the Further province knew perfectly well who were Sertorius's informants; so he proceeded to put his new policies about intelligence into practice, and leaked in the most innocent way to these men the news that he was moving away from his position on the lower Anas. Not up the headwaters of the Anas or the Baetis and thus into the arms of Lucius Hirtuleius at Laminium but to relieve Gaius Memmius in New Carthage. He would (the informants were telling Hirtuleius not many days later) cross the Baetis from Italica to Hispalis, then move up the Singilis River toward the massif of the Solorius, cross it on its northwestern flank at Acci, proceed thence to Basti, and so down onto the Campus Spartarius through Eliocroca. In actual fact this was the way Metellus Pius might have gone; but what was important to him was that Hirtuleius should believe it. The Piglet was well aware that Herennius, Perperna and Sertorius himself were thoroughly absorbed in teaching Pompey a much needed lesson, and that Sertorius reposed full confidence in the ability of Hirtuleius and the Spanish army to pen the Piglet up inside his own provincial sty. But New Carthage was a way out of his own provincial sty that could possibly lead to a northward march from New Carthage to relieve Pompey at Lauro; the five legions the Piglet would have were a possible tipping of the balance from Sertorius's way to Pompey's. The march of Metellus Pius could therefore not be allowed to happen. What Metellus Pius hoped was that Hirtuleius would decide to leave Laminium and come down onto the easy terrain between the Anas and the Baetis. Away from the crags in which any Sertorian general was likely to be victorious, Hirtuleius would be easier to beat. No Sertorian general trusted the peoples of the Further province east of the Baetis, which was why Sertorius had never attempted to invade that area. So when Hirtuleius heard the news of Metellus Pius's projected march, he would have to intercept it before Metellus Pius could cross the Baetis into safe territory. Of course Hirtuleius's most prudent course would have been to travel well to the north of the Further province and wait to intercept Metellus Pius on the Campus Spartarius itself, this certainly being country friendly to Sertorius. But Hirtuleius was too canny to make this logical move; if he left central Spain for a place so far away, all the Piglet had to do was to double back and romp through the pass at Laminium, then choose the quickest line of march to join Pompey at Lauro. There was only one thing Hirtuleius could do: move down onto the easy terrain between the Anas and the Baetis, and stop Metellus Pius before he crossed the Baetis. But Metellus Pius marched more quickly than Hirtuleius thought he could, was already close to Italica and the Baetis when Hirtuleius and the Spanish army were still a hard day's slog away. So Hirtuleius hurried, unwilling to let his prey slip across the broad deep river. The month was Quinctilis and southern Spain was in the grip of that summer's first fierce heat wave; the sun sprang up from behind the Solorius Mountains fully armed to smite lands not yet recovered from the previous day's onslaught and only slightly relieved by the breathless, humid night. With extraordinary solicitude for his troops, Metellus Pius gently inserted them into big, airy, shady tents, encouraged them to hold cloths soaked in cold spring water to brows and napes of necks, made sure they had drunk well of that same cold spring water, then issued each man with a novel item of extra equipment to carry into battle a skin full of cold water strapped to his belt. Even when the merciless sun was glinting off the forest of Hirtuleius's spears rapidly approaching down the road from the north, Metellus Pius kept his men in the shade of their tents and made sure there were enough tubs of cold water to keep the cold compresses coming. At the very last moment he moved, his soldiers fresh and keen, chattering cheerfully to each other as they marched into position about how they would manage to help each other snatch a much needed drink in the middle of the fight. The Spanish army had tramped ten hard miles in the sun already. Though it was well provided with water donkeys, it had not the time to pause and drink before battle was joined. His men wilting, Hirtuleius stood no chance of winning. At one time he and Metellus Pius actually fought hand to hand a rare occurrence in any conflict since the days of Homer and though Hirtuleius was younger and stronger, his well watered and well cooled opponent got the better of him. The struggle carried them apart before the contest came to an end, but Hirtuleius bore a wound in his thigh and Metellus Pius the glory. Within an hour it was over. The Spanish army broke and fled into the west, leaving many dead or exhausted upon the field; Hirtuleius had to cross the Anas into Lusitania before he could allow his men to stop. "Isn't that nice? asked Metellus Pius of his son as they stood surveying the diminishing dust to the west of Italica. "Tata, you were wonderful!" cried the young man, forgetting that he was too grown up to use the diminutive of childhood. The Piglet swelled, huffed. "And now we'll all have a good swim in the river and a good night's sleep before we march tomorrow for Gades," he said happily, composing letters in his mind to the Senate and to Pompey. Metellus Scipio stared. "Gades? Why Gades?" "Certainly Gades!" Metellus Pius shoved his son between the shoulder blades. "Come on, lad, into the shade! I'll have no man down with sunstroke, I need every last one of you. Don't you fancy a long sea voyage to escape this heat?" "A long sea voyage? To where?" "To New Carthage, of course, to relieve Gaius Memmius." "Father, you are absolutely beyond a doubt brilliant!" And that, reflected the Piglet as he drew his son into the shade of the command tent, was every bit as thrilling to hear as the rousing volley of cheers and the shouts of "Imperator!" with which his army had greeted him after the battle was over. He had done it! He had inflicted a decisive defeat upon Quintus Sertorius's best general.
The fleet which put out from Gades was a very big one, and formidably guarded by every warship the governor could commandeer. The transports were loaded with wheat, oil, salt fish, dried meat, chickpea, wine, even salt all intended to make sure New Carthage did not starve because of the Contestani blockade from land and the pirate blockade from sea. And having revictualed New Carthage, Metellus Pius loaded Gaius Memmius's legion aboard the empty transports, then sailed at a leisurely pace up the eastern coast of Nearer Spain, amused to see the pirate craft his fleet encountered scuttle out of the way. The pirates may have defeated Gaius Cotta in a fleet to fleet engagement several years before in these same waters, but they had little appetite for salt Piglet. The Piglet was going, of course exemplary Roman nobleman that he was to deliver Gaius Memmius and the legion to Pompey in Emporiae: and if he was also going to crow a little and to be just a trifle too sympathetic about Pompey's ignominious summer in the field, well... The Piglet considered Pompey owed him that for trying to steal his thunder. Just after the fleet passed the great pirate stronghold of Dianium it put in to a deserted cove to anchor for the night; a small boat came stealing out of Dianium and made for the Roman ships. In it was the younger Balbus, full of news. "Oh, how good it is to be back among friends!" he said in his soft, lisping Latin to Metellus Pius, Metellus Scipio and Gaius Memmius (not to mention his uncle, very pleased to see him safe and well). "I take it that you didn't manage to make contact with my colleague Gnaeus Pompeius," said Metellus Pius. "No, Quintus Caecilius. I got no further than Dianium. The whole coast from the mouth of the Sucro to the Tader is just boiling with Sertorius's men, and I look too much like a man of Gades I would have been captured and tortured for sure. In Dianium there are many Punic looking fellows, however, so I thought it wiser to lie low there and hear whatever I could hear." "And what did you hear, Balbus Minor?" "Oh, I not only heard! I also saw! Something extremely interesting," said Balbus the nephew, eyes shining. "Not two market intervals ago a fleet sailed in. It had come all the way from Pontus, and it belonged to King Mithridates." The Romans tensed, leaned forward. "Go on," said Metellus Pius softly. "On board the flagship were two envoys from the King, both Roman deserters I think they had been legates commanding some of Fimbria's troops. Lucius Magius and Lucius Fannius." "I've seen their names," said Metellus Pius, "on Sulla's proscription lists." "They had come to offer Quintus Sertorius he arrived in person to confer with them four days after they sailed in three thousand talents of gold and forty big warships." What was the price?'' growled Gaius Memmius. "That when Quintus Sertorius becomes the Dictator of Rome, he confirms Mithridates in all the possessions he already has and allows him to expand his kingdom further." "When Sertorius is Dictator of Rome?" gasped Metellus Scipio, staggered. "That will never happen!" "Be quiet, my son! Let the good Balbus Minor continue," said his father, who kept his own outrage concealed. "Quintus Sertorius agreed to the King's terms, with one proviso that Asia Province and Cilicia remain Rome's." "How did Magius and Fannius take that?" "Very well, according to my source. I suppose they expected it, as Rome is not to lose any of her provinces. They consented on the King's