by Ken Parejko
In order to know exactly when we'd be arriving Fredericus, who owned the villa and its sprawling lands, had set up a line of couriers along the road to keep him updated of our progress. A half-hour earlier, just as we were sloshing across the Erfte, he'd had his cuirass and mail taken down from the wall and began stuffing the sagging girth of his body into the armor, a battle he won just in time to stand in the doorway in all his martial glory, sword in hand, battle-scarred and grey-bearded. He introduced himself as Quintus Fredericus, the Romanized version of his Ubi name, Fetrolangus.
Fredericus was born a chieftain of the Ubi tribe. Unable to resist the pomp and circumstance, flash and flare of Roman armor, he joined the Roman auxiliary when Tiberius passed through. Over the years his courage and loyalty were rewarded by taking part in two triumphs in the capitol, one in the presence of Tiberius and another under Caligula.
After thirty years’ service he'd retired. His land grant stretched a half-mile along the Rhine and reached far back from the river. He mimicked, as best as he could here on the frontier, the life of a wealthy Roman landlord. To keep in touch with traffic passing up and down the river he had his house, the largest for many miles, built directly on the road. He developed a reputation for warm hospitality. His villa became a regular inn for couriers and officers traveling up and downriver. Fredericus knew that here on the frontier as much as in Rome itself the ladder to success was built of rungs made of personal connections, one by one.
“Gaius Plinius!” Fredericus’ hand was warm and welcoming. “Good to see you again. How have you gotten by at Vetera?”
“Well I...”
Fredericus smiled. “Yes, yes, it’s quite the dump, isn’t it?” He turned to the other officers standing around. “I’ve got tents put up for your men. There are rooms enough in the house for all the officers. There’ll be a feast out back in an hour or two. Meanwhile my baths are at your disposal.”
A servant showed me to my room on the villa’s second floor. It was small and furnished with two simple beds, a table and a chair, and hooks to hang our clothes on. I opened the shuttered windows to look out over the road and beyond it the Rhine. It was a lovely summer evening. A few fishermen were patiently seining the shallows of the river while farther out in the current a barge heavy with timber and riding low in the water floated slowly downstream. Directly below my men milled about, awaiting their orders. I caught Lucius' attention and motioned him upstairs.
While I waited I passed the time watching the travelers on the road. As night came on, stragglers hurried to get upriver. A cart, piled high with apples and pulled by two big mules, creaked slowly past. I was pleased to recognize the apples, one of the many varieties I’d been telling Lucius about—knowing something about them, even their name, made them more than just raw images in my eyes. I’d once heard that a cart full of apples was heavier than a cart full of stones. As the mules strained to pull they seemed to be nodding in agreement. “Yes, heavy...Yes, heavy,” they seemed to be saying.
Two of my men pulled the apple-cart to, found coins in their purses and bought big handfuls of the fruit, which they offered around. The cart began again its slow journey upriver. After a few moments a young man came into view from downriver, a big sturgeon thrown over his shoulder. As he walked he struggled with the heavy fish, whose tail dragged on the ground and left an undulating track on the road.
An old lady, bent over and hobbling, drove a gaggle of geese before her, each goose leashed to a short rope. The geese, the apples, the fish and most of the traffic were headed upriver to the morning market at Ubiorum, where prices would be inflated by the big hungry crowds. A boy, perhaps ten years’ old, came into view, riding in a tiny cart pulled by two sheep. I smiled. I’d enjoyed sheep-carts when I was a child. Four of the boy’s friends ran up from behind him, begging for their turn. But the driver swung his willow-branch whip and the sheep bolted off down the path, leaving the others to run after.
On the river the timber-barge I’d first seen had passed out of sight. Now I could see only a single river-boat drifting downstream, on it a sorry-looking cow complacently watching the scenery move quietly past. It was such a quiet and relaxing scene that while Lucius made several trips carrying up our gear, I found myself, arms resting on the windowsill, staring meditatively and somewhat cow-like into the gathering dusk.
