Caesar's Women Read online

  The nine commissioners sent from Rome before his power there waned were scattered all over Pontus and Cappadocia, including the man Lucullus loved best in all the world now that Sulla was dead—his younger brother, Varro Lucullus. But commissioners owned no troops, and it seemed from the tone of the letters Publius Clodius carried that they would not last long in the job. Therefore, decided Lucullus, he had no choice other than to leave two of his four legions behind in Pontus to garrison it in case Mithridates tried to win back his kingdom unassisted by Tigranes. The legate he esteemed most was repairing the ravages wreaked upon the isle of Delos, and while he knew Sornatius was a good man, Lucullus wasn't sure enough of his military capabilities to leave him without someone else at his side. The other senior legate, Marcus Fabius Hadrianus, would have to stay in Pontus too.

  Having made up his mind that two of his four legions must remain in Pontus, Lucullus also knew which two legions they would have to be—not a welcome prospect. The legions belonging to the province of Cilicia would stay in Pontus. Leaving him to march south with the two legions of Fimbriani. Wonderful troops! He absolutely loathed them. They had been in the East for sixteen years now, and were sentenced never to return to Rome or Italy because their record of mutiny and murder was such that the Senate refused to allow them to go home. Perpetually on the boil, they were dangerous men, but Lucullus, who had used them off and on for many years, dealt with them by flogging them pitilessly during campaigns and indulging their every sensual whim during winter rests. Thus they soldiered for him willingly enough, even grudgingly admired him. Yet they preferred still to nominate themselves as the troops of their first commander, Fimbria, hence the Fimbriani. Lucullus was happy to have it so. Did he want them known as the Liciniani or the Luculliani? Definitely not.

  Clodius had fallen so in love with Amisus that he decided he would elect to remain behind in Pontus with the legates Sornatius and Fabius Hadrianus; campaigning had lost its lure for Clodius the moment he heard Lucullus planned a thousand-mile march.

  But it was not to be. His orders were to accompany Lucullus in his personal train. Oh well, thought Clodius, at least he would live in relative luxury! Then he discovered Lucullus's idea of campaigning comfort. Namely, that there was none. The sybaritic Epicurean Clodius had known in Rome and Amisus had utterly vanished; Lucullus on the march at the head of the Fimbriani was no better off than any ranker soldier, and if he was no better off, nor was any member of his personal staff. They walked, they didn't ride—the Fimbriani walked, they didn't ride. They ate porridge and hard bread—the Fimbriani ate porridge and hard bread. They slept on the ground with a sagum for cover and earth heaped into a pillow—the Fimbriani slept on the ground with a sagum for cover and earth heaped into a pillow. They bathed in icicle-fringed streams or else chose to stink—the Fimbriani bathed in icicle-fringed streams or else chose to stink. What was good enough for the Fimbriani was good enough for Lucullus.

  But not good enough for Publius Clodius, who not many days out from Amisus took advantage of his relationship with Lucullus and complained bitterly.

  The General's pale-grey eyes looked him up and down without expression, as cold as the thawing landscape the army traversed. "If you want comfort, Clodius, go home," he said.

  "I don't want to go home, I just want comfort!" said Clodius.

  "One or the other. With me, never both," said his brother-in-law, and turned his back contemptuously.

  That was the last conversation Clodius had with him. Nor did the dour little band of junior legates and military tribunes who surrounded the General encourage the kind of companionship Clodius now learned he could hardly do without. Friendship, wine, dice, women, and mischief; they were the things Clodius craved as the days turned into what seemed like years and the countryside continued as bleak and inhospitable as Lucullus.

  They paused briefly in Eusebeia Mazaca, where Ariobarzanes Philoromaios, the King, donated what he could to the baggage train and wished Lucullus a doleful well. Then it was on into a landscape convulsed by chasms and gorges of every color at the warm end of the rainbow, a tumbled mass of tufa towers and boulders perched precariously on fragile stone necks. Skirting these gorges more than doubled the length of the march, but Lucullus plodded on, insisting that his army cover a minimum of thirty miles a day. That meant they marched from sunup to sundown, pitched camp in semidarkness and pulled camp in semidarkness. And every night a proper camp, dug and fortified against—whom? WHOM? Clodius wanted to shout to the pallid sky floating higher above them than any sky had a right to do. Followed by a WHY? roaring louder than the thunder of endless spring storms.