behalf, though they said the King would have to hear from them in person before confirming it formally." "Is the Pontic fleet still in Dianium?" "No, Quintus Caecilius. It stayed only nine days, then it sailed away again." Did any gold or ships change hands?'' "Not yet. In the spring. However, Quintus Sertorius did send the King evidence of his good faith." "In what form?" "He presented the King with a full century of crack Spanish guerrilla troops under the command of Marcus Marius, a young man he esteems highly." The Piglet frowned. "Marcus Marius! Who is he?" "An illegitimate son of Gaius Marius got on a woman of the Baeturi when he was governor propraetore of the Further province forty eight years ago." "Then this Marcus Marius is not so young," said Gaius Memmius. "True. I am sorry, I misled you." Balbus looked abject. "Ye gods, man, it's not a prosecutable offense!" said the Piglet, amused. "Go on, go on!" "Marcus Marius has never left Spain. Though he speaks good Latin and was properly educated Gaius Marius knew of him, and had left him well provided for his inclinations are toward the Spanish barbarian cause. He has been, as a matter of fact, Quintus Sertorius's most successful guerrilla commander he specializes in the guerrilla attack." "So Sertorius has sent him off to teach Mithridates how to ambush and raid," said Metellus Scipio. "Thank you, Sertorius!" "And will the money and ships be delivered to Dianium?" asked Metellus Pius. "Yes. In the spring, as I have said." This amazing piece of news provided food for thought and for Metellus Pius's pen all the way to Emporiae. Somehow he had never considered that Sertorius's ambitions extended further than setting himself up as a Romanized King of All Spain; his cause had seemed absolutely inseparable from the native Spanish cause. "But," he said to Pompey when he reached Emporiae, "I think it's high time we looked at Quintus Sertorius more closely. The conquest of Spain is only his first step. Unless you and I can stop him, he's going to arrive on Rome's doorstep with his nice white diadem all ready to tie round his head. King of Rome! And ally of Mithridates and Tigranes." After all that purring anticipation, it had not proven possible for Metellus Pius to twist his own thin knife in Pompey's glaringly obvious wounds. He had taken one look at the erstwhile Kid Butcher's empty face and empty eyes and understood that instead of reminding him of his shortcomings, he would have to subject him to extensive spiritual and mental repairs. Numidicus the father would have said that his own honor demanded that the knife be twisted anyway, but Pius the son had lived too long in his father's shadow to have quite such a rarefied idea of his honor. With the object of effecting extensive repairs to Pompey's shattered image of himself, the Piglet craftily sent his tactless and haughty son off into Narbonese Gaul with Aulus Gabinius, there to recruit cavalry and horses; he had a talk to Gaius Memmius to enlist him as an ally, and sent Afranius and Petreius to start reorganizing Pompey's skeletal army. For some days he kept conversation and thoughts away from the last season's campaigns, glad that the news from Dianium had given conversation and thoughts such a dynamic fresh turn. Finally, with December almost upon him and a pressing need to return to his own province, the old woman from Further Spain got down to business. "I do not think it necessary to dwell upon events already in the past," he said crisply. "What ought to concern both of us is next year's campaigns." Pompey had always liked Metellus Pius well enough, though he now found himself wishing his colleague had rubbed him raw, crowed and exulted; he might then have been able to dismiss his opinions as worthless and healthily hated his person. As it was, the genuine kindness and consideration only drove his own inadequacy home harder. Clearly the Piglet did not deem him important enough to despise. He was just another junior military tribune who had come a cropper on his first lone mission, had to be picked up, dusted off, and set astride his horse again. However, at least this attitude meant they could sit together amicably. In pre Sertorian times Pompey would have taken over what was obviously going to be a war conference; but the post Sertorian Pompey simply sat and waited for Metellus Pius to produce a plan. "This time," said the Piglet, "we will both march for the Sucro and Sertorius. Neither of us has a big enough army to do the job unassisted. However, I can't move through Laminium because Hirtuleius and the Spanish army will be back there lying in wait for me. So I will have to go by a very devious route indeed, and with as much stealth as possible. Not that word of my coming won't reach Sertorius, and therefore Hirtuleius. But Hirtuleius will have to move from Laminium to contain me, and he won't do that until Sertorius orders him to. Sertorius is a complete autocrat in all matters military." "So what way can you go?" asked Pompey. "Oh, far to the west, through Lusitania," said the Piglet cheerfully. "I shall fetch up eventually at Segovia." "Segovia! But that's at the end of the earth!" "True. It will throw sand in Sertorius's eyes beautifully, however, as well as avoiding Hirtuleius. Sertorius will think I am about to move into the upper Iberus and try to take it off him while he's busy dealing with you. He'll send Hirtuleius to stop me because Hirtuleius at Laminium will be more than a hundred miles closer to Segovia than he." What do you want me to do, precisely?'' asked this new and much humbler Pompey. "Stay in camp here in Emporiae until May. It will take me two months to reach Segovia, so I'll be moving long before you. When you do march, proceed with extreme caution. The most vital part of the whole strategy is that you look as if you're moving with purpose and completely independently of me. But that you do not reach the Turis and Valentia until the end of June." "Won't Sertorius try to stop me at Saguntum or Lauro?" "I doubt it. He doesn't work the same territory twice. You are now in a position to know Saguntum and Lauro well." Pompey turned dull red in the face, but said nothing. The Piglet went on as if he noticed no change in Pompey's complexion. "No, he'll let you reach the Turis and Valentia this time. They will be new to you, you see. Herennius and the traitor Perperna are still occupying Valentia, but I don't think they'll stay to let you besiege them Sertorius doesn't like making his stand in coastal cities, he prefers his mountain strongholds they are impossible to take." Metellus Pius paused to study Pompey's face, faded back to its new pinched whiteness, and was profoundly thankful to see that his eyes were interested. Good! He was taking it in. From Segovia I will march for the Sucro, where I expect Sertorius will maneuver you into battle." Frowning, Pompey turned this over in his mind, which, the Piglet now realized, was still functioning well; it was just that Pompey no longer possessed the confidence to make his own plans. Well, a couple of victories and that would come back! Pompey's nature was formed, couldn't be unformed. Just battered. "But a march from Segovia to the Sucro will take you right down the middle of the driest country in Spain!" Pompey protested. "It's an absolute desert! And until you reach the Sucro itself you'll be crossing ridge after ridge instead of following valley floors. An awful march!" "That's why I shall make it," said Metellus Pius. "No one has ever chosen the route voluntarily before, and Sertorius will certainly not expect me to do so. What I hope is to reach the Sucro before his scouts sniff my presence." His brown eyes surveyed Pompey with pleasure. "You've studied your maps and reports intensively, Pompeius, to know the lay of the land so well." "I have, Quintus Caecilius. It can't substitute for actual experience, but it's the best one can do until the experience is accumulated," said Pompey, pleased at this praise. "You're already accumulating experience, don't worry about that!" said Metellus Pius heartily. "Negative experience," muttered Pompey. "No experience is negative, Gnaeus Pompeius, provided it leads to eventual success." Pompey sighed, shrugged. "I suppose so." He looked down at his hands. "Where do you want me when you reach the Sucro? And when do you think that will be?" "Sertorius himself won't move north from the Sucro to the Turis," said Metellus Pius firmly. "Herennius and Perperna may try to contain you at Valentia or on the Turis somewhere, but I think their orders will be to fall back to Sertorius on the Sucro. I shall aim to be in Sertorius's vicinity at the end of Quinctilis. That means that if you reach the Turis by the end of June, you must find a good excuse to linger there for one month. Whatever happens, don't keep marching south to find Sertorius himself until the end of Quinctilis! If you do, I won't be there to reinforce you. Sertorius's aim is to remove you and your legions from the war completely that would leave him with vastly superior numbers to deal with me. I would go down." "Last year saw you come up, Quintus Caecilius." "That might have been a freak occurrence, and I hope that is what Sertorius will call it. Rest assured that if I meet Hirtuleius and am victorious again, I will endeavor to conceal my success from Sertorius until I can join my forces to yours." "In Spain, difficult, I'm told. Sertorius hears everything." "So they maintain. But I too have been in Spain for some years now, and Sertorius's advantages are melting away. Be of good cheer, Gnaeus Pompeius! We will win!"