When Lucius had finished bringing up the gear he asked somewhat testily when we would be eating.
“Not yet,” I said. “Soon. Meanwhile, let’s look around.” As we headed for the door, I reminded Lucius to bring along wax tablets and pen and papyrus. I’d wanted to explore the villa’s ground the last time we were here, but then there wasn’t time. I was curious what an ambitious Gaul like Fredericus could make of life on the frontier.
Fredericus was still in the atrium happily fussing over his company. We slipped past him out the back door, where we were greeted by four big growling dogs, fortunately roped to a tree. Perhaps what I'd heard was true, that the Gauls had interbred dogs and wolves. We followed a well-worn path away from the house into the quiet of the barnyard. In a sturdy lean-to a dozen of the big Belgian horses common in this part of Gaul were chomping their evening hay. They were well-groomed and fat animals, with carefully-trimmed hooves. A farmhand moved among them, grooming and patting them and talking to them in the Gallic tongue which horses seem to understand so well. He leaned beside a big stallion and with the tip of a knife probed a wound in the animal’s haunch. The animal winced, lifted its leg.
“We’ve a vet with us,” I said in my halting Gallic. The man looked up, as though he didn’t understand. “We’ve brought a vet,” I repeated. “I’ll tell him to have a look at that one, if you like.”
The man nodded, calmed the stallion.
“I’d put pitch on that wound,” I said to Lucius as we moved on to the next corral. “to keep the flies out, or he’ll have real trouble.”
A half-dozen mules grazed in the next corral. North Gaul was known for its big Belgian horses and hard-working mules, two of which, harnessed to a strange contraption, were just being brought in from the field. We watched them brought to and unhitched. I’d heard of a machine the Gauls had invented to harvest oats, but this was the first I’d actually seen. Lucius and I studied it until we understood how it worked, and I told Lucius to make a sketch of it.
The machine hung from a yoke attached to the front of the mules and rested on the ground on small wooden wheels. As it was pushed through the grain the wheels drove wooden gears which turned a shaft which in turn worked an iron sickle back and forth, cutting the grain. As the stalks of grain fell back onto the machine, a leather conveyor directed them off to the side, where they were deposited on the ground in a narrow windrow. I’d heard that two men and a team could cut more grain with this machine than a dozen Roman farmers with their scythes. I asked how many of these Fredericus had, and was told he had two, and on a good day they could cut more than ten acres. If it was true, it was astonishing.
The August light grew dim. Lucius pocketed his sketch. Off to one corner of a shed, leaning up against barrels used for storing wine was a plow with two small wheels attached. The Gauls were an inventive, ambitious people. After we’d lifted the plow and studied it we broke ourselves away down a path leading further back past several granaries already brim with the year’s harvest. I pointed out the big dried toads hanging above the doorways to the granaries, thought to protect the grain from mice and rats.
We walked through orchards heavily laden with apples and pears. Lucius reached up, picked two apples and handed me one. They were sweet and juicy, a variety I’d never had before, so of course I told Lucius to make note of them. In a little grove of cherry trees, picked a month earlier, we found a cluster of ceramic bee-hives whose inhabitants were busily bringing in the last of the day’s nectar. The soft, sweet smell which rose from them reminded me of home and the hives father kept back near the terminus of the estate.
Nearby was a big garden where well-ten
ded rows of cabbages and carrots, beans and lentils and other crops were ready for harvest. And there was of course a patch of garlic, ready to be dug, a plant my countrymen cook with, carry to ward off the evil eye and serpents and scorpions, and use to decorate Hecate wreathes against dangerous spirits at crossroads.
“I suppose,” I remarked to Lucius, “one could follow the ebb and flow of the empire’s boundaries by mapping where garlic is grown.”
