Had he once dreamed of a meeting between himself and an equally godlike man called Lucius Cornelius Sulla? And been crushed to abject misery because he had found a satyr, not a god? But what did the look of a man matter, when he held in both hands such a store of dreams? The scarred and drunken old man whose eyes were not even good enough to see Rome in the distance was offering him the whole conduct of a war! A war far away from interference, against an enemy he would have all to himself… Pompey gasped, held out his freckled hand with its short and slightly crooked fingers, and clasped Sulla’s beautiful hand.
“Lucius Cornelius, that’s wonderful! Wonderful! Oh, you can count on me! I’ll drive Perperna Veiento out of Sicily and give you more wheat than ten armies could eat!”
“I’m going to need more wheat than ten armies could eat,” said Sulla, releasing his hand; despite his youth and undeniable attractions, Pompey was not a type who appealed to Sulla physically, and he never liked to touch men or women who didn’t appeal to him physically. “By the end of this year, Rome will be mine. And if I want Rome to lie down for me, then I’ll have to make sure she’s not hungry. That means the Sicilian grain harvest, the Sardinian grain harvest—and, if possible, the African grain harvest too. So when you’ve secured Sicily, you’ll have to move on to Africa Province and do what you can there. You won’t be in time to catch the loaded fleets from Utica and Hadrumetum—I imagine you’ll be many months in Sicily before you can hope to deal with Africa. But Africa must be subdued before you can come home to Italy. I hear that Fabius Hadrianus was burned to death in the governor’s palace during an uprising in Utica, but that Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus—having escaped from Sacriportus!—has taken over and is holding Africa for the enemy. If you’re in western Sicily, it’s a short distance from Lilybaeum to Utica by sea. You ought to be able to wrap up Africa. Somehow you don’t have the look of a failure about you.”
Pompey was literally shivering in excitement; he smiled, gasped. “I won’t fail you, Lucius Cornelius! I promise I will never fail you!”
“I believe you, Pompeius.” Sulla sat down on a log, licked his lips. “What are we doing here? I need wine!”
“Here is a good place, there’s no one to see us or listen to us,” said Pompey soothingly. “Wait, Lucius Cornelius. I’ll fetch you wine. Just sit there and wait.”
As it was a shady spot, Sulla did as he was told, smiling at some secret joke. Oh, what a lovely day it was!
Back came Pompey at a run, yet breathing as if he hadn’t run at all. Sulla grabbed at the wineskin, squirted liquid into his mouth with great expertise, actually managing to swallow and take in air at the same time. Some moments elapsed before he ceased to squeeze, put the skin down.
“Oh, that’s better! Where was I?”
“You may fool some people, Lucius Cornelius, but not me. You know precisely where you were,” said Pompey coolly, and sat himself on the grass directly in front of Sulla’s log.
“Very good! Pompeius, you’re as rare as an ocean pearl the size of a pigeon’s egg! And I can truly say that I am very glad I’ll be dead long before you become a Roman headache.” He picked up the wineskin again, drank again.
“I’ll never be a Roman headache,” said Pompey innocently. “I will just be the First Man in Rome—and not by mouthing a lot of pretentious rubbish in the Forum or the Senate, either.”
“How then, boy, if not through stirring speeches?”
“By doing what you’re sending me off to do. By beating Rome’s enemies in battle.”
“Not a novel approach,” said Sulla. “That’s the way I’ve done it. That’s the way Gaius Marius did it too.”
“Yes, but I’m not going to need to snatch my commissions,” said Pompey. “Rome is going to give me every last one on her very knees!”
Sulla might have interpreted that statement as a reproach, or even as an outright criticism; but he knew his Pompey by this, and understood that most of what the young man said arose out of egotism, that Pompey as yet had no idea how difficult it might be to make that statement come true. So all Sulla did was to sigh and say, “Strictly speaking, I can’t give you any sort of imperium. I’m not consul, and I don’t have the Senate or the People behind me to pass my laws. You’ll just have to accept that I will make it possible for you to come back and be confirmed with a praetor’s imperium.”
“I don’t doubt that.”
“Do you doubt anything?”