To say that Pompey was in a better frame of mind after the old woman from the Further province left to take his fleet back to Gades was perhaps a slight exaggeration, but there certainly had been a stiffening in his spine. He removed himself from his quarters to join Afranius, Petreius and the more junior legates in putting the finishing touches to his restructured army. As well, he thought, that he had insisted on taking one of the Piglet's legions away from him! Without it, he could not have campaigned. The exact number of his soldiers offered him two alternatives: five under strength legions, or four normal strength. Since he was far from being a military dunce, Pompey elected five under strength legions because five were more maneuverable than four. It came hard to look his surviving troops in the eye this being the first time he had really done so since his defeat but to his gratified surprise, he learned that none of them held the deaths of so many of their comrades against him. Instead they seemed to have settled into a dour determination that Sertorius would not prosper, and were as willing as always to do whatever their lovely young general wanted. As the winter in the lowlands was a mild and unusually dry one, Pompey welded his new units together by leading them up the Iberus a little way and reducing several of Sertorius's towns Biscargis and Celsa fell with satisfying thumps. At this point, it being the end of March, Pompey withdrew again to Emporiae and began to prepare for his expedition down the coast. A letter from Metellus Pius informed him that after taking delivery of his forty warships and three thousand talents of gold in Dianium, Sertorius himself had departed into Lusitania with Perperna to help Hirtuleius train more men to fill the reduced ranks of the Spanish army, leaving Herennius in charge of Osca. Pompey's own intelligence network had markedly improved, thanks to the efforts of uncle and nephew Balbus (now in his service), and his Picentine scouts were faring better than he had expected. Not until after the beginning of May did he move, and then he proceeded with extreme caution. A man of the land himself, he noted automatically as he crossed the Iberus at Dertosa that this rich and extensively farmed valley looked very dry for the time of year, and that the wheat coming up in the fields was sparser than it ought to be, was not yet eared. Of the enemy there was no sign, but that fact did not fill Pompey with pleasure on this second march into the south. It merely made him more cautious still, his column defensive. Past Saguntum and Lauro he hurried with averted face; Saguntum stood, but Lauro was a blackened ruin devoid of life. At the end of June, having sent a message he hoped would reach Metellus Pius in Segovia, he reached the wider and more fertile valley of the Turis River, on the far bank of which stood the big, well fortified city of Valentia. Here, drawn up on the narrow flats between the river and the city, Pompey found Herennius and Perperna waiting for him. In number, his Picentine scouts informed him, they were stronger than he, but had the same five legions; some thirty thousand men to Pompey's twenty thousand. Their greatest advantage was in cavalry, which his scouts estimated at a thousand Gallic horse. Though Metellus Scipio and Aulus Gabinius had tried strenuously to recruit cavalry in Narbonese Gaul during the early winter, Pompey's troopers numbered only four hundred. At least he could be sure that what his Picentine scouts told him was reliable, and when they assured him that there was little difference between scouting in Italy and scouting in Spain, he believed them. So, secure in the knowledge that no Sertorian cohorts lurked behind him ready to outflank him or fall upon his rear, Pompey committed his army to the crossing of the Turis. And to battle on its southern bank. The river was more a declivity than a steep sided trench, thus presented no obstacle even when battle was joined; its bed was rock hard, its waters ankle deep. There was no particular tactical advantage to be seized by either side, so what developed was a conventional clash which the army with better spirit and strength would win. The only innovation Pompey used had arisen out of his deficiency in cavalry; correctly assuming that Perperna and Herennius would use their superiority in horse to roll up his flanks, Pompey had put troops bearing old fashioned phalanx spears on the outside of his wings and ordered these men to use the fearsome fifteen foot long weapons against mounts rather than riders. The struggle was hotly contested and very drawn out. By no means as gifted a general as either Sertorius or Hirtuleius, Herennius did not see until it was too late that he was getting the worst of it; Perperna, to his west, was ignoring his every order. The two men had, in fact, not been able before the battle began to agree upon how it should be conducted; they ended in fighting as two separate entities, though this Pompey could not discern, only learned of later. The end of it was a heavy defeat for Herennius, but not for Perperna. Deciding that it was better to die if Sertorius insisted he must continue the war in tandem with this treacherous, odious man Perperna, Herennius threw his life away on the field, and the heart went out of the three legions and the cavalry directly under his command. Twelve thousand men died, leaving Perperna and eighteen thousand survivors to retreat to Sertorius on the Sucro. Mindful of Metellus Pius's warning that he must not reach the Sucro until the end of Quinctilis, Pompey did not attempt to pursue Perperna. The victory, so decisive and complete, had done his wounded self the world of good. How wonderful it was to hear his veterans cheering him again! And to wreath the eagles and the standards in well earned laurels! Valentia of course was now virtually defenseless, only its walls between the inhabitants and Roman vengeance. So Pompey sat down before it and subjected it to a merciless inspection which revealed more than enough weaknesses to suit his purpose. A few mines a fire along a section made of wood finding and cutting off the water supply and Valentia surrendered. With some of his newly learned caution, Pompey removed every morsel of food from the city and hid the lot in an abandoned quarry beneath a carpet of turf; he then sent the entire citizenry of Valentia to the slave market in New Carthage by ship, as the Roman fleet of Further Spain just happened (thanks to the foresight of a certain Roman Piglet) to be cruising in those waters, and no one had seen a sign of the forty Pontic triremes Sertorius now possessed. And six days before the end of Quinctilis did Pompey march for the Sucro, where he found Sertorius and Perperna enclosed in two separate camps on the plain between him and the river itself. Pompey now had to contend with a distressing dilemma. Of Metellus Pius he had heard nothing, and could not therefore assume that reinforcements were nearby. Like the situation on the Turis, the lay of the land bestowed no tactical advantage upon Sertorius; no hills, big forests, handy groves or ravines lay in even remote proximity, which meant that Sertorius had nowhere to hide cavalry or guerrillas. The closest town was little Saetabis five miles to the south of the river, which was wider than the Turis and notorious for quicksands. If he delayed battle until Metellus Pius joined him always provided that Metellus Pius was coming then Sertorius might retreat to more suitably Sertorian country or divine that Pompey was stalling in the expectation of reinforcements. On the other hand, if he engaged Sertorius he was grossly outnumbered, almost forty thousand against twenty thousand. Neither side now had many horse, thanks to Herennius's losses. In the end it was fear Metellus Pius would not come that decided Pompey to commit himself to battle or so he told himself, refusing to admit that his old greedy self was whispering inside his head that if he did fight now, he wouldn't have to share the laurels with a Piglet. The clash with Herennius and Perperna was only a prelude to this engagement with Sertorius, and Pompey burned to expunge the memory of Sertorius's taunts. Yes, his confidence had returned! So at dawn on the second last day of Quinctilis, having constructed a formidable camp in his rear, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus marched his five legions and four hundred horse onto the plain opposite Sertorius and Perperna, and deployed them for battle.
On the Kalends of April, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius the Piglet had left his comfortable quarters outside Italica on the western bank of the Baetis and headed for the Anas River. With him went all six of his legions a total of thirty five thousand men and a thousand Numidian light horse. Since the aristocratic fluid coursing through his veins was undiluted by any good farming blood, he failed to notice as he went that the cultivated lands he traversed did not look as verdant, nor the sprouting crops as lush, as in other years. He had abundant grain in his supply column, and all the other foodstuffs necessary to vary the diet of his men and maintain their good health. There was no waiting wall of Lusitani on the Anas when he reached it some hundred and fifty miles from its mouth; that pleased him, for it meant no word had come to them of his whereabouts, that they still waited for him by the sea. Though big settlements were nonexistent this far upstream, there were small hamlets, and the soil of the river valley was being tilled. Word of his arrival would certainly go downstream to the massed tribesmen; but by the time they got here, he intended to be far away from the Anas. They could pursue him, but they would not catch him! The Roman snake wound on through the rolling uplands at a good pace, heading now for the Tagus at Turmuli. Occasional skirmishes of a purely local nature did happen, but were swished away like flies from a horse's rump. As Segovia was his penultimate destination, the Piglet did not attempt to follow the Tagus further upstream but continued to march cross country instead, somewhere to the north of northwest. The road he was following throughout was nothing more than a primitive wagon trail, but in the manner of such things it took the line of least resistance across this western plateau; its altitude varied only in the hundreds of feet, and never got above two thousand five hundred. As the region was unknown to him, the Piglet gazed about in fascination, exhorting his team of cartographers and geographers to chart and describe everything minutely. Of people there were few; any the Romans chanced upon were immediately killed. Onward they pressed through beautiful mixed forests of oak, beech, elm and birch, sheltered from the increasing heat of the sun. The victory against Hirtuleius last year had put marvelous heart into the men, and had also endowed their general with a new attitude toward their comfort. Resolved that they must not suffer any more than possible and aware too that he was well on time the old woman of the Further province made sure the pace he set did not tire his soldiers to the point whereat a good meal and a good night's rest had not the power to restore them. The Roman column passed between two much higher ranges and emerged into the lands which ran down to the Durius, the least well known to the Romans of all Spain's major rivers. Ahead of him had he continued on the same course was big and prosperous Salamantica, but Metellus Pius now turned to the northeast and hugged the slopes of the mountains on his right, unwilling to provoke the tribe of Vettones whose gold workings had caused the great Hannibal to sack Salamantica one hundred and forty five years before. And on the Kalends of June, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius brought his army to a halt outside Segovia. Hirtuleius had beaten him to Segovia nonetheless not very surprising. Laminium lay only two hundred miles away, whereas Metellus Pius had needed to cover a distance of six hundred miles. Presumably someone at Turmuli on the Tagus had sent a message to Sertorius that the Romans were passing through but not up the Tagus. Sertorius had (as the old woman of the Further province had surmised) assumed that the Roman objective was the upper Iberus, a ploy to lure Sertorius away from the east coast and Pompey, or else a genuine attempt to strike at Sertorius's loyalest heartlands. Hirtuleius had been ordered to intercept the old woman before he could reach Sertorius's heartlands. Of one thing Metellus Pius was sure: they had not guessed whereabouts he was really going. To