Just beyond the garden we saw a small pond, on which a dozen lazy ducks, a few geese and two pairs of swans floated. The quiet, comforting quacking of the ducks and the graceful swans again brought back memories of home, where I would go down to the lake and watch the ducks and swans. We watched these for a while, envying Fredericus for his pleasant and self-sufficient surroundings, until Lucius suggested he was hungry and anyway it was getting dark and we ought to move on. So we hurried back past several sturdy barns, small paddocks and grain-fields all surrounded by well-maintained fences. We stopped for a moment in front of a big shed within which various farm-tools and implements were stored along with the villa's wine-press, used to press out grapes from the vines we’d seen planted up on the hills along the river.
As we came back to the house we found our men gathered around large tables piled with food and drink and lit by rows of smoking pitch-torches. Many of the men had developed a taste for the local fermented barley, a welcome break from the standard army-issued sour posca. The table was laden with foaming jugs of beer, bottles of the local wines, and fresh-pressed apple cider, around wide serving dishes stacked high with meat, vegetables from the garden, bread, cheeses and fruit.
I bit into a boiled egg I rescued from a big bowl of thick white sauce. The sauce, lightly spiced with cinnamon and asafoetida, a substitute for the silphium which was so hard to come by, was delicious. I was surprised that cinnamon had made its way from the orient all the way here to the wilds of Gaul, but shouldn’t have been. Day after day I ran into these reminders that the pax romana Drusus had scoffed at in my dream reached far indeed. In fact except for the local varieties of trees and flowers in the surrounding forest, the big jugs of beer, and the clouds of pesky biting bugs barely kept away by the smoke of the torches, we might be at a banquet in the suburbs of Rome.
And but for us, what would this veteran’s house be, and his farm? A tumbledown hut built of branches, covered with bark and deer-skins, offering little protection from the rain, full of biting insects, cold in the winter, scattered around it perhaps a few bony, starving cows with little to eat and pocked with mange and scurvy. The brightest of them knew this and like Fredericus helped themselves and our cause by giving over to civilization. It was hard to fathom how tribes like the rebellious Chatti would choose barbarism over the benefits we offered.
Our men were deep in the joys of the banquet, voraciously feeding their bottomless appetites. One of them brandished a roasted leg of venison and praised its tenderness, just as Julius, who I’d encountered along the way leading the small deer, approached. “By the way, have you seen Lydia lately?” he asked Julius.
Julius growled, then frowned. The crowd quieted down. Julius stared at them a moment, then turned and hurried back toward the tent he was sharing for the night. The men went back to chatting with each another, but in a moment Julius returned.
“All right,” he shouted, holding his sword high, “Who’s got her?"
“I do,” a burly lanceman announced. He raised the leg of meat he was working on. “She's a sweet young thing, she is. Her leg’s really soft, right here under the thigh.”
The men laughed.
“No, I've got her!” another said. “Here, have a rib,” one joked, offering it to Julius.
Julius waved his sword. “Which one of you bastards killed my deer?”
All were silent.
“Ask the cook. He should know,” someone shouted. Everyone laughed. Julius rushed them, swinging his sword this way and that. They jumped out of the way, upsetting one of the serving tables, spilling precious beer and wine. Three of them wrestled Julius to the ground and held him there, taunting him with pieces of venison they chewed in his face, now red, his eyes mad with hatred.
The time had come to put a stop to it. “Okay, let him go,” I said.
Reluctantly they stood and released him. Julius lay a few moments, growling and cursing, looking as though he might bawl like a child. Finally he stood up, brushed himself off, and slinked off to his room. Just before he was out of sight, a big Thracian yelled out.
“Hey, Julius!”
Julius stopped and turned around. From behind the Thracian’s back Lydia appeared, nonchalantly chewing a mouthful of grass, oblivious to the mayhem she’d caused. Julius stood unmoving a moment, glancing from Lydia to the crowd, then hurried to grab the deer’s leash and tug her off to safety. Everyone went back to eating. Someone commented, “Poor Julius. He didn't even eat.”
“Aw,” another added, refilling a cup of beer. “He doesn't have to eat. He's in love.”
That brought a laugh. I broke a piece off bread from a big, dark loaf. Lucius handed me a cup of wine. Though I’m not a fan of white wines, this one had a nice rich, fruity flavor. Everyone was in high spirits. Plenty of good food and drink, warm, dry quarters, and the prospect of spending the night with one of the farm-hand’s daughters – or wives -- was all anyone could possibly ask for.
