1. First Man in Rome Read online

  The gold set out from Tolosa in its 450 wagons midway through Sextilis. It was escorted by a single cohort of legionaries, for the Roman road was a civilized one passing through civilized country that had not seen a hand lifted in anger in a very long time, and Caepio's agents had reported that King Copillus and his warriors were still within Burdigala, hoping to see Caepio venture down the same road Lucius Cassius had taken to his death. Once Carcasso was reached, the road was literally downhill all the way to the sea, and the pace of the wagon train increased. Everyone was pleased, no one worried; the cohort of soldiers began to fancy that they could smell the salt of the shore. By nightfall, they knew, they would be clattering into the streets of Narbo; their minds were on oysters, dug-mullets, and Narbonese girls. The raiding party, over a thousand strong, came whooping out of the south from the midst of a great forest bordering the road on either side, spilling in front of the first wagon and behind the last wagon some two miles further back, where the halves of the cohort were distributed. Within a very short space of time not a single Roman soldier was left alive, and the wagon drivers too lay in jumbled heaps of arms and legs. The moon was full, the night fine; during the hours when the wagon train had waited for darkness, no one had come along the Roman road from either direction, for provincial Roman roads were really for the movement of armies, and trade in this part of the Roman Province was scant between coast and interior, especially since the Germans had come to settle around Tolosa. As soon as the moon was well up, the mules were again harnessed to the wagons and some of the raiders climbed up to drive, while others walked alongside as guides. For when the forest ceased to march alongside the road, the wagon train turned off it onto a stretch of hard coastal ground suited only to the nibbling mouths of sheep. By dawn Ruscino and its river lay to the north; the wagon train resumed tenure of the Via Domitia and crossed the pass of the Pyrenees in broad daylight. South of the Pyrenees its route was circuitous and not within sight of any Roman road until the wagon train crossed the Sucro River to the west of the town of Saetabis; from there it headed straight across the Rush Plain, a desolate and barren stretch of country which dived between two of the greatest of the chains of Spanish mountains, yet was not used as a short cut because of its waterlessness. After which the trail petered out, and further progress of the Gold of Tolosa was never ascertained by Caepio's investigators.

  It was the misfortune of a dispatch rider carrying a message from Narbo to find the tumbled heaps of looted corpses alongside the road through the forest just to the east of Carcasso. And when the dispatch rider reported to Quintus Servilius Caepio in Tolosa, Quintus Servilius Caepio broke down and wept. He wept loudly for the fate of Marcus Furius, he wept loudly for the fate of that cohort of Roman soldiers, he wept loudly for wives and families left orphaned in Italy; but most of all he wept loudly for those glittering heaps of ruddy bricks, the loss of the Gold of Tolosa. It wasn't fair! What had happened to his luck? he cried. And wept loudly. Clad in a dark toga of mourning, his tunic dark and devoid of any stripe on its right shoulder, Caepio wept again when he called his army to an assembly, and told them the news they had already learned through the camp grapevine. "But at least we still have the silver," he said, wiping his eyes. "It alone will ensure a decent profit for every man at the end of the campaign." "I'm thankful for small mercies, myself," said one veteran ranker to his tentmate and messmate; they had both been pressed off their farms in Umbria, though each had already served in ten campaigns over a period of fifteen years. "You are?" asked his companion, somewhat slower in his thought processes, due to an old head wound from a Scordisci shield boss. "Too right I am! Have you ever known a general to share gold with us scum-of-the-earth soldiers? Somehow he always finds a reason why he's the only one gets it. Oh, and the Treasury gets some, that's how he manages to hang on to most of it, he buys the Treasury off. At least we're going to get a share of the silver, and there was enough silver to make a mountain of. What with all the fuss about the gold going missing, the consul don't have much choice except to be fair about dishing out the silver." ''I see what you mean,'' said his companion. ''Let' s catch a nice fat salmon for our supper, eh?" Indeed, the year was wearing down and Caepio's army had not had to do any fighting at all, save for that one unlucky cohort deputed to guard the Gold of Tolosa. Caepio wrote off to Rome with the whole story from the decamped Germans to the lost gold, asking for instructions. By October he had his answer, which was much as he had expected: he was to remain in the neighborhood of Narbo with his entire army, winter there, and wait for fresh orders in the spring. Which meant that his command had been extended for a year; he was still the governor of Roman Gaul. But it wasn't the same without the gold. Caepio fretted and moped, and often wept, and it was noted by his senior officers that he found it difficult to settle, kept on walking back and forth. Typical of Quintus Servilius Caepio, was the general feeling; no one really believed that the tears he shed were for Marcus Furius, or the dead soldiers. Caepio wept for his lost gold.