have guessed that, Sertorius would have had to hold a much higher opinion of the old woman's ability and subtlety! than he did. The first thing was to get the army into a very strongly fortified camp. As prudent as always, Metellus Pius made his men dig and build clad in their armor an extra burden no legionary welcomed but, as their centurions told them, Hirtuleius was in the neighborhood. They worked in a frenzy, burrowing and raising mounds like a vast colony of insects. The wagons, oxen, mules and horses had been brought in while the red flags were being planted and the surveying was still going on, then were left under the care of a skeleton crew because noncombatants were also being pressed into service. Thirty five thousand men labored with such logic and organization that the camp was finished in one day, though each side measured one mile in length, the timber reinforced ramparts were twenty five feet high, there were towers every two hundred paces, and the ditch in front of the walls was twenty feet deep. Only when the four gates made of solid logs were slammed shut and the sentries posted did the general heave a sigh of relief; his army was safe from attack. The day had not passed without incident, however. Lucius Hirtuleius had found the idea of the old woman from the Further province cozily ensconced behind trenches, walls and palisades too much to stomach, so he had launched a cavalry sortie from his own camp aimed at forcing the old woman to break off his construction. But Metellus Pius had not been in Spain for three and a half years for nothing; he was learning to think like his enemy. Deliberately paring away six hundred Numidian light horse from his column many miles before he reached Segovia, he instructed them to follow on with great stealth, then position themselves where a potential attacker could not see them. No sooner was the sortie under way than out they came from under the nearby trees and chased Hirtuleius back to his own camp. For the full eight days of a nundinum nothing further happened. The men had to rest, to feel as if no enemy forces would dare to disturb their tranquillity, to sleep the nights away and spend the long hours of sunlight in a mixture of exercise and recreation. From where his command tent stood at the junction of the via praetoria and the via principalis (it occupied a knoll within the flat expanse of the camp so the general could see over the tops of its buildings to all four walls), the general walked the length of both main streets, dived off into the alleyways lined by oiled cowhide tents or slab huts, and everywhere talked to his men, explained to them carefully what he was going to do next, let them see that he was superbly confident. He was not a warm man, nor one who felt comfortable when dealing with his subordinates or inferiors, yet nor was he so cold that he could render himself proof against overt affection. Ever since the battle on the Baetis when he had cared for his soldiers so scrupulously, they had looked at him differently; shyly at first, then more and more openly. And they looked at him with love, and told him how grateful they were to him for giving them the chance of that victory with his care, his forethought. Nor did it make any difference to them that his motives for this care had been entirely practical, founded not in love for them but in the desire to beat Hirtuleius. They knew better. He had fussed and clucked like the old woman Sertorius called him so derisively; he had betrayed a personal interest in their well being. Since then they had sailed with him from Gades to Emporiae and back again, and they had marched six hundred miles through unknown country riddled with barbarians; and always he had kept them safe. So by the time that Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius walked the streets and alleys of his camp at Segovia, he had thawed in the glow of this extraordinary affection, and understood that time, his own mind and a properly Roman attitude to detail had dowered him with an army he would weep to part from. They were his. What he did not quite come to terms with was the fact that he was also theirs. His son never did come to terms with this last fact, and found it difficult to accompany his father on these strolls around what was a veritable town. Metellus Scipio was more snob than stickler, incapable by nature of eliciting or accepting the affection of those who were not his peers even, it might be said, of those who were not directly related to him through blood or adopted blood. By the time that their general led them out to tempt Lucius Hirtuleius into battle, his men knew why he had crammed six full legions and a thousand horse into a camp considerably smaller than it ought to have been. He wanted Hirtuleius to think that there were only five under strength legions with him, and to think too that he had built his camp so stoutly because his army had been obliged to travel without all the adjuncts it needed; some of the Numidian cavalry troopers had been heard to pass remarks to this effect while they chased Hirtuleius's cavalry away during the sortie. Taking a deliberate leaf out of Scipio Africanus's book, he chose the kind of ground to form up on that a general in command of ill equipped troops in cheerless spirits would choose cut up by tiny watercourses, a trifle uneven, impeded by bushes and small trees. And it was plain to Hirtuleius that in order to cover the front presented by forty thousand superbly armed Spanish soldiers in top condition, Metellus Pius had been obliged to thin out his center. To compensate for this his wings straggled too far forward, with the Numidian cavalry at their tips behaving as if they were commanded by someone who could not control them. In two minds as to whether he would fight that day when his scouts had come to tell him that the old woman's army was marching out of its camp, Hirtuleius surveyed the opposition and the ground, grunted contemptuously, and elected to give battle after all. The old woman's wings engaged Hirtuleius first, which was exactly what he wanted. Forward he charged for that thin center, intent upon punching a hole in it through which he would pull three legions in a hurry, then turn and fall upon its rear. But the moment the Spanish army inserted itself between those unruly wings, Metellus Pius sprang his trap. His best men were hidden within the wings; some suddenly moved to reinforce his center, others turned to fight on the flanks. Before he could attempt to extricate himself, Lucius Hirtuleius found himself rolled neatly into a milling mass of bewildered men, and lost the battle. He and his younger brother died on the field, and the soldiers of Metellus Pius, singing a victory paean, cut the beloved Spanish army of Sertorius into pieces. Very few of its men survived; those who did fled into Lusitania howling the awful news of defeat, and came no more to fight for Quintus Sertorius. Their fellow tribesmen, cheated of their quarry at the mouth of the Anas, had followed the Romans at first, then decided to invade the Further province, even to cross the Baetis. But when the word spread of the fate of the Spanish army, they keened a terrible dirge at the passing of their great chance, then melted away into the forests. Little more than a village perched atop a crag high above the plateau, Segovia could not hold out against Metellus Pius for one single day. Its people were put to the sword and its buildings went up in flames. Metellus Pius wanted no one left alive to fly eastward to warn Sertorius that his Spanish army was dead. As soon as his centurions pronounced the men fit and rested enough to leave, Metellus Pius commenced his march to the mouth of the Sucro River. Time dictated that he should cross the formidable massif behind Segovia without trying to find a way around it: the Juga Carpetana (as it was called) proved difficult but not impossible to conquer even for the ox drawn wagons, and the passage was a short one, some twenty five miles. Miaccum followed Segovia, and Sertobriga followed Miaccum; Metellus Pius and his army passed far enough to the south of them to delude their inhabitants into thinking they saw Hirtuleius and the Spanish army returning to Laminium. After that it was a weary trek through country so arid even the sheep seemed to avoid it, but there were riverbeds at regular intervals which yielded water below the ground, and the distance to the upper Sucro, still flowing, was not so great that the army of Further Spain stood in any danger. The heat of course was colossal, and of shade there was none. But Metellus Pius marched only by night, as the moon was full enough, and by day made his men sleep in the shade of their tents. What instinct caused him to cross the Sucro to its northern bank the moment he encountered that river he never afterward knew, for lower down its course the bed turned out to be a shifting mire of sandy gravel which would have proven time consuming to ford. As it was, his legions were on the northern side of the stream when, stirring into activity just before sunset, he and his men heard in the distance the unmistakable sounds of battle. It was the second last day of Quinctilis.
From dawn until an hour before sunset Quintus Sertorius watched Pompey's legions drawn up in battle formation, wondering as the day dragged on if Pompey would stay the course, or whether he would commence to march away. It was this latter alternative Sertorius wanted; the moment Pompey's back was turned, he would have found out soon enough that he had made a terrible blunder. As it was, either the kid was smart enough to know what he was doing, or else some lucky divinity stood by his shoulder and persuaded him to wait on for hour after hour in the frightful sun. Things were not going well for Sertorius, despite the many advantages he enjoyed the superior ability of his troops to endure the heat, plenty of water to drink and splash around, an intimate knowledge of the surrounding countryside. For one thing, he had heard nothing from Lucius Hirtuleius once he had reached Segovia beyond a curt note saying Metellus Pius was not there, but that he would wait for thirty days to see whether the old woman turned up before he proceeded as ordered to join Sertorius. For another, his scouts posted on the highest hills in the district had discerned no column of dust coming down the dry valley of the Sucro to indicate that Hirtuleius was on his way. And by far the biggest worry of all! Diana had disappeared. The little white fawn had been with him all the way from Osca, unperturbed by the scuffle and chaos of an army on the march, unperturbed too by the summer sun (which ought to have burned her, as she was albino, but never did one more sign of her divine origins). And then when he had located himself here by the Sucro, with Herennius and Perperna in good position near Valentia to soften Pompey up, Diana disappeared. One night he had gone to sleep in his command tent knowing the animal was curled up on its sheepskin rug beside his pallet, only to find when he awoke at dawn that it had vanished. At first he had not fretted about its absence. Beautifully trained, it never soiled the interior of any building with urine or droppings, so Sertorius had simply assumed that it had gone off to do its business. But while he broke his fast it also broke its fast, and during the summer it was always hungriest after the respite of darkness. Yet it did not come back to eat. That had been thirty three days ago. His alarm growing, Sertorius had quietly searched further and further afield without result, then finally had needed to ask other people if they had seen it. Immediately the news had spread it seemed like a fire in tinder dry scrub until the whole camp had scattered panic stricken to look for Diana; Sertorius had been driven to issue a harsh order that discipline must be maintained even if he disappeared. The creature meant so much, especially to the Spaniards. When day succeeded day without a sign of it, morale plummeted, the decline fueled by that stupid disaster at Valentia which Perperna had brought on when he refused to work with poor loyal Gaius Herennius. Sertorius knew well enough that the fault lay with Perperna, but his people were convinced the fault lay in Diana's disappearance. The white fawn was Sertorius's luck, and now his luck was gone. It was almost sunset when Sertorius committed his army to battle, secure in the knowledge that his troops were in much better condition to fight than Pompey's, obviously suffering from the long wait under the summer sun. Pompey himself was commanding his right with Lucius Afranius on the left and the center under some