Numerius Tullius, a big lanceman from the Tuscan hills, beat a spoon on a serving-dish. “Quiet!” He shouted. The men turned to hear. “I offer a toast, to those we left behind.” He raised his cup. “To the poor bastards back at Vetera!”
“The poor bastards at Vetera!” The shout rose into the Gallic night, racing towards the deep, dark sky with its friendly twinkling stars and the moon which had just come up over the river to smile familiarly down at us.
After dinner I sat at the little table in my room and wrote for hours. I rose once to pee, threading my way through noisy carousing men. My hand was stiff from the long hours of writing. I took a break to stare again out the window. Now all was calm and peaceful. A fat and happy harvest moon shown above the deep Hercynian forest, ignited the Rhine into a river of diamonds rolling down the night. The air was refreshingly cool. Rising across the river to the east I saw the star they call the Vintager, which back home marks the beginning of the grape harvest. I wondered if it signaled that here, too.
While I stood at the window breathing the fresh outside air a tired and slightly tipsy Lucius came in. “Quite a feast,” he remarked, closing the door behind him. “Quite a feast.”
I turned from the window. Lucius was sitting on the edge of the bed and rubbing his head, a habit which used to bother me. “Lucius, I’ve a question. What do you think of Drusus’ son, Germanicus? Was he a great man?”
Lucius, used to my ways, sighed. “Of course he was. He was a great general and a good man.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked, speaking now to the deep quiet outside the window.
“Why, his first thoughts were of Rome, then of his family, and lastly, of himself.”
“And why do you say that?”
“Everyone knows that,” Lucius said, his voice a bit testy. “We learn that, as children.”
“And that makes it true?” I’d been thinking about what it meant for something to be true and what criteria of truth to use in my History. There were so many different versions of events, it was hard to choose which was “true.” I’d read many of the standard histories -- Caesar's Gallic Wars, Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander, Naevius’ Punic Wars, and Polybius' Punic and Numantine Wars – to learn how others dealt with this issue. Of them Polybius impressed me most.
History, I was coming to realize, was not a series of isolated, separate events. That was as true of Caesar’s murder as it was of Varus’ defeat. The stories that ended up in history books were actually part of a much larger interwoven fabric. To understand one thread – the massacre in the Teutoberg forest, for example – you had to learn about the
event itself, but you also needed to know about the ebb and flow of Roman and German power, going back to Caesar and beyond, the relevant details of Augustus’ reign and why he’d appointed Varus in the first place, and fit it all together. Polybius had set the bar in that respect.
Tiny biting bugs were making their way into the room and if I didn’t close the window would keep us awake.
“It’s not as simple as that,” I offered Lucius, who’d lain back on his bed, eyes closed. I picked a quill-pen from my field pack and unrolled the papyrus I'd been writing on, opened a small glass ink-jar, dipped the quill, and started scribbling. “I mean, should we let the mob tell us what is true?” I asked, looking up. “It seems to me you can convince the mob of almost anything. They’re like a flock of gulls, when one of them finds something edible and the rest swarm around to get their part. It’s our nature to believe true what we want to be true. Julius Caesar made good use of that. We wanted to feel good about ourselves, so he told us that sixty thousand of his men killed three hundred thousand Helveti, and we believed it, and now it’s common knowledge. But that doesn't make it true.”
“And where do you propose to find this thing called truth?” Lucius asked, rolling over to face the wall.
As much as I’d thought on it, I didn’t have an answer. I wanted my History to be accurate, to represent what had actually happened. How could I manage that? “Well for one thing you’re likely to get closer to the truth if you visit where the events actually happened.”
“We tried that didn’t we, and almost got ourselves killed,” Lucius complained.
“And by talking to those who were there.” When I returned to the capitol, I 'd try to find veterans of Varus' legion. “Oh, and probably most important, by being impartial.”