  2

  One of the main characteristics of a long campaign in a foreign land is the way the army and its chain of command settle into a life-style which regards the foreign land as at least a semipermanent home. Despite the constant movements, the campaigns, the forays, the expeditions, base camp takes on all the aspects of a town: most of the soldiers find women, many of the women produce babies, shops and taverns and traders multiply outside the heavily fortified walls, and mud-brick houses for the women and babies mushroom through a haphazard system of narrow streets. Such was the situation in the Roman base camp outside Utica, and to a lesser extent the same thing occurred in the base camp outside Cirta. Since Marius chose his centurions and military tribunes very carefully, the period of the winter rains which saw no fighting was used not only for drills and exercises, but for sorting out the troops into congenial octets expected to tent and mess together, and dealing with the thousand and one disciplinary problems which naturally occur among so many men cooped up together for long stretches of time. However, the arrival of the African spring warm, lush, fruitful, and dry always saw a great stirring within the camp, a little like the rolling shiver which starts at one end of a horse's skin and proceeds all the way to the other end. Kits were sorted out for the coming campaigns, wills made and lodged with the legion's clerks, mail shirts oiled and polished, swords sharpened, daggers honed, helmets padded with felt to withstand heat and chafing, sandals carefully inspected and missing hobnails attended to, tunics mended, imperfect or worn-out gear shown to the centurion and then turned in to the army stores for replacement. Winter saw the arrival of a Treasury quaestor from Rome bearing pay for the legions, and a spate of activity among the clerks as they compiled their accounts and paid the men. Because his soldiers were insolvent, Marius had instituted two compulsory funds into which some of every man's pay was channeled a fund for burial in respectable fashion for the legionary who died while away but not actually in battle (if he died in battle, the State paid for his burial), and a savings bank which would not release the legionary's money until he was discharged. The army of Africa knew great things were planned for it in the spring of the year of Caepio's consulship, though only the very highest levels of command knew what. Orders went out for light marching order, which meant there would be no miles-long baggage train of ox-drawn wagons, only mule-drawn wagons able to keep up with and camp within each night's camp. Each soldier was now obliged to carry his gear on his back, which he did very cleverly, slung from a stout Y-shaped rod he bore on his left shoulder shaving kit, spare tunics, socks, cold-weather breeches, and thick neckerchiefs to avoid chafing where the mail shirt rubbed against the neck, all rolled inside his blanket and encased in a hide cover; sagum his wet-weather circular cape in a leather bag; mess kit and cooking pot, water bag, a minimum of three days' rations; one precut, notched stake for the camp palisade, whichever entrenching tool he had been allocated, hide bucket, wicker basket, saw, and sickle; and cleaning compounds for the care of his arms and ar
mor. His shield, encased in a supple kidskin protective cover, he slung across his back beneath his gear, and his helmet, its long dyed horsehair plume removed and stowed away carefully, he either added to the clutter depending from his carrying pole, or slung high on his right chest, or wore on his head if he marched in expectation of attack. He always donned his mail shirt for the march, its twenty-pound weight removed from his shoulders because he kilted it tightly around his waist with his belt, thus distributing its load on his hips. On the right side of his belt he fixed his sword in its scabbard, on the left side his dagger in its scabbard, and he wore both on the road. His two spears he did not carry. Each eight men were issued with a mule, on which were piled their leather tent, its poles, and their spears, together with extra rations if no fresh issue was to be made every three days. Eighty legionaries and twenty noncombatants made up each century, officered by the centurion. Every