“Not if it concerns me directly. I can influence events.”
“May you never change!” Sulla leaned forward, clasped his hands between his knees. “All right, Pompeius, the compliments are over. Listen to me very carefully. There are two more things I have to tell you. The first concerns Carbo.”
“I’m listening,” said Pompey.
“He sailed from Telamon with Old Brutus. Now it’s possible that he headed for Spain, or even for Massilia. But at this time of year, his destination was more likely Sicily or Africa. While ever he’s at large, he is the consul. The elected consul. That means he can override the imperium of a governor, commandeer the governor’s soldiers or militia, call up auxiliaries, and generally make a thorough nuisance of himself until his term as consul runs out. Which is some months off. I am not going to tell you exactly what I plan to do after Rome is mine, but I will tell you this—it is vital to my plans that Carbo be dead well before the end of his year in office. And it is vital that I know Carbo is dead! Your job is to track Carbo down and kill him. Very quietly and inconspicuously—I would like his death to seem an accident. Will you undertake to do this?”
“Yes,” said Pompey without hesitation.
“Good! Good!” Sulla turned his hands over and inspected them as if they belonged to someone else. “Now I come to my last point, which concerns the reason why I am entrusting this overseas campaign to you rather than to one of my senior legates.” He peered at the young man intently. “Can you see why for yourself, Pompeius?’’
Pompey thought, shrugged. “I have some ideas, perhaps, but without knowing what you plan to do after Rome is yours, I am mostly likely wrong. Tell me why.”
“Pompeius, you are the only one I can entrust with this commission! If I give six legions and two thousand horse to a man as senior as Vatia or Dolabella and send that man off to Sicily and Africa, what’s to stop his coming back with the intention of supplanting me? All he has to do is to remain away long enough for me to be obliged to disband my own army, then return and supplant me. Sicily and Africa are not campaigns likely to be finished in six months, so it’s very likely that I will have had to disband my own army before whoever I send comes home. I cannot keep a permanent standing army in Italy. There’s neither the money nor the room for it. And the Senate and People of Rome would never consent. Therefore I must keep every man senior enough to be my rival under my eye. Therefore it is you I am sending off to secure the harvest and make it possible for me to feed ungrateful Rome.”
Pompey drew a breath, linked his arms around his knees and looked at Sulla very directly. “And what’s to stop me doing all of that, Lucius Cornelius? If I’m capable of running a campaign, am I not capable of thinking I can supplant you?”
A question which plainly didn’t send a single shiver down Sulla’s spine; he laughed heartily. “Oh, you can think it all you like, Pompeius! But Rome would never wear you! Not for a single moment. She’d wear Vatia or Dolabella. They have the years, the relations, the ancestors, the clout, the clients. But a twenty-three-year-old from Picenum that Rome doesn’t know? Not a chance!”
And so they left the matter, walked off in opposite directions. When Pompey encountered Varro he said very little, just told that indefatigable observer of life and nature that he was to go to Sicily to secure the harvest. Of imperium, older men, the death of Carbo and much else, he said nothing at all. Of Sulla he asked only one favor—that he might be allowed to take his brother-in-law, Gaius Memmius, as his chief legate. Memmius, several years older than Pompey but not yet a quaestor
, had been serving in the legions of Sulla.
“You’re absolutely right, Pompeius,” said Sulla with a smile. “An excellent choice! Keep your venture in the family.”
*
The simultaneous attack on Sulla’s fortifications from north and south came to pass two days after Pompey had departed with his army for Puteoli and the grain fleet. A wave of men broke on either wall, but the waves ebbed and died away harmlessly. Sulla still owned the Via Latina, and those attacking from the north could find no way to join up with those attacking on the south. At dawn on the second morning after the attack, the watchers in the towers on either wall could see no enemy; they had packed up and stolen off in the night. Reports came in all through that day that the twenty thousand men belonging to Censorinus, Carrinas and Brutus Damasippus were marching down the Via Appia toward Campania, and that the Samnite host was marching down the Via Latina in the same direction.
“Let them go,” said Sulla indifferently. “Eventually I suppose they’ll come back—united. And when they do come back it will be on the Via Appia. Where I will be waiting for them.”