legate Sertorius suspected was new to Spain, as no one among his scouts could put a name to the face. Their encounter outside Lauro the previous year had given Sertorius a profound contempt for Pompey's generalship, so he elected to fight opposite Pompey himself, which left Perperna to deal with Afranius; his center belonged to Sertorius as well. Things went excellently for Sertorius from the beginning, and looked even better when Pompey was carried from the field just as the sun set, one thigh scoured to ribbons by a barbed spear. Behind him he left his big white Public Horse, dead by the same spear. Despite the valiant attempts of young Aulus Gabinius to rally it, Pompey's rudderless right began to retreat. Unfortunately Perperna was not doing nearly as well against Afranius, who punched a hole in his lines and reached Perperna's camp. Sertorius was forced to go to Perperna's rescue in person, and only contrived to eject Afranius from the camp after sustaining heavy losses. Darkness had fallen as the full moon rose, but the battle went on by moonlight and torchlight despite the dust; Sertorius was determined that he would not break off the engagement until he stood in a strong enough position to win on the morrow. Thus it was that when hostilities did cease, Sertorius had good cause to look forward to the next dawn. "I'll string the kid's carcass from a tree and leave it for the birds," he said, smiling nastily. Then, with an eager yet despairing look: "I don't suppose Diana has come back?" No, Diana had not come back. As soon as it was light enough to see, battle was joined again. Pompey was still in command, lying on a stretcher held at shoulder height by some of his tallest men. Formed anew during the night, his army was drawn together tightly and had obviously been ordered to minimize its losses by not incurring any risks just the sort of enemy Sertorius detested most. And then a little after sunrise a fresh face and a fresh army strolled onto the battlefield: Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius, marching out of the west and through Perperna's ranks as if they did not exist. For the second time in less than a day Perperna's camp fell. Metellus Pius pressed on toward the camp of Sertorius. Time to go. As he and Perperna beat a hasty retreat, Sertorius was heard to wail desolately, "If that wretched old woman had not arrived, I would have kicked the kid all the way back to Rome!" The retreat ended in the foothills to the west of Saetabis. Here order began once more to emerge from disorder as Sertorius, trying to ignore Perperna, counted his losses perhaps four thousand men all told and put the men (mostly Perperna's) from badly mauled cohorts among cohorts in need of a few extra men. It had been Perperna's intention to make a formal protest about this, to complain loudly that Sertorius was deliberately undermining his authority, but one look at the set face with the maimed orbit decided him to leave well enough alone. For the time being. Here too Sertorius finally got the news that Lucius and Gaius Hirtuleius had been killed at Segovia, together with the entire Spanish army. A crushing blow, and one Sertorius had never expected. Not when the enemy had been the old woman from the Further province! And how cunning, to march so circuitously that his real intentions had never even been suspected, to hustle himself past Miaccum and Sertobriga in the distance pretending to be Hirtuleius, to march then by the light of the moon and raise no dust to give his presence away as he came down the Sucro! My Spaniards are right, he thought. When Diana disappeared I lost my luck. Fortune no longer favors me. If Fortune ever did. The kid and the old woman, he was informed, had evidently decided there was no point in continuing to march southward; after they had cleaned up the field and looted hapless Saetabis of all its food, their armies had turned into the north. Well, that was good thinking. Sextilis was upon them and they had a long way to go before the kid could insert himself into winter camp. Only what did the old woman intend to do? Was he going back to Further Spain, or was he marching all the way north with the kid? Aware of an awful lassitude he did not know how to shake off, Quintus Sertorius decided his wounds were now licked sufficiently to heal; he would follow the old woman and the kid as they headed north, do what damage he could without risking another outright confrontation. His camp was dismembered and his army moving out, its guerrilla units in the lead, when two little children of the area came to him shyly, their bare feet even browner than their naked bodies, nostrils and ears pierced by shining balls of gold. In between them, a precious strand of family rope around its neck, was a dirt encrusted brown fawn. The tears sprang unbidden to Quintus Sertorius's remaining eye how nice, how kind! They had heard of the loss of his beautiful goddess given white fawn, and come to offer him their own pet as a replacement. He squatted down to their level, his face turned away so that they only saw its good side, would not be frightened by its bad side. To his great surprise, the creature they led began to leap and struggle at his advent; animals never shied away from Quintus Sertorius! "Did you bring me your pet?" he asked gently. "Thank you, thank you! But I can't take it, you know. I'm off to fight the Romans, and I'd much rather you kept it safe with you." "But it's yours," said the girl child. "Mine? Oh no! Mine was white." "It's white," she said, spat on her hand, and rubbed the juice into its coat. "See?" At this moment the fawn managed to pull its neck free of the rope and launched itself at Sertorius. Tears pouring down the right side of his face the good side he took it into his arms, hugged it, kissed it, could not let it go. "Diana! My Diana! Diana, Diana!" When the children had been sent off with their precious bit of family rope put into a big bag of gold carried by a slave under instructions to deliver everything to their parents, Quintus Sertorius bathed his fawn in the nearby spring and looked it over, crooning and clucking. Whatever the reason for its original disappearance might have been, it had clearly not prospered in the wild. Some large cat had attacked it, for it bore the deep and half healed marks of vicious claws on both sides of its rump, as if it had been pounced on from behind and dragged down. How it had managed to escape only the Goddess knew or had contrived at. Its poor little trotters were worn and bloodied, its ears shredded along their edges, its muzzle torn. The children had found it when they took the family sheep out to graze, and it had come straight up to them, put its nose in the girl child's grimy hands and sighed in shivering relief. "Well, Diana," said Sertorius as he put it into a box upon the tray of a wagon, "I hope you've learned that the wilds are for the wild. Did you smell a stag, was that it? Or did the camp dogs bait you? In future, my girl, you'll travel like this. I can't bear the thought of losing you again." Word had flown swifter than birds on the wing; Diana was back! And so was Quintus Sertorius's luck.
Pompey and Metellus Pius left Valentia behind, continuing north to Saguntum. The food they had plundered from Saetabis (there was nothing else to plunder) was a welcome addition to their dwindling supplies, and so was Pompey's cache in the disused quarry outside Valentia. They had agreed that both would march together up the east coast to Emporiae, and that Metellus Pius would winter that year in Narbonese Gaul; though his men had not voiced any complaint at their thousand mile detour to reinforce Pompey, the Piglet thought that another five hundred mile walk would do them for the year. Besides, he wanted to be in the thick of the action in the spring, and he knew that the annihilation of the Spanish army would keep the Further province safe from any raiding Lusitani. Saguntum had sent them an embassage to inform them that it would do whatever possible to assist them, and was still stoutly Roman in sentiment. Not surprising: it had been Saguntum's Roman (and Massiliote) affiliations which had caused the outbreak of the second Punic war against Carthage a century and a half earlier. Of food, however, the town had little to offer, and this the two generals believed. The harvest was poor because the rains of winter had not come to give the crops their best drink of the growing season, nor had the late spring rains come to send them shooting up heavy with ears of grain. It was therefore imperative that the two armies move as swiftly as possible to the Iberus, where the harvest was later and richer. If they could reach it by the end of Sextilis it would be theirs, not Sertorius's. The embassage from Saguntum had therefore been thanked and sent home; Metellus Pius and Pompey would not be staying. Pompey's leg wound was healing, but slowly; the barbs of the spear which had inflicted it had torn chunks out of sinews and tendons as well as muscles, and much tissue had to grow and reknit before he would be able to bear any weight on it. The loss of his Public Horse he seemed to feel, thought the Piglet, more than he did the use of his leg or the loss of its beauty. Well, a horse was more beautiful than a man's leg. Pompey wouldn't find one to match it this side of the rosea rura in Sabine country. Spanish horses were small and underbred. His spirits were down again, not unnaturally. Not only had Metellus Pius been the sole reason for the victory on the Sucro, but Metellus Pius had also slaughtered Sertorius's best general and best army. Even Lucius Afranius, Marcus Petreius and Pompey's new legate, Lucius Titurius Sabinus, had fared better than poor Pompey himself. All very well to say that it was upon Pompey personally that the brunt of Sertorius's venom had fallen; Pompey knew he hadn't met the test. And now, his scouts told him, the renegade Marian was dogging their footsteps as they marched north, no doubt waiting for his next opportunity. His guerrilla units were already in evidence, harrying what foraging parties were sent out, but Pompey had learned as much wisdom as the Piglet in this respect, so the two armies suffered very little. On the other hand, they obtained very little in the way of food. Then apparently quite by accident they ran into the army of Quintus Sertorius on the plains of the coast just after they had passed Saguntum. And Sertorius decided to engage them, making sure that he and his own legions faced Pompey. Pompey was the weak link, not Metellus Pius. The strategy was a mistake. Sertorius would have done far better to have contained Metellus Pius himself and left Pompey to Perperna; Pompey appeared on the field on his stretcher, unwilling to have it said that, like Achilles, he skulked in his tent while his allies got on with the battle. Hostilities began in the early afternoon, and it was all over by nightfall. Though he had sustained a slight wound on his arm, Metellus Pius had carried the day. He inflicted losses of five thousand upon Perperna but experienced few himself. Poor Pompey's ill luck continued to dog him; his cavalry was killed to the last man and his casualties stood at six thousand a legion and a half. That they could claim the engagement as a victory for Rome was due to Perperna's losses plus the three thousand men who died fighting for Sertorius. "He'll be back at dawn," said the Piglet cheerfully when he came to see how Pompey was. "He'll withdraw, surely," said Pompey. "It didn't go well for him, but it went disastrously for Perperna." "He'll be back, Gnaeus Pompeius. I know him." Oh, the pain! Oh, the gall! The wretched Piglet knew him! And he was right, of course. Sertorius was back in the morning, determined to win. This time he rectified his mistake and concentrated his own energies upon Metellus Pius, whose camp he attacked as soon as it was light enough to see. But the old woman was ready for him. He had put Pompey and his men in the camp as well, and trounced Sertorius. Looking a lot younger and fitter these days, Metellus Pius chased Sertorius into Saguntum, while Pompey on his stretcher was carried back to his tent. But the action had brought Pompey a personal grief, despite its success. Gaius Memmius brother in law, friend, quaestor was killed, the first of Pompey's legates to perish. While he wept huddled in the back of a mule drawn cart, Metellus Pius commanded the march north, leaving Sertorius and Perperna to do whatever they wanted, which was probably to exact reprisals on the inhabitants of Saguntum. They wouldn't stay long, of that Metellus Pius was sure; Saguntum could hardly feed itself, let alone an army.