century had one mule cart allocated to it, in which rode all the men's extra gear clothing, tools, spare weapons, wicker breastwork sections for the camp's fortifications, rations if no issues were to be made for very long periods, and more. If the whole army was on the move and didn't expect to double back on its tracks at the end of a campaign, then every single thing it owned from plunder to artillery was carried in oxcarts which plodded miles to the rear under heavy guard. When Marius set out for western Numidia in the spring, he left this heavy baggage behind in Utica, of course; it was nonetheless an imposing parade, seeming to stretch inimitably, for each legion and its mule carts and artillery took up a mile of road, and Marius led six legions west, plus his cavalry. The cavalry, however, he disposed on either side of the infantry, which kept the total length of his column to about six miles. In open country there was no possibility of ambush, an enemy could not string himself out enough to attack all parts of the column simultaneously without being seen, and any attack on a part of the column would immediately have resulted in the rest of the column's turning in on the attackers and surrounding them, the act of wheeling bringing them into battle rank and file automatically. And yet, every night the order was the same make a camp. Which meant measuring and marking an area large enough to hold every man and animal in the army, digging deep ditches, fixing the sharpened stakes called stimuli in their bottoms, raising earthworks and palisades; but at the end of it, every man save the sentries could sleep like the dead, secure in the knowledge that no enemy could get inside quickly enough to take the camp by surprise. It was the men of this army, the first composed entirely of the Head Count, who christened themselves "Marius's mules" because Marius had loaded them like mules. In an old-style army composed of propertied men, even ranker soldiers had marched with their effects loaded onto a mule, a donkey, or a slave; those who could not afford the outlay hired carrying space from those who could. In consequence, there was little control over the number of wagons and carts, as many were privately owned. And in consequence, the old-style army marched more slowly and less efficiently than did Marius's African Head Count army and the many similar armies which were to follow in its wake for the next six hundred years. Marius had given the Head Count useful work and a wage for doing it. But he did them few favors otherwise, save to lop the curved top and curved bottom off the old five-foot-tall infantryman's shield, for a man couldn't have carried that on his back beneath his loaded pole; at its new reduced height of three feet, it didn't collide with his burdens, or clip the backs of his ankles as he strode along.

  And so they marched into western Numidia six miles long, singing their marching songs at the tops of their voices to keep their pace even and feel the comfort of military camaraderie, moving together, singing together, a single mighty human machine rolling irresistibly along. Midway down the column marched the general Marius with all his staff and the mule carts carrying their gear, singing with the rest; none of the high command rode, for it was uncomfortable as well as conspicuous, though they did have horses close by in case of attack, when the general would need the additional height of horseback to see to his dispositions and send out his staff with orders. "We sack every town and village and hamlet we encounter," Marius said to Sulla. And this program was faithfully carried out, with some additions: granaries and smokehouses were pillaged to augment the food supply, local women were raped because the soldiers were missing their own women, and homosexuality was punishable by death. Most of all, everyone kept his eyes peeled for booty, which was not allowed to be taken as private property, but was contributed to the army's haul. Every eighth day the army rested, and whenever it reached a point where the coastline intersected the march route, Marius gave everyone three days of rest to swim, fish, eat well. By the end of May they were west of Cirta, and by the end of Quinctilis they had reached the river Muluchath, six hundred miles further west again.