  They came down at last to the Euphrates at Tomisa crossing to find its eerie milky-blue waters a seething mass of melted snows. Clodius heaved a sigh of relief. No choice now! The General would have to rest while he waited for the river to go down. But did he? No. The moment the army halted, the Euphrates began to calm and slow, turn itself into a tractable, navigable waterway. Lucullus and the Fimbriani boated it into Sophene, and the moment the last man was across, back it went to foaming torrent.

  "My luck," said Lucullus, pleased. "It is an omen."

  The route now passed through slightly kinder country, in that the mountains were somewhat lower, good grass and wild asparagus covered the slopes, and trees grew in small groves where pockets of moisture gave their roots succor. But what did that mean to Lucullus? An order that in easy terrain like this and with asparagus to chomp on, the army could move faster! Clodius had always considered himself as fit and agile as any other Roman, used to walking everywhere. Yet here was Lucullus, almost fifty years of age, walking the twenty-two-year-old Publius Clodius into the ground.

  They crossed the Tigris, a minor matter after the Euphrates, for it was neither as broad nor as swift. And then, having marched over a thousand miles in two months, the army of Lucullus came in sight of Tigranocerta.

  It had not existed thirty years ago. King Tigranes had built it to cater to his dreams of glory and a far vaster realm: a splendid city of stone with high walls, citadels, towers, squares and courts, hanging gardens, exquisite glazed tiles of aquamarine and acid-yellow and brazen red, immense statues of winged bulls, lions, curly-bearded kings under tall tiaras. The site had been chosen with a view to everything from ease of defense to internal sources of water and a nearby tributary of the Tigris which carried away the contents of the vast sewers Tigranes had constructed in the manner of Pergamum. Whole nations had fallen to fund its construction; wealth proclaimed itself even in the far distance as the Fimbriani came over a ridge and saw it, Tigranocerta. Vast, high, beautiful. Because he craved a Hellenized realm, the King of Kings had started out to build in the Greek fashion, but all those years of Parthian-influenced childhood and young manhood were too strong; when Doric and Ionic perfection palled, he added the gaudy glazed tiles, the winged bulls, the monolithic sovereigns. Then, still dissatisfied with all those low Greek buildings, he added the hanging gardens, the square stone towers, the pylons and the power of his Parthian upbringing.

  Not in twenty-five years had anyone dared to bring King Tigranes bad news; no one wanted his head or his hands chopped off, which was the King's reaction to the bearer of bad news. Someone, however, had to inform him that a Roman army was approaching rapidly out of the mountains to the west. Understandably, the military establishment (run by a son of Tigranes named Prince Mithrabarzanes) elected to send a very junior officer with this shockingly bad news. The King of Kings flew into a panic—but not before he had the messenger hanged. Then he fled, so hastily that he left Queen Cleopatra behind together with his other wives, his concubines, his children, his treasures, and a garrison under Mithrabarzanes. Out went the summonses from the shores of the Hyrcanian Sea to the shores of the Middle Sea, anywhere and everywhere Tigranes ruled: send him troops, send him cataphracts, send him desert Bedouins if no other soldiers could be found! For it had never occurred to Tigranes that Rome, so beleaguered, might invade Armenia to knock on the ga
tes of his brand-new capital city.

  While his father skulked in the mountains between Tigranocerta and Lake Thospitis, Mithrabarzanes led the available troops to meet the Roman invaders, assisted by some nearby tribes of Bedouins. Lucullus trounced them and sat down before Tigranocerta to besiege it, though his army was far too small to span the length of its walls; he concentrated upon the gates and vigilant patrols. As he was also extremely efficient, very little traffic passed from inside to outside of the city walls, and none the other way. Not, he was sure, that Tigranocerta could not withstand a long siege; what he was counting on was the unwillingness of Tigranocerta to withstand a long siege. The first step was to defeat the King of Kings on a battlefield. That would lead to the second step, the surrender of Tigranocerta, a place filled with people who had no love for— though great terror of—Tigranes. He had populated this new capital city far from northern Armenia and the old capital of Artaxata with Greeks imported against their will from Syria, Cappadocia, eastern Cilicia; it was a vital part of the program of Hellenization that Tigranes was determined to inflict upon his racially Median peoples. To be Greek in culture and language was to be civilized. To be Median in culture and illiterate in Greek was inferior, primitive. His answer was to kidnap Greeks.