At the end of Sextilis the two Roman armies reached the Iberus only to find the harvest such as it was safely in the granaries of Sertorius's formidable mountain strongholds, and the earth burned to a uniformly black desert. Sertorius had not stayed long in Saguntum. He had outmaneuvered them and got to the Iberus first, there to wreak devastation. Emporiae and the lands of the Indigetes were in little better condition; two winters of Pompey's occupation had made the purses of the people fat, but their harvest was lean. "I shall send my quaestor Gaius Urbinius to the Further province to recruit enough troops to keep my lands safe," said the Piglet, "but if we are to break Sertorius's back, then I have to be close to you in spring. So, as we thought, it will have to be Narbonese Gaul for me." "The harvest isn't good there either." "True. But they haven't had an army quartered on them for many years, so they'll have enough to spare for me." The Piglet frowned. "What worries me more is what you're going to do. I don't think there's enough here to fatten your men up and if you can't fatten them up in winter, they'll stay very thin." "I'm off to the upper Durius," said Pompey calmly. "Ye gods!" "Well, it's a good way west of Sertorius's towns, so it ought to be easier to reduce the local fortresses than it would be places like Calagurris or Vareia. The Iberus belongs to Sertorius from end to end. But the Durius doesn't. The few native Spaniards I trust tell me that the country isn't as high nor the cold as perishing as it is nearer to the Pyrenees." "The Vaccei inhabit the region, and they're warlike." "Oh, tell me what Spanish tribe isn't?" asked Pompey wearily, shifting his aching leg. The Piglet was nodding thoughtfully. "You know, Pompeius, the more I think about it, the better I like it," he said. "You go there! Just make sure you start before winter makes it too hard to cross the watershed at the top end of the Iberus." "Don't worry, I'll beat the winter. But first," he said grimly, "I have a letter to write." "To Rome and the Senate." "That's right, Pius. To Rome and the Senate." The blue eyes, older and warier these days, stared into the Piglet's brown ones. "The thing is, will you let me write and speak for you too?'' "You most definitely can," said Metellus Pius. "You're sure you wouldn't rather write for yourself?" "No, it's better that it comes from you. You're the one those couch fat experts gave the special commission. I'm just an ordinary old governor in the throes of a frightful war. They won't take any notice of me, they know perfectly well that I'm one of the old retainers. It's you they don't know, Magnus. You they probably don't quite trust. You're not one of them. Write to them! And give them a fright, Magnus!" "Don't worry, I will." The Piglet got up. "Well, I'll take myself off to Narbo first thing tomorrow. Every day less I'm here means less of your food I eat." "Won't you at least polish up my prose? Varro used to." "No, not I!" said the Piglet, and laughed. "They know my literary style. Give them something they've never seen before." Pompey gave them something they had never seen before.
To the Senate and People of Rome: I write this from Emporiae on the Nones of October in the consulship of Lucius Octavius and Gaius Aurelius Cotta. On the Ides of October I commence my march up the Iberus River to the Durius River and its confluence with the Pisoraca River, where there is a town called Septimanca in the middle of a fertile highland. There I hope to winter my men in enough comfort to keep their bellies full. Luckily I do not have nearly as many men as I did two years ago when I arrived in Emporiae. I am down to four legions of less than four thousand men each, and I have no cavalry. Why do I have to march my fourteen thousand men some five hundred miles through hostile territory to winter them? Because there is nothing to eat in eastern Spain. That is why. Then why do I not buy in food from Gaul or Italian Gaul since the winds at this time of year favor shipping it in my direction? Because I have no money. No money for food and no money for ships. That is why. I have no other choice than to rob food from Spanish tribesmen who will, I hope, prove weak enough to let themselves be robbed by fourteen thousand hungry Roman men. That is why I have to march so far, to find tribesmen I hope will prove weak enough. There is no food to be had on the Iberus without reducing one of Sertorius's strongholds, and I am not in a position to do that. How long did it take Rome to reduce Numantia? And Numantia is a hen coop of a place compared to Calagurris or Clunia. Nor was Numantia commanded by a Roman. You know from my dispatches that I have not had a good two years in the field, though my colleague Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Pontifex Maximus has had more success. Quintus Sertorius takes some getting used to. This is his country. He knows it and he knows the people. I do not. I did my best. I do not believe that anyone else you might have sent could have done better. My colleague Pius took three years to hatch his first victory. I at least have collaborated in two victories in my second year, when my colleague Pius and I combined our forces and beat Sertorius on the Sucre River, then again near Saguntum. My colleague Pius and I believe we will win. I do not just say that. We will win. But in order to win, we need a bit of help from home. We need more legions. We need money. I do not say "more money" because I for one have not received any money at all. Nor I believe has my colleague Pius received any money beyond his stipend for his first year as governor. Yes, I can hear you now: win a few victories and sack a few cities and there is your money. Well, Spain is not like that. There is no money in Spain. The best I or anyone else can hope for when we take a town is a bit of food. There is no money. In case you are having a bit of trouble reading this, I will say that again. THERE IS NO MONEY. When you sent me here you gave me six legions and fifteen hundred cavalry and enough money to pay everyone and find my supplies for about half a year. That was two years ago. My war chest was empty in half a year. That was a year and a half ago. But no more money. No more troops either. You know I know you know because my colleague Pius and I both reported it in our dispatches that Quintus Sertorius has made a pact with King Mithridates of Pontus. He has agreed to confirm King Mithridates in all his conquests and allow Pontus more conquests when he is Dictator of Rome. Now that should tell you that Quintus Sertorius is not going to stop when he is King of Spain. He intends to be King of Rome too, no matter what title he likes to award himself. There are only two people who can stop him. My colleague Pius and I. I say that because we are here on the spot and we have the chance to stop him. But we cannot stop him with what we have. He has all the manpower Spain can offer and he has the Roman skills to turn barbarian Spaniards into good Roman soldiers. If he had not these two things, he would have been stopped years ago. But he is still here and still recruiting and training. My colleague Pius and I cannot recruit in Spain. No one in his right mind would join our armies. We cannot pay our men. We cannot even keep their bellies full. And the gods be my witness, there are no spoils to share. I can beat Sertorius. If I cannot do it any other way, then I will be the drop of water that wears down the hardest stone to a hollow shell a child can break with a toy hammer. My colleague Pius feels the same. But I cannot beat Sertorius unless I am sent more soldiers and more cavalry AND SOME MONEY. My soldiers here have not been paid in a year and a half, and I owe the dead as well as the living. I did bring a lot of my own money with me, but I have spent it all buying supplies. I do not apologize for my troop losses. They were the result of a miscalculation not helped by the information I received in Rome. Namely, that six legions and fifteen hundred horse were more than enough to deal with Sertorius. I ought to have had ten legions and three thousand cavalry. Then I would have beaten him in the first year and Rome would be the richer in men and money. You ought to think about that, you miserly lot. And here is something else for you to think about. If I am not able to stay in Spain and my colleague Pius is therefore unable to come out of his little corner of Spain, what do you think will happen? I will go back to Italy. Dragging Quintus Sertorius and his armies along in my wake like the tail on a comet. Now you think about that long and hard. And send me some legions and some cavalry AND SOME MONEY. By the way, Rome owes me a Public Horse.
