The First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

  He shed his military gear, put on his purple-bordered toga, and walked the rather rustic alleys of the town, poked through every nook and niche inside the citadel, wandered into the pastures and fields which encroached upon the outskirts in a manner more Spanish than Gallic. Indeed, Tolosa had little Gallic feel to it—no Druids, no typical Gallic dislike for an urban environment. The temples and temple precincts were laid out in the fashion of Spanish cities, a picturesque parkland of artificial lakes and rivulets, fed from and going back to the Garumna. Lovely!

  Having found nothing on his walks, Caepio put his army to looking for the gold, a treasure hunt in a gala atmosphere conducted by troops who were released from the anxiety of facing an enemy, and who smelled a share in fabulous booty.

  But the gold couldn’t be found. Oh, the temples yielded a few priceless artifacts, but only a few, and no bullion.

  And the citadel was a complete disappointment, as Caepio had already seen for himself; nothing but weapons and wooden gods, horn vessels and plates of fired clay. King Copillus had lived with extreme simplicity, nor were there secret storage vaults under the plain flags of his halls.

  Then Caepio had a bright idea, and set his soldiers to digging up the parks around the temples. In vain. Not one hole, even the deepest, revealed a sign of a gold brick. The gold diviners brandished their forked withies without finding one tiny signal to set the palms of their hands tingling or the withies bending like bows. From the temple precincts, the search spread into the fields and into the streets of the town, and still nothing. While the landscape came more and more to resemble the demented burrowing of a gigantic mole, Caepio walked and thought, thought and walked.

  The Garumna was alive with fish, including freshwater salmon and several varieties of carp, and since the river fed the temple lakes, they too teemed with fish. It was more comfortable for Caepio’s legionaries to catch fish in the lakes than in the river, wide and deep and swift flowing, so as he walked, he was surrounded by soldiers tying flies and making rods out of willow canes. Down to the biggest lake he walked, deep in thought. And as he stood there, he absently watched the play of light on the scales of lurking fish, glitters-and gleams flickering in and out of the weeds, coming and going, ever changing. Most of the flashes were silver, but now and then an exotic carp would slide into view, and he would catch a gleam of gold.

  The idea invaded his conscious mind slowly. And then it struck, it exploded inside his brain. He sent for his corps of engineers and told them to drain the lakes—not a difficult job, and one which certainly paid off. For the Gold of Tolosa lay at the bottom of these sacred pools, hidden by mud, weeds, the natural detritus of many decades.

  When the last bar was rinsed off and stacked, Caepio came to survey the hoard, and gaped; that he had not watched as the gold was retrieved was a quirk of his peculiar nature, for he wanted to be surprised. He was surprised! In fact, he was flabbergasted. There were roughly 50,000 bars of gold, each weighing about 15 pounds; 15,000 talents altogether. And there were 10,000 bars of silver, each weighing 20 pounds; 3,500 talents of silver altogether. Then the sappers found other silver in the lakes, for it turned out that the only use the Volcae Tectosages had made of their riches was to craft their millstones out of solid silver; once a month they hauled these silver millstones from the river and used them to grind a month’s supply of flour.

  “All right,” said Caepio briskly, “how many wagons can we spare to transport the treasure to Narbo?” He directed his question at Marcus Furius, his praefectus fabrum, the man who organized supply lines, baggage trains, equipment, accoutrements, fodder, and all the other necessities entailed in maintaining an army in the field.

  “Well, Quintus Servilius, there are a thousand wagons in the baggage train, about a third of which are empty at this stage. Say three hundred and fifty if I do a bit of shuffling around. Now if each wagon carries about thirty-five talents—which is a good but not excessive load—then we’ll need about three hundred and fifty wagons for the silver, and four hundred and fifty wagons for the gold,” said Marcus Furius, who was not a member of the ancient Famous Family Furius, but the great-grandson of a Furian slave, and now was a client of Caepio’s, as well as a banker.

  “Then I suggest that we ship the silver first, in three hundred and fifty wagons, unload it in Narbo, and bring the wagons back to Tolosa to transport the gold,” said Caepio. “In the meantime, I’ll have the troops unload an extra hundred wagons, so that we have sufficient to send the gold off in one convoy.”

  By the end of Quinctilis, the silver had made its way to the coast and been unloaded, and the empty wagons sent back to Tolosa for the gold; Caepio, as good as his word, had found the extra hundred wagons during the interval.

  While the gold was loaded, Caepio wandered around deliriously from one stack of rich bricks to another, unable to resist stroking one or two in passing. He chewed the side of his hand, thinking hard, and finally sighed. “You had better go with the gold, Marcus Furius,” he said then. “Someone very senior will have to stay with it in Narbo until every last brick is safely loaded on board the last ship.’’ He turned to his Greek freedman Bias. “The silver is already on its way to Rome, I trust?”

  “No, Quintus Servilius,” said Bias smoothly. “The transports which brought heavy goods across on the winter winds at the beginning of the year have dispersed. I could only locate a dozen good vessels, and I thought it wiser to save them for the gold. The silver is under heavy guard in a warehouse and is quite safe. The sooner we ship the gold to Rome, the better, I think. As more decent ships come in, I’ll hire them for the silver.”

  “Oh, we can probably send the silver to Rome by road,” Caepio said easily.

  “Even with the risk of a ship’s foundering, Quintus Servilius, I would rather trust to the sea for every single brick, gold and silver,” said Marcus Furius. “There are too many hazards by road from raiding alpine tribes.”

  “Yes, you’re quite right,” agreed Caepio, and sighed. “Oh, it’s almost too good to be true, isn’t it? We are sending more gold and silver to Rome than there is in every one of Rome’s treasuries!”

  “Indeed, Quintus Servilius,” said Marcus Furius, “it is remarkable.”

  *

  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 s
tretch 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 armor. 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.