  Though the two great kings were reconciled, Mithridates was too cagey to be with Tigranes—instead, he lay with an army of a mere ten thousand men to the north and west of where Tigranes had fled; his opinion of Tigranes as a military man was not high. With him was his best general, his cousin Taxiles, and when they heard that Lucullus was besieging Tigranocerta and that Tigranes was gathering an immense force to relieve it, Mithridates sent his cousin Taxiles to see the King of Kings.

  "Do not attack the Romans!" was the Mithridatic message.

  Tigranes was inclined to heed this advice, even after he had assembled one hundred and twenty thousand infantry from places as far apart as Syria and the Caucasus, and twenty-five thousand of the awesome cavalry known as cataphracts, horses and riders clad from head to foot in chain mail. He lay some fifty miles from his capital in a cozy valley, but he needed to move. Most of his supplies were in Tigranocertan granaries and storehouses, so he knew he must establish fortified contact with the city if his vast forces were to eat. And that, he reasoned, should not be too difficult if indeed, as his spies had reported to him, the Roman army did not have the strength to embrace the entire perimeter of so great a place as Tigranocerta.

  He had not, however, believed the reports which said the Roman army was minute. Until he himself rode to the top of a high hill behind his capital and actually saw for himself what gnat was impudent enough to sting him.

  "Too large to be an embassage, but too small to be an army" was how he put it, and issued orders to attack.

  But vast eastern armies were not entities a Marius or a Sulla would have desired for one moment, even had those two Roman generals ever had such military largesse offered to them. Forces must be small, flexible, maneuverable—easily supplied, easily controlled, easily deployed. Lucullus had two legions of superb if disreputable soldiers who knew his tactics as well as he did, plus a very neat contingent of twenty-seven hundred horsemen from Galatia who had been with him for years.

  The siege had not been without Roman losses, chiefly because of a mysterious Zoroastrian fire King Tigranes possessed. It was called naphtha by the Greeks, and it came from a Persian fastness somewhere on the southwest of the Hyrcanian Sea. Small light lumps of it lobbed onto the siege towers and shelter sheds roared through the air ablaze and splattered as they landed, flaring up so hot and so incandescent that nothing could extinguish them or the fires which spread from them. They burned and maimed— but worse than that, they terrified. No one had ever experienced anything like them before.

  Thus when Tigranes moved his mighty force to attack the gnat, he failed to understand what a difference mood could make to the gnat. Every Roman in that tiny army was fed up—fed up with a monotonous diet, Zoroastrian fire, no women, cataphracts lumbering on their huge Nesaean horses to badger foraging parties, Armenia in general and Tigranocerta in particular. From Lucullus to the Fimbriani to the Galatian cavalry, all of them hungered for a battle. And cheered themselves hoarse when the scouts reported that King Tigranes was in the offing at last.

  Promising Mars Invictus a special sacrifice, Lucullus girded his loins for the fray at dawn on the sixth day of Roman October. Siege lines abandoned, the General occupied a hill which intervened between the advancing Armenian giant and the city, and made his dispositions. Though he couldn't know that Mithridates had sent Taxiles to warn the King of Kings not to engage the Romans, Lucullus did know exactly how to tempt Tigranes into an engagement: huddle his little force together and appear to be terrified by the size of the Armenian giant. Since all the eastern kings were convinced an army's strength was in numbers, Tigranes would attack.

  Tigranes did attack. What developed was a debacle. No one on the Armenian side, including Taxiles, seemed to comprehend the value of high ground. Nor, so much was clear to Lucullus as the seething host flowed up his hill, had anyone in the Armenian chain of command thought to develop tactics or a strategy. The monster was unleashed; no more was necessary.

  Taking his time, Lucullus dealt out frightful punishment from the top of his hill, worried only that the mountains of dead would end in hemming him in, foil a complete victory. But when he put his Galatian cavalry to clearing lines through the Armenian fallen, the Fimbriani spread outward and downward like scythes through a field of wheat. The Armenian front disintegrated, pushing thousands of Syrian and Caucasian foot soldiers into the ranks of the mailed cataphracts until horses and riders fell, or they themselves were crushed. More of the Armenian host died that way than the berserk Fimbriani had the numbers to kill.