The letter reached Rome at the end of November, a time of flux in Sulla's reorganized Senate. The consuls of the year were drawing to the end of their tenure in office and the consuls elect were feeling their coming power. Because of Lucius Octavius's state of chronic ill health, only one consul, Gaius Aurelius Cotta, occupied the curule chair. Mamercus Princeps Senatus read Pompey's letter to the silent senators, as this was one privilege Sulla had not stripped from the Leader of the House. It was Lucius Licinius Lucullus, senior consul elect for the next year, who rose to reply; his junior colleague was the present consul's middle brother, Marcus Aurelius Cotta, and neither of the Cottae wanted to answer that bald, comfortless letter. "Conscript Fathers, you have just listened to a soldier's report rather than the meretricious missive of a politician." "A soldier's report? I'd rather call it as incompetently written as its author is an incompetent commander!" said Quintus Hortensius, holding his nose with his fingers as if to shut out a bad smell. "Oh, pipe down, Hortensius!" said Lucullus wearily. "I do not need to have what I am about to say punctuated by the smart remarks of a stay at home general! When you can leap off your dining couch and abandon your pretty fish to outsoldier Quintus Sertorius, I'll not only give you the floor, I'll strew rose petals before your pudgy flat feet! But until your sword is as sharp as your tongue, keep your tongue where it belongs behind your gourmandizing teeth!" Hortensius subsided, looking sour. "It is not the meretricious missive of a politician. Nor does it spare us politicians. On the other hand it does not spare its writer either. It isn't full of excuses, and the statement about battles won and lost is fully supported by the dispatches we have received regularly from Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius. "Now I have never been to Spain. Some of you sitting here do know the place, but many more of you are in my boat, and know it not at all. In the old days the Further province always had the reputation of being good pickings for a governor rich, well ordered, peaceful, yet amply provided with barbarians on two frontiers so that the wars a governor might feel free to wage were fairly easily managed. The Nearer province has never enjoyed the same reputation the pickings are lean and the native peoples in a perpetual state of unrest. Therefore the governor of Nearer Spain could only look forward to an empty purse and much aggravation from the mountain dwelling tribesmen. "However, all that changed when Quintus Sertorius arrived. He already knew Spain well, from his missions for Gaius Marius to a military tribunate under Titus Didius during which, I remind you, he won the Grass Crown, though still a youngster. And when this remarkable and absolutely formidable man arrived back in Spain as a Marian rebel fleeing retribution, the Nearer province became literally ungovernable, and the Further province ungovernable west of the Baetis. As Gnaeus Pompeius's letter says, it took the excellent governor of Further Spain almost three years to win a battle against one of Sertorius's adherents, Hirtuleius not against Sertorius himself. What the letter does not reproach us with is the fact that due to strife inside Italy, we neglected to send Nearer Spain a governor at all for nearly two years. That, Conscript Fathers, was tantamount to handing Sertorius the Nearer province as a gift!" Lucullus paused to look directly at Philippus, who was leaning forward on his stool and smiling broadly. It galled Lucullus to be doing Philippus's work for him; but he was a fair man, and it came better from the consul elect than from one even the stupidest senator now realized was Pompey's lobbyist. "When, Conscript Fathers, you gave your special commission to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, I was governing Africa Province and you could find no capable senator willing to undertake the task of uprooting Quintus Sertorius. You sent Gnaeus Pompeius off with six legions and fifteen hundred cavalry. I tell you frankly that I would not have consented to go with less than ten full legions and three thousand cavalry the figures Gnaeus Pompeius gives in his letter as adequate for the job. The correct figures! "If one examines Gnaeus Pompeius's military record, it is impressive. And Pompeius is young enough to be flexible, adaptable, all the qualities men lose along with their youthful enthusiasm. Against any other enemy of Rome, six legions and fifteen hundred cavalry would probably have been sufficient. But Quintus Sertorius is a very special case. We have not seen his like since Gaius Marius, and I personally rank him a better general than Marius. So the initial defeats of Pompeius are not so very surprising. His luck was out, was all. For he ran up against one of the best military minds Rome has ever produced. Do you doubt that? You ought not! It is the truth. "However, even the finest military minds think in a certain way. The governor of the Further province, our good Pius, has now been in Spain long enough to have begun to understand the way Sertorius thinks. I congratulate Pius for that. Frankly, I did not think he had it in him! Yet he cannot beat Sertorius alone. The theater of war is too vast it is Italy during the Italian War all over again. One man cannot be north and south at the same time, and between the two regions is a dry and mountainous barrier. "You sent the second man a mere knight upon whom you put a kind of unnamed military crown to govern the Nearer province. How did you phrase it, Philippus? non pro consule, sed pro consulibus. You gave him to understand that you were sending him adequately staffed and adequately remunerated. Oh, make no mistake, he was eager for the job! At twenty nine years of age and already a hoary veteran, which one of us military fellows would not have been? He was eager for the job, and may well have been eager enough to have gone off even less well provided! You might have got him as cheaply as four legions and five hundred cavalry!" "A pity we didn't," said Catulus. "He's lost more men than that since he's been there." "Hear, hear!" cried Hortensius. "And that," said Lucullus, ignoring the brothers in law this time, brings me to the crux of the matter. How can Rome hope to stop a man like Quintus Sertorius when Rome is not willing to send the money or the men to Spain that would ensure he was stopped? Not even a Quintus Sertorius could have coped with the war Pompeius and Pius might have brought to bear on him on two fronts had each of them commanded ten legions and three thousand horse! Pompeius's letter accuses this body of losing the war and I agree with that judgement! How can this body expect miracles when it will not pay the magicians to work them? No money, no reinforcements it cannot go on! This body must find the money to pay the woefully inadequate legions of Pompeius and Pius, and it must also find the money to give Pompeius at least two more legions. Four would be better." Gaius Cotta spoke from the curule chair. "I agree with every last thing you've said, Lucius Licinius. But we do not have the money, Lucius Licinius. We just do not have the money." "Then we have to find it," said Lucullus. "Find it from where?" asked Gaius Cotta. "It is three years since we saw any significant revenues from Spain, and since the Contestani rose up we have seen no revenues at all. The Further province cannot mine the Marian Mountains or the southern Orospeda, and the Nearer province now cannot mine around New Carthage. The days when the Treasury's share of the gold, silver, lead and iron from Spain amounted to twenty thousand talents are gone, as are the mines themselves. Added to which, the events of the last fifteen years have reduced our income from Asia Province to its lowest level since we inherited the place over fifty five years ago. We are at war in Illyricum, Macedonia and Gaul across the Alps. We even hear rumors that King Mithridates is rising again, though no one can be sure. And should Nicomedes of Bithynia die, the situation in the east will become more precarious still." "To deny our governors in Spain money and troops because we foresee events at the other end of Our Sea that may well not come to pass, Gaius Cotta, is absolute idiocy," said Lucullus. "No, Lucius Lucullus!" Cotta snapped, angered. "I do not need to foresee anything to know that we do not have the money to send to Spain, let alone the troops! Gnaeus Pompeius and Quintus Pius must put up with things the way they are!'' The long face grew flintlike. "Then," said Lucullus in freezing tones, "there will be a new comet in Rome's sky. Its head will be loyal enough, for that will be a bankrupt Gnaeus Pompeius hurrying home with his tatterdemalion army. But the tail ah, the tail! The tail will be Quintus Sertorius and the barbarians of Spain he holds in utter thrall. Joined along the way by Volcae, Salluvii, Vocontii, Allobroges, Helvii and no doubt by the Boii and Insubres of Italian Gaul not to mention the Ligures and Vagienni!" Absolute silence greeted this Parthian shot. Deciding it was time to break Sulla's rule, Philippus got to his feet and walked deliberately into the middle of the Curia Hostilia floor. There he looked at everybody in turn, from an ashen Cethegus to the flinching figures of Catulus and Hortensius. Then he turned to the curule podium and gazed at the discomfited Gaius Cotta, whose face reflected his state of mind. "I suggest, Conscript Fathers," Philippus said, "that we summon the heads of the Treasury and the tax experts and see how we can find a considerable sum of money the honorable consul says we do not have. I also suggest that we find some legions and a squadron or two of cavalry."
When Pompey arrived before Septimanca in the lands of the Vaccei he found it smaller than his informants had thought, though it looked prosperous enough. It was situated on a bluff above the Pisoraca River, but not invulnerably so; at Pompey's advent the whole district surrendered without a fight. Surrounded by interpreters, he endeavored to soothe Septimancan fears and convince the chieftains of the region that he would eventually pay in full for what he took, and that his men would behave. Clunia, some miles to the north of the sources of the Durius, was the westernmost of Sertorius's strongholds, but some of the settlements to the south of the same reach of that river had heard of the fate of Segovia and sent to Pompey at Septimanca the moment he arrived there, fervently assuring him of their loyalty to Rome and offering him whatever he needed. So after a conference with his legates, interpreters and locals, he dispatched Lucius Titurius Sabinus and fifteen cohorts to winter at Termes, Celtiberian in populace but no longer keen to serve Sertorius. In fact (as Pompey told Metellus Pius in a letter sent to wish him felicitations for the New Year) the ground swell was now beginning. If in the next campaign season they could damage Sertorius so badly he visibly reeled, places like Septimanca and Termes anxious to submit would increase. The war would go on in Sertorius's heartland of the Iberus; there would be no more expeditions to the lower east coast. The spring came early to the upper Durius, and Pompey did not linger. Leaving the people of Septimanca and Termes to plant their crops (with something extra in case the Romans came back next winter), the reunited four very under strength legions set off up the Pisoraca to Pallantia, which had declared for Sertorius, apparently for no other reason than that the rival Septimanca had declared for Rome. Metellus Pius pulled up stakes in Narbonese Gaul early as well, and marched up the Iberus with the intention of eventually joining Pompey marching down. His most important task, however, was to open the route between the Iberus and central Spain to Roman use, so when he reached the Salo a big tributary of the Iberus flowing from the Juga Carpetana he turned up it and one by one subdued the Sertorian towns along it. At the end of this crisp campaign he now had a quick way home to his own