Marching With Caesar-Rise of Augustus

by R. W. Peake

  “There’s been quite the change in the Tribune,” Crassus said idly, his eyes on the retreating man’s back.

  “Yes, there has,” I agreed. “And really, he’s not a bad sort, once he got that stick out of his ass.”

  I do not know who was more surprised at these words coming out of my mouth, and I felt Crassus’ eyes on me before he burst out laughing.

  “I hadn’t thought of it in those terms,” he said, still amused. “But I suppose that’s as good a way of putting it as any.”

  Returning our attention to the scene before us, we saw Claudius reach the Moesians, and I found myself clenching Ocelus’ reins, waiting for some kind of trick. When nothing untoward happened, I relaxed as the Tribune and the Moesians talked. My attention was drawn to one man in particular, a heavyset man with a dark beard that had startling streaks of white that were visible even from this distance. By his position a bit in front of the others, I deduced that this must be the leader of the Moesian army that, like ours, was standing on their hillside waiting. The conference between Claudius and the Moesians did not take long, Claudius returning at the trot.

  “They request a meeting with you to discuss a possible peaceful settlement,” Claudius told Crassus. The Legate lifted an eyebrow, exchanging a glance with me.

  “Well, well,” he said softly. “This is unexpected.”

  For a moment, I thought he was going to refuse the meeting, then he gave a shrug. “I suppose it can’t hurt to hear what they have to say.” Turning to me, he said briskly, “Prefect, I'm leaving you here in command of the army. If the Moesians have some sort of trick to play, you know what to do.”

  “Destroy them,” I replied.

  “Exactly.”

  Beckoning Claudius to follow, Crassus descended the hill with the same troopers as an escort. I sat on Ocelus, who was getting bored, tossing his head, communicating his desire to go for a run.

  “Maybe later,” I told him, patting his neck.

  Hearing the sound of hoofbeats, Iturned to see Balbus coming to sit beside me while we waited. I was happy for his company, and we sat in silence, watching the Legate approach the Moesians. Although I did not think there would be any treachery, I was also not taking my eyes off the scene below in the event I was wrong. The heavyset man did all the talking for the Moesians, it quickly becoming apparent that this would be as protracted a negotiation as the one with Roles had been. After a short while, the Primi Pili allowed the men to sit in place, and it was barely a few heartbeats after that the dice were broken out, and the gambling began. I finally dismounted from Ocelus to let him graze and get the load off his back, while Balbus did the same, lying down to take a nap.

  “If you wouldn’t drink so much, you wouldn’t be tired all the time,” I chided him.

  He opened one eye to squint up at me.

  “And I would be as boring and as little fun as you,” he retorted, shutting his eye and was soon snoring.

  The sun continued to climb, except there was a cool breeze, making it very pleasant, and I found that I was fighting the urge to nod off myself. Finally, there was a movement when Crassus and the heavyset man clasped hands before returning to their respective parties. Crassus remounted his horse, the party immediately turning to trot back towards us, while I watched carefully to make sure that the Moesians did not try anything. However, they were content to return to their own army, and I waited for Crassus to find out what was going on.

  “That was a profitable discussion,” Crassus said as he dismounted, a wide smile on his face.

  “Oh? How so?” I asked.

  “We just made two thousand talents of silver, and fifty royal and noble hostages,” he said, not a little smugly.

  I could feel my jaw drop, and I heard Balbus, who had gotten to his feet at the sound of the approaching horses, gasp in astonishment.

  “They're going to pay that to keep from fighting?”

  Crassus nodded, then added, “A bit more than that. I agreed that we'll leave Moesia immediately, and will suspend all hostilities against any Moesian tribe for this season and next.”

  This seemed too good to be true, and he could see my dubious expression.

  “They're going to pay us a thousand talents by sundown today, and the rest will be delivered next year, once we fulfill our end of the bargain. The hostages will be with the money.”

  While that was good news, I still could not see the reason behind making this agreement from the Moesian perspective.

  “Why would the Moesians give us that much money?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” Crassus admitted. “I suspect that there's some internal dissension that their leader, that’s the man with the streaked beard, is trying to deal with. His name is Arrianos, and he claims to be the high king of all the Moesian tribes.”

  He gave a shrug, turning his gaze back to where the man Arrianos and his party had just rejoined their own army.

  “You never know with these natives. But what I do know is that this should make the men happy. As soon as we take delivery of the money and hostages, we're turning south and heading for Greece.”

  On the surface, that sounded completely reasonable, but I was not so sure.

  “Don’t underestimate the greed of the Legions,” was the way I put my concerns to Crassus.

  Giving me a sharp look, he asked cautiously, “What do you mean?”

  Drawing him a short distance away from the others, I laid out what I thought the likely reaction of the men to be at this news.

  “As much as the men want to go home, since they’re not going back to Siscia, they want the opportunity for loot. One reason they fight is for the chance at making money off of what they can take from an enemy. There’s also the matter of the slaves you promised the Centurions,” I went on.