By the end of Sextilis, the Samnites and the remnants of Carbo’s army had joined forces at Fregellae, and there moved off the Via Latina eastward through the Melfa Gorge.
“They’re going to Aesernia to think again,” said Sulla, and did not instruct that they be followed further. “It’s enough to post lookouts on the Via Latina at Ferentinum, and the Via Appia at Tres Tabernae. I don’t need more warning than that, and I’m not going to waste my scouts sending them to sneak around Samnites in Samnite territory like Aesernia.”
*
The action shifted abruptly to Praeneste, where Young Marius, restless and growing steadily more unpopular within the town, emerged from the gates and ventured out into No Man’s Land. At the westernmost point of the ridge, where the watershed divided Tolerus streams from Anio streams, he began to build a massive siege tower, having judged that at this point Ofella’s wall was weakest. No tree had been left standing to furnish materials for this work anywhere within reach of those defending Praeneste; it was houses and temples yielded up the timber, precious nails and bolts, blocks and panels and tiles.
The most dangerous work was to make a smooth roadway for the tower to be moved upon between the spot where it was being built and the edge of Ofella’s ditch, for these laborers were at the mercy of marksmen atop Ofella’s walls; Young Marius chose the youngest and swiftest among his helpers to do this, and gave them a makeshift roof under which to shelter. Out of harm’s reach another team toiled with pieces of timber too small to use in constructing the tower, and made a bridge of laminated planking to throw across the ditch when it came time to push the tower right up against Ofella’s wall. Once work upon the tower had progressed enough to create a shelter inside it for those who labored upon building it, the thing seemed to grow from within, up and up and up, out and out and out.
In a month it was ready, and so were the causeway and the bridge along which a thousand pairs of hands would propel it. But Ofella too was ready, having had plenty of time to prepare his defenses. The bridge was put across the ditch in the darkest hours of night, the tower rolled heaving and groaning upon a slipway of sheep’s fat mixed with oil; dawn saw the tower, twenty feet higher than the top of Ofella’s wall, in position. Deep in its bowels there hung upon ropes toughened with pitch a mighty battering ram made from the single beam which had spanned the Goddess’s cella in the temple of Fortuna Primigenia, who was the firstborn daughter of Jupiter, and talisman of Italian luck.
But it was many a year before tufa stone hardened to real brittleness, so the ram when brought to bear on Ofella’s wall roared and boomed and pounded in vain; the elastic tufa blocks shook, even trembled and vibrated, but they held until Ofella’s catapults firing blazing missiles had set the tower on fire, and driven the attackers hurling spears and arrows fleeing with hair in flames. By nightfall the tower was a twisted ruin collapsed in the ditch, and those who had tried to break out were either dead or back within Praeneste.
Several times during October, Young Marius tried to use the bridged ditch filled with the wreckage of his tower as a base; he roofed a section between Ofella’s wall and the ditch to keep his men safe and tried to mine his way beneath the wall, then tried to cut his way through the wall, and finally tried to scale the wall. But nothing worked. Winter was close at hand, seemed to promise the same kind of bitter cold as the last one; Praeneste knew itself short of food, and rued the day it had opened its gates to the son of Gaius Marius.
*
The Samnite host had not gone to Aesernia at all. Ninety thousand strong, it sat itself down in the awesome mountains to the south of the Fucine Lake and whiled away almost two months in drills, foraging parties, more drills. Pontius Telesinus and Brutus Damasippus had journeyed to see Mutilus in Teanum, come away armed with a plan to take Rome by surprise—and without Sulla’s knowledge. For, said Mutilus, Young Marius would have to be left to his fate. The only chance left for all right—thinking men was to capture Rome and draw both Sulla and Ofella into a siege which would be prolonged and filled with a terrible doubt—would those inside Rome elect to join the Samnite cause?