  Said Lucullus in his report to the Senate in Rome: "Over one hundred thousand Armenian dead, and five Roman dead."

  King Tigranes fled a second time, so certain he would be captured that he gave his tiara and diadem to one of his sons to keep, exhorting the princeling to gallop faster because he was younger and lighter. But the youth entrusted tiara and diadem to an obscure-looking slave, with the result that the Armenian symbols of sovereignty came into the possession of Lucullus two days later.

  The Greeks forced to live in Tigranocerta opened the gates of the city, so overjoyed that they carried Lucullus shoulder-high. Privation was a thing of the past; the Fimbriani dived with equal glee into soft arms and soft beds, ate and drank, wenched and pillaged. The booty was staggering. Eight thousand talents of gold and silver, thirty million medimni of wheat, untold treasures and art works.

  And the General became human! Fascinated, Publius Clodius saw the Lucullus he had known in Rome emerge out of the hard-bitten, coldly ruthless man of months past. Manuscripts were piled up for his delectation alongside exquisite children he retained for his own pleasure, never happier than when he could sexually initiate girls just flowering into puberty. Median girls, not Greek! The spoils were divided at a ceremony in the marketplace with Lucullan fairness: each of the fifteen thousand men received at least thirty thousand sesterces in money, though of course it would not be paid over until the loot had been converted into cold, hard Roman cash. The wheat fetched twelve thousand talents; canny Lucullus sold the bulk of it to King Phraates of the Parthians.

  Publius Clodius was not about to forgive Lucullus for those months of footslogging and living hard, even when his own share of the booty came in at a hundred thousand sesterces. Somewhere between Eusebeia Mazaca and the crossing at Tomisa he added his brother-in-law's name to the list he kept of those who would pay for offending him. Catilina. Cicero the small fish. Fabia. And now Lucullus. Having seen the gold and silver piled in the vaults—indeed, having assisted in counting it—Clodius concentrated at first upon working out how Lucullus had managed to cheat everyone when the spoils were divided. A mere thirty thousand for each legionary, each cavalryman? Ridiculous! Until his abacus told him that eight t
housand talents divided by fifteen thousand men yielded only thirteen thousand sesterces each—so where had the other seventeen thousand come from? Sale of the wheat, said the General laconically when Clodius applied to him for elucidation.

  This wasted exercise in arithmetic did give Clodius an idea, however. If he had assumed Lucullus was cheating his men, what would they think if someone sowed a seed or two of discontent?

  Until Tigranocerta had been occupied, Clodius had been given no chance to cultivate the acquaintance of anyone outside the small and untalkative group of legates and tribunes around the General. Lucullus was a stickler for protocol, disapproved of fraternization between ranker soldiers and his staff. But now, with winter setting in and this new Lucullus prepared to give all who served him the time of their lives, supervision ceased. Oh, there were jobs to do: Lucullus ordered every actor and dancer rounded up, for example, and forced them to perform for his army. A circus holiday far from home for men who would never see home again. Entertainments were plentiful. So was wine.

  The leader of the Fimbriani was a primus pilus centurion who headed the senior of the two Fimbriani legions. His name was Marcus Silius, and like the rest he had marched, an ordinary legionary not yet old enough to shave, east across Macedonia with Flaccus and Fimbria seventeen years before. When Fimbria won the struggle for supremacy, Marcus Silius had applauded the murder of Flaccus at Byzantium. He had crossed into Asia, fought against King Mithridates, been handed over to Sulla when Fimbria fell from power and suicided, and fought for Sulla, for Murena, and then for Lucullus. With the others he had gone to besiege Mitylene, by which time his rank was pilus prior, very high in the tortuous gradations of centurions. Year had succeeded year; fight had succeeded fight. They had all been mere striplings when they left Italy, for Italy by then was exhausted of seasoned troops; now in Tigranocerta they had been under the eagles for half of the years they had lived, and petition after petition for an honorable discharge had been denied them. Marcus Silius, their leader, was a bitter man of thirty-four who just wanted to go home.