  While I was not absolutely sure that Crassus had no plans to share this bounty with the men, I assumed it to be the case based on what I had seen previously with men of the upper classes getting their hands on that much money. My judgment seemed to be confirmed when he made a face that clearly indicated his displeasure at the idea.

  Except that he said, “I was already planning on paying each man a bonus of three hundred sesterces per man for the ranks and a thousand for all second-grade and lower Centurions. The first grades were to receive fifteen hundred, and the Primi Pili two thousand.”

  I did some quick mental calculations in my head, which I was able to do thanks to Scribonius teaching me many years before.

  “That’s well more than one thousand talents. In fact, I think that would be a bit more than two thousand, wouldn’t it?”

  “I haven’t really thought about it,” he said carelessly, reminding me that he was so wealthy that two thousand talents was a sum so inconsequential that he did not bother to notice whether the sums he had come up with exceeded the total.

  “Well,” I replied, somewhat ashamed that I had so readily assumed that he would keep the money for himself, “that changes things quite a bit. I think the men will be very happy with this news.”

  “I hope so.”

  Crassus dismounted and called his bucinator to sound the call for the Primi Pili to assemble. Immediately upon their arrival, he announced the latest developments. The Primi Pili took the news that there was to be no fight with mixed reactions; Macrinus clearly wanted to fight, while Natalis looked the most relieved. The more I had seen of Natalis, the more certain I became that he was not fit to lead a Legion, and I began turning over in my mind the best way to make sure he was removed. However, they all turned more cheerful when Crassus announced the bounty that he would be paying to the men. As soon as he was finished, the Primi Pili were dismissed to alert their Legions. It was easy to tell when each Legion was told, since the men raised a rousing cheer at the news, shouting praise to their general and generally rejoicing, though whether it was for the money or for the end of the campaign it was hard to tell. Unfortunately for the men, and for everyone else, we could not leave the hill until the mone
y had been delivered, and Crassus was unwilling to risk sending part of the army back to make camp as long as the Moesians were still arrayed across from us. They did not leave, so we were forced to stay put, the day dragging by slowly. Finally, three wagons appeared over the crest of the far hill, accompanied by what I assumed to be the hostages, except there were far more than fifty. I quickly remembered that, similar to the situation in Gaul, these highborn hostages were all bringing at least one and usually more retainers or slaves to attend to their needs. I remembered how much of a headache keeping track of all the Gauls had been, along with the amount of mischief they had caused, and I hoped that these Moesians did not prove to be as much trouble. I went down with Crassus and several clerks from the Praetorium, along with a Cohort guard, sitting and watching the Legate inspect the contents of the wagons, dictating to a scribe as he counted. There was no way to tell if each ingot of silver was the same weight, although I supposed that the Moesians would not be willing to take the risk of coming up short. Crassus announced that from his initial count, it appeared that the entire amount was there, but that we would make sure that night. The wagons were sent back to the army, while the clerks recorded the names and tribe of each of the hostages, along with any other information that Crassus deemed pertinent, before we joined the rest of the army. The hostages seemed to be in anything but a sullen mood, chattering excitedly in a mishmash of their tribal tongues and Greek. From what I gathered, most of them were under the impression that they would be sent to Rome, and were looking forward to it immensely. I remained silent, not sure that any of them would get anywhere near Rome.

  We began the march south the next morning, after the clerks stayed up half the night conducting a thorough and complete count of the bullion. All of the men were in high spirits, their initial disappointment at not heading back to Siscia allayed by the news of the bonuses, which would be paid once we settled in wherever our winter quarters happened to be in Greece. With Moesia settled and the Bastarnae vanquished, Crassus justifiably felt good about all that had been accomplished. He had been sending regular dispatches back to Rome, but there had been no response, which we interpreted in two different ways. Crassus took the silence as approval for all that he was doing; I took it as an ominous sign, one that Scribonius and I had talked at length about. I was heeding his advice, keeping my mouth shut and not getting involved in any intrigues, despite my feelings for Crassus. I had come to regard him as one of the most likeable of the upper classes I had met. I did not hold him in the same regard that I had Caesar, and I did not fear him the way I feared Octavian, but I respected both equally, for completely different reasons. Where Octavian was, and is cold and aloof, Crassus was personable and approachable. Octavian might have been more competent, and at organization he is unparalleled, but Crassus was no slouch himself. I think the biggest difference between the two was in the way that Crassus carried the weight of his ancestry and position among the Roman elite. By virtue of his birth, and more importantly his wealth, he had every right to be a snob, yet he was anything but, having a common touch that I had only seen before in Caesar, and to a lesser extent, Antonius, except as I would learn with Antonius it was more of a sham than genuine. I never got that feeling from Crassus; if it was an act, it was a good one that I never saw slip. I suppose that is why I worried as much as I did that he had overstepped and would pay a steep price. As pressing as these thoughts were, the daily monotony of the march and the need to alleviate the boredom of plodding mile after mile soon pushed them to the back of my mind. Most worrying was the gradual change in weather; just our second day of the march to Greece saw a hard frost on the ground when we awoke, the chill lasting through the better part of the day. Looming ahead of us was the line of mountains that we had to cross to get into Thrace, snow already well down their flanks.