There was a way across the mountains between the Melfa Gorge and the Via Valeria. This stock route—for so it was better termed than road—traversed the ranges between Atina at the back of the Melfa Gorge—a wilderness—went to Sora on the elbow of the Liris River, then to Treba, then to Sublaquaeum, and finally emerged on the Via Valeria a scant mile east of Varia, at a little hamlet called Mandela. It was neither paved nor even surveyed, but it had been there for centuries, and was the route whereby the many shepherds of the mountains moved their flocks each summer season between pastures at the same altitude. It was also the route the flocks took to the sale yards and slaughterhouses of the Campus Lanatarius and the Vallis Camenarum adjoining the Aventine parts of Rome.
Had Sulla stopped to remember the time when he had marched from Fregellae to the Fucine Lake to assist Gaius Marius to defeat Silo and the Marsi, he might have remembered this stock route, for he had actually followed a part of it from Sora to Treba, and had not found it impossible going. But at Treba he had left it, and had not thought to ascertain whereabouts it went north of Treba. So the one chance Sulla might have had to circumvent Mutilus’s strategy was overlooked. Thinking that the only route open to the Samnites if they planned to attack Rome was the Via Appia, Sulla remained in his defile on the Via Latina and kept watch, sure he could not be taken by surprise.
And while he sat in his defile, the Samnites and their allies toiled along the stock route, secure in the knowledge that they were passing through country whose inhabitants had no love of Rome, and well beyond the outermost tentacles of Sulla’s intelligence network. Sora, Treba, Sublaquaeum, and finally onto the Via Valeria at Mandela. They were now a scant day’s march from Rome, a mere thirty miles of superbly kept road as the Via Valeria came down through Tibur and the Anio valley, and terminated on the Campus Esquilinus beneath the double rampart of Rome’s Agger.
But this was not the best place from which to launch an attack on Rome, so when the great host drew close to the city, Pontius Telesinus and Brutus Damasippus took a diverticulum which brought them out on the Via Nomentana at the Colline Gate. And there outside the Colline Gate—waiting for them,as it were—was the stout camp Pompey Strabo had built for himself during Cinna’s and Gaius Marius’s siege of Rome. By nightfall of the last day of October, Pontius Telesinus, Brutus Damasippus, Marcus Lamponius, Tiberius Gutta, Censorinus and Carrinas were comfortably ensconced within that camp; on the morrow they would attack.
*
The news that ninety thousand men were occupying Pompey Strabo’s old camp outside the Colline Gate was brought to Sulla after night had fallen on the last day of October. It found him a little the worse for wine, but not yet asleep. Within moments bugles were blaring, drums were rolling, men were tumbling from their pallets and torches were
kindling everywhere. Icily sober, Sulla called his legates together and told them.
“They’ve stolen a march on us,” he said, lips compressed. “How they got there I don’t know, but the Samnites are outside the Colline Gate and ready to attack Rome. By dawn, we march. We have twenty miles to cover and some of it’s hilly, but we have to get to the Colline Gate in time to fight tomorrow.” He turned to his cavalry commander, Octavius Balbus. “How many horses have you got around Lake Nemi, Balbus?”
“Seven hundred,” said Balbus.
“Then off you go right now. Take the Via Appia, and ride like the wind. You’ll reach the Colline Gate some hours before I can hope to get the infantry there, so you’ve got to hold them off. I don’t care what you have to do, or how you do it! Just get there and keep them occupied until I arrive.”
Octavius Balbus wasted no time speaking; he was out of Sulla’s door and roaring for a horse before Sulla could turn back to his other legates.
There were four of them—Crassus, Vatia, Dolabella and Torquatus. Shocked, but not bereft of their wits.
“We have eight legions here, and they will have to do,” said Sulla. “That means we’ll be outnumbered two to one. I’ll make my dispositions now because there may not be the time for conferences after we reach the Colline Gate.”
He fell silent, studying them. Who would fare best? Who would have the steel to lead in what was going to be a desperate encounter? By rights it ought to be Vatia and Dolabella, but were they the best men? His eyes dwelt upon Marcus Licinius Crassus, huge and rock—solid, never anything save calm—eaten up with avarice, a thief and a swindler—not principled, not ethical, perhaps moral. And yet of the four of them he had the most to lose if this war was lost. Vatia and Dolabella would survive, they had the clout. Torquatus was a good man, but not a true leader.
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