  It had been an easy campaign; Jugurtha's army never appeared, the settlements were incapable of resisting the Roman advance, and at no time had they run short of either food or water. The inevitable regimen of hardtack bread, pulse porridge, salty bacon, and salty cheese had been varied by enough goat meat, fish, veal, mutton, fruit, and vegetables to keep everyone in good spirits, and the sour wine with which the army was occasionally issued had been augmented with Berber barley beer and some good wine. The river Muluchath formed the border between western Numidia and eastern Mauretania; a roaring torrent in late winter, by midsummer the big stream had dwindled to a string of water holes, and by the late autumn it dried up completely. In the midst of its plain not far from the sea there reared a precipitous volcanic outcrop a thousand feet high, and on top of it Jugurtha had built a fortress. In it, so Marius's spies had informed him, there was a great treasure stored, for it functioned as Jugurtha's western headquarters. The Roman army came down to the plain, marched to the high banks the river had cut itself when in full spate, and built a permanent camp as close to the mountain fortress as possible. Then Marius, Sulla, Sertorius, Aulus Manlius, and the rest of the high command took time to study the impregnable-looking citadel. "We can forget the idea of a frontal assault," Marius said, "and I, for one, can't see any way to besiege it." "That's because there isn't a way to besiege it," said young Sertorius positively; he had made several thorough inspections of the peak from all sides. Sulla lifted his head so that he could see the top of the peak from under the brim of his hat. "I think we're going to sit here at the bottom without ever getting to the top," he said, and grinned. "Even if we built a gigantic wooden horse, we'd never get it up the track to the gates." "Any more than we'd get a siege tower up there," said Aulus Manlius. "Well, we've got about a month before we have to turn east again," said Marius finally. "I suggest we spend that month camped here. We'll make life as palatable for the men as possible Lucius Cornelius, make up your mind where you want to take our drinking water from, then allocate the deeper river pools downstream of that for swimming holes. Aulus Manlius, you can organize fishing parties to go all the way to the sea it's about ten miles, so the scouts say. You and I will ride down to the coast ourselves tomorrow to spy out the land. They're not going to run the risk of coming out of that citadel to attack us, so we may as well let the men enjoy themselves. Quintus Sertorius, you can forage for fruit and vegetables." "You know," said Sulla later on, when he and Marius were alone in the command tent, "this whole campaign has been a holiday. When am I going to be blooded?" "You should have been at Capsa, only the place surrendered," said Marius, and gave his quaestor a searching glance. "Are you becoming bored, Lucius Cornelius?" "Actually, no," said Sulla, frowning. "I wouldn't have believed how interesting this kind of life is -there's always something interesting to do, interesting problems to wrestle. I don't even mind the bookkeeping! It's just that I need to be blooded. Look at you. By the time you were my age, you'd been in half a hundred battles. Whereas look at me a tyro." "You'll be blooded, Lucius Cornelius, and hopefully soon." "Oh?" "Certainly. Why do you think we're here, so far from anywhere important?" "No, don't tell me, let me work it out!" said Sulla quickly. "You're here because .. . because
you're hoping to give King Bocchus a big enough fright to ally himself with Jugurtha... because if Bocchus does ally himself with Jugurtha, Jugurtha will feel strong enough to attack." "Very good!" said Marius, smiling. "This land is so vast we could spend the next ten years marching up and down it, and never so much as smell Jugurtha on the wind. If he didn't have the Gaetuli, smashing the settled areas would smash his ability to resist, but he does have the Gaetuli. However, he's too proud to like the idea of a Roman army on the loose among his towns and villages, and there's no doubt he must be feeling the pinch of our raids, particularly in his grain supply. Yet he's too crafty to risk a pitched battle while I'm in command. Unless we can push Bocchus to his aid. The Moors can field at least twenty thousand good troops, and five thousand excellent cavalry. So if Bocchus does join him, Jugurtha will move against us, nothing surer.'' "Don't you worry that with Bocchus, he'll outnumber us?" "No! Six Roman legions properly trained and properly led can contend with any enemy force, no matter how large." "But Jugurtha learned his warfare with Scipio Aemilianus at Numantia," said Sulla. "He'll fight the Roman way." "There are other foreign kings who fight the Roman way," said Marius, "but their troops aren't Roman. Our methods were evolved to suit the minds and temperaments of our people, and I make no distinction in this regard between Roman and Latin and Italian." "Discipline," said Sulla. "And organization," said Marius. "Neither of which is going to get us to the top of that mountain out there," said Sulla. Marius laughed. "True! But there's always one intangible, Lucius Cornelius." "What's that?" "Luck," said Marius. "Never forget luck." They had become good friends, Sulla and Marius, for though there were differences between them, there were also basic similarities: neither man was an orthodox thinker, both men were unusual, adversity had honed each of them finely, and each was capable of great detachment as well as great passion. Most important similarity of all, both men liked to get on with the job, and liked to excel at it. The aspects of their natures which might have driven them apart were dormant during those early years, when the younger man could not hope to rival the older in any way, and the younger man's streak of cold-bloodedness did not need to be exercised, any more than did the older man's streak of iconoclasm. "There are those who maintain," said Sulla, stretching his arms above his head, "that a man makes his own luck." Marius opened his eyes wide, an action which sent his eyebrows flying upward. "But of course! Still, isn't it nice to know one has it?"