  On the fourth day of the march, we reached the foot of the mountains to begin the climb up, following a narrow river valley that cut through the range. The lower slopes leading down to the river consisted of striated rock, alternating between shades of red and white that is quite striking. These are the kinds of things one notices to pass the time, but the narrowness of the valley acted as a funnel for the wind, so it was not long before men who had them broke out their socks and bracae to cover the legs, while everyone began wearing their sagum. I pulled my fur-lined sagum out of my baggage, as did Scribonius, who was now strong enough to spend the whole day in the saddle. He still retired immediately after our evening meal to the tent, but his strength was coming back little by little every day. However, there seemed to be something missing from him, some spark that I had seen extinguished in other men who had almost died. It had not happened to me, and I spent a great deal of time thinking about why this was the case. Scribonius was every bit as brave as I was, and while he may not have been as skilled with the sword as I was, I was convinced that it was only because he did not practice as much as I did. He was also not as large and physically strong as I was, yet that was something that he could not help, and neither could I; both of us had been born with our condition and really had nothing to do with what the gods had given us. The conclusion that I reached was that what Scribonius lacked was the gift of fury, that feeling of rage that came over me in battle that fueled a savage desire in me to destroy any who stood in my way. Thinking it through, I attributed this feeling of anger that I had, always seething just beneath the surface like a volcano that is waiting to erupt, to the circumstances of my childhood, along with the relationship of hatred and fear between my father and me. When Scribonius had finally opened up about his background, his life of privilege and opportunity that came with being the son of a wealthy equestrian in Rome, the one thing that he had communicated was the love he had felt from his father, along with the regard and respect Scribonius held for his paterfamilias. While it had helped make Scribonius the good man that he is, it also meant that he would never be as single-minded as I was when the time came to pick up the sword to slay the enemy. Finally, I believe that in the heart of every successful warrior is the secret belief that they cannot be defeated, that there is no man who can strike them down. It is a myth, a fantasy that we convince ourselves is true in order to give us the ability to wade into a fight without fear. We all expect to be wounded, and in fact we bear these scars with immense pride, but there is a difference between the wound that is part of a victory over a foe, and one where you are the one that is struck down. For those fortunate few of us who receive a wound that proves mortal to others, it can rob us of that secret belief that we are invincible, and that is what appeared to have happened to Scribonius. I honestly do not know why even after my near death at Munda, that belief never left me, yet it had not. Balbus noticed this as well, and we had more than one whispered conversation about our friend, but we both knew that only time would tell if the old Scribonius would come back.

  It was in the middle of our second day in the mountains that the blizzard struck, out of nowhere, completely surprising the army. Even wrapped up as we were, the cold sliced through the layers of clothing that we wore, in bare moments the visibility dropping next to zero. I was instantly reminded of Parthia, except the one blessing was that we did not have a dropoff of several hundred feet to send men plunging to their deaths. Still, the footing was treacherous for man and beast. Even Ocelus, normally so surefooted, slipped several times before I finally dismounted to begin leading him. The wind was howling so loudly that it made normal conversation impossible, keeping communications to a bare minimum of shouted orders while we trudged along, struggling forward. Time seemed to stop, our world now reduced to just the few feet we could see in front of us, while the most important thing was putting one foot in front of the other. I kept a careful eye on Scribonius, and after I saw him stagger a few times, I made him get back on his horse, which I led alongside Ocelus. As the day progressed, the storm showed no signs of abating, and the exploratores, those men designated to range ahead of the army to find a place to camp made their way back to repor
t that the spot they had chosen was still more than ten miles distant. It was now perilously close to dusk, meaning that even if the storm had miraculously cleared, there was no way that we would make it to the site before nightfall. Moving forward in the dark and in a blizzard was simply out of the question, prompting Crassus to make the decision that we would continue on until it was no longer light enough to see, whereupon we would have to settle in the best we could to wait out the storm.

  When we did stop, there was simply not enough room to spread out and pitch more than the hospital tent, but with the army now spread out on the trail over several miles, with the baggage train at the rear of three Legions, there was no way to even do that. This meant that the few men still seriously wounded enough to remain in the hospital, along with the sick, had to endure a night out in the cold. Even with a fur-lined sagum and wearing my extra pair of fur-lined socks on my hands as mittens, it was bitterly cold, forcing Balbus, Scribonius, Diocles and me to huddle together, shivering the night away. I do not believe any of us got much sleep, while I worried the most about Scribonius, although he seemed to bear up well and without complaint. The storm raged through the night, covering men in a blanket of snow, actually serving to make things a bit warmer once we were encased in the stuff like a cocoon. It finally abated shortly before dawn, and by the time the sun rose, all traces of the storm had been scrubbed from the sky, the day dawning bright, clear, and bitterly cold. Inevitably, some of the sick and wounded succumbed, not responding when a medici came to check on them, and it was not long before we learned that it was not only these men that were lost. In some cases, men who had been on sentry duty had lost their bearings and could not be found, never to be seen again. Other cases involved men who had not been deemed ill enough to be placed on the sick list, but had obviously been weakened enough that the night in the bitter storm had been too much for them.