province, and had cut Sertorius off from the headwaters of both the Tagus and the Anas, which meant isolation from the tribes of Lusitania. Pallantia turned out to be a hard nut to crack, so Pompey settled down to besiege it in the manner of Scipio Aemilianus before Numantia as he informed the town through a relentless barrage of heralds. To retaliate, Pallantia sent to Sertorius in Osca, and Sertorius responded by bringing his own army to besiege the besiegers. It was clear that he wanted nothing to do with the old woman of the Further province, whose efforts up the Salo he chose to ignore as he passed by; Sertorius was as certain as ever that Pompey was the weak link in the Roman chain. Neither side was interested in a direct confrontation at Pallantia, where Pompey concentrated upon reducing the town and Sertorius upon reducing Pompey's ranks. So while Pompey piled logs and tinder against Pallantia's stout wooden walls, Sertorius picked off Pompey's men a few at a time. And at the beginning of April Pompey withdrew, leaving Sertorius to help the town repair its burned section of fortifications before setting off in pursuit. A month later Pompey and Metellus Pius met before one of Sertorius's strongest towns, Calagurris on the upper Iberus. With the Piglet came a chest of money for Pompey and two more legions plus six thousand extra men formed into cohorts to plump out his existing legions to full strength. And with all that largesse from Rome came his new proquaestor, none other than Marcus Terentius Varro. Oh, how glad he was to see that shiny pate with the fringe of dark hair above its ears! Pompey wept unashamedly. "I'd gone before Varro and your reinforcements reached Narbo," said the Piglet as the three of them sat in Pompey's tent over a much needed goblet of watered wine, but I picked him up when I came out of the Salo valley into the Iberus. And I'm pleased to say he handed me a full war chest too, Magnus." Pompey's chest expanded; he exhaled a huge sigh of relief. "I take it then that my letter worked," he said to Varro. "Worked?" Varro laughed. "I'd rather say it lit a fire under the Senate hotter than any since Saturninus declared that he was King of Rome! I wish you could have seen everybody's faces when Lucullus started itemizing the number of Gallic tribes which were sure to tack themselves on to Sertorius's comet tail when he followed you toward Rome!" "Lucullus?" asked Pompey, astonished. "Oh, he was your champion, Magnus!" "Why? I didn't think he was fond of me." "He probably isn't. But I think he was afraid someone might suggest sending him to replace you in Spain. He's a very good military man, but the last thing he wants is to be sent to Spain. Who in full possession of his wits would want Spain?" "Who indeed," said the Piglet, smiling. "So I now have six legions, and both of us can issue some pay," said Pompey. "How much did we get, Varro?" Enough to give the living and the dead their back pay, and to pay the living for a part of this year. But unfortunately not enough to keep on paying them. I'm sorry, Magnus. It was the best Rome could do." "I wish I knew where Sertorius kept his treasure! I'd make sure it was the next town I attacked, and I wouldn't rest until his moneybags were in my war chest," said Pompey. "I doubt Sertorius has any funds either, Magnus," said the Piglet, shaking his head. "Rubbish! He got three thousand talents of gold from King Mithridates not more than a year ago!" "Swallowed up already, is my guess. Don't forget that he has no provinces to bring in a regular income, and he hasn't the slaves to work the mines. Nor do the Spanish tribes have money." "Yes, I suppose you're right." A small and comfortable silence fell. Metellus Pius broke it suddenly, as if reaching a decision he had mulled over in his mind for some time. He drew a breath of sufficient dimension to make Pompey and Varro look at him. "Magnus, I have an idea," he said. "I'm listening." "We've just agreed Spain is impoverished, Spaniards and Romans alike. Even the Punic Gadetanians are suffering. Wealth is an unattainable dream to most men who live in Spain. Now I happen to have a tiny treasure which belongs to the Further province, and has sat in a trunk in the governor's residence at Castulo since Scipio Africanus put it there. I have no idea why none of our more avaricious governors took it, but they didn't take it. It amounts to one hundred talents of gold coins minted by Hannibal's brother in law, Hasdrubal." "That's why they didn't take it," said Varro, grinning. "How could any Roman get rid of Carthaginian gold coins without someone asking questions?" "You're right." "So, Pius, you have a hundred talents in Carthaginian gold coins," said Pompey. "What do you intend to do with them?" "I have a little more than that, actually. I also have twenty thousand iugera of prime river frontage land on the Baetis which a Servilius Caepio took off some local nobleman in payment for tax arrears. It too has been sitting there in Rome's name for decades, bringing in a little in lease money." Pompey saw the point, "You're going to offer the gold and the land as a reward to anyone who turns Quintus Sertorius in." "Absolutely correct." "That's a brilliant idea, Pius! Whether we like it or not, it seems to me that we'll never manage to crush Sertorius on a battlefield. He's just too clever. He also has enormous reserves of men to draw on, and they don't mind whether he pays them or not. All they want is to see the end of Rome. But there are a few greedy men around any army camp or national capital. If you offer a reward you bring the war right inside Sertorius's palace walls. And you make it a war of nerves. Do it, Pius! Do it!" Pius did it. The proclamations went out within a market interval from one end of Spain to the other: a hundred talents of gold coins and twenty thousand iugera of prime river frontage land on the Baetis to the lucky man who laid information directly leading to the death or capture of Quintus Sertorius. That it smote Sertorius hard was made apparent to Metellus Pius and Pompey very soon, for they heard that when Sertorius learned of the reward he immediately dismissed his bodyguard of Roman troops and replaced it with a detachment of his loyalest Oscan Spaniards, then removed himself from the company of his Roman and Italian adherents. Actions which wounded the Romans and Italians to the quick. How dared Quintus Sertorius assume it would be a Roman or an Italian to betray him! Chief among the offended Romans and Italians was Marcus Perperna Veiento.
Amid this war of nerves the actual war ground on inexorably. Working now as a team, Pompey and Metellus Pius reduced some of Sertorius's towns, though Calagurris had not fallen; Sertorius and Perperna had turned up with thirty thousand men and sat back to pick off the Roman besiegers in much the same way as Sertorius had dealt with Pompey before Pallantia. In the end lack of supplies forced Pompey and Metellus Pius to pull out of the investment of Calagurris, not Sertorius's harassment; their twelve legions just could not be fed. Supplies were a perpetual problem, thanks to the previous year's poor harvest. And as spring turned into summer, and summer blazed on toward the coming harvest, a freakish disaster played havoc with the war of attrition Pompey and Metellus Pius were intent upon waging. The whole of the western end of the Middle Sea underwent a frightful shortage of food when scanty rains in winter and late spring were succeeded, just as the crops struggled to mature, by a deluge which stretched from Africa to the Alps, from Oceanus Atlanticus to Macedonia and Greece. The harvest did not exist: not in Africa, in Sicily, in Sardinia, in Corsica, in Italy, in Italian Gaul, in Gaul across the Alps, or in Nearer Spain. Only in Further Spain did some crops survive, though not with the usual abundance. "The only comfort," said Pompey to the Piglet at the end of Sextilis, "is that Sertorius will run short of food too." "His granaries are full from earlier years," said the Piglet gloomily. "He'll survive far more easily than we will." "I can go back to the upper Durius," said Pompey doubtfully, "but I don't think the area can feed six full legions." Metellus Pius made up his mind. Then I am going back to my province, Magnus. Nor do I think you will need me next spring. What has still to be done in Nearer Spain, you can do for yourself. There won't be food for my men in Nearer Spain, but if you can get inside some of Sertorius's bigger strongholds you'll manage to provision your own men. I can take two of your legions to Further Spain with me and winter them there. If you want them back in the spring I'll send them to you but if you think you won't be able to feed them, I'll keep them. It will be difficult, but the Further province is not as badly hit as every other place west of Cyrenaica. Rest assured, whoever stays with me will be well fed." Pompey accepted the offer, and Metellus Pius marched with eight legions for his own province far earlier in the year than he had planned or wanted to. The four legions Pompey kept were sent at once to Septimanca and Termes, while Pompey, lingering with Varro and the cavalry on the lower Iberus (thanks to the deluge grazing for horses was no longer a problem, so Pompey was sending his troopers to Emporiae to winter under the command of Varro), sat down to write to the Senate in Rome for the second time. And even though he now had Varro, he kept the prose his own.
To the Senate and People of Rome: I am aware that the general shortage of grain must be affecting Rome and Italy as badly as it is affecting me. I have sent two of my legions to the Further province with my colleague Pius, who is in better case than Nearer Spain. This letter is not to ask for food. I will manage to keep my men alive somehow, just as I will manage to wear Quintus Sertorius down. This letter is to ask for money. I still owe my men about one year of pay, and am tired of never catching up for the future. Now although I am at the western end of the earth, I do hear what is going on elsewhere. I know that Mithridates invaded Bithynia in early summer, following on the death of King Nicomedes. I know that the tribes to the north of Macedonia are boiling from one end of the Via Egnatia to the other. I know that the pirates are making it impossible for Roman fleets to bring grain from eastern Macedonia and Asia Province back to Italy to help overcome the present food crisis. I know that the consuls of this year, Lucius Lucullus and Marcus Cotta, have been compelled to go out to fight Mithridates during their consulship. I know that Rome is pressed for money. But I also know that you offered the consul Lucullus seventy two millions of sesterces to pay for a fleet and that he declined your offer. So you do have at least seventy two millions of sesterces under a flagstone in the Treasury floor, don't you? That's what really annoys me. That you value Mithridates higher than you do Sertorius. Well, I don't. One is an eastern potentate whose only real strength is in numbers. The other is a Roman. His strength is in that. And I know which man I'd rather be fighting. In fact, I wish you'd offered the job of putting Mithridates down to me. I might have jumped at it after this thankless business in Spain, an address no one remembers. I cannot continue in Spain without some of those seventy two millions of sesterces, so I suggest you lever up that flagstone in the Treasury floor and scoop a few bags of money out. The alternative is simple. I will discharge my soldiers here in Nearer Spain all the men of the four legions I still have with me and leave them to fend for themselves. It is a long way home. Without the structure of command and the comfort of knowing they are led, I believe few of them will elect to march home. The majority of them will do what I would myself in the same situation. They will go to Quintus Sertorius and offer to enlist in his armies because he will feed them and he will pay them regularly. It is up to you. Either send me money, or I will discharge my troops on the spot. By the way, I have not been paid for my Public Horse.