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by Colleen McCullough

  “Conscript Fathers, we have to send Nearer Spain a governor! We did try, but Lepidus made it impossible for Quintus Lutatius to go, and a mutiny has made it impossible for our Princeps Senatus to go. It is obvious to me that this next governor will have to be a very special man. His duties must be first to make war, and only after that to govern. In fact, almost his sole duty will be to make war! Of the fourteen legions which went with Pius and Calvinus two and a half years ago, it seems perhaps seven are left, and all of these are with Pius in Further Spain. Nearer Spain is garrisoned—by Quintus Sertorius. There is no one in the province to oppose him.

  “Whoever we send to Nearer Spain will have to bring an army with him—we cannot take troops off Pius. And we have the nucleus of that army sitting in Capua, four good legions mostly composed of Sullan veterans. Who have steadfastly refused to go to Spain under the command of any other man than Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. Who is not a senator, but a knight.”

  Philippus paused for a long time, unmoving, to let this sink in. When he resumed his voice was brisker, more practical.

  “So there, my fellow senators, we have one suggestion, courtesy of the Capuan army—Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. However, the law as Lucius Cornelius Sulla wrote it stipulates that command must go first to someone who is a member of the Senate, who is willing to take the command, and who is militarily qualified to take the command. I intend to discover now if there is such a man in the Senate.”

  He turned to the curule podium and looked at the senior consul. “Decimus Junius Brutus, do you want the command?”

  “No, Lucius Marcius, I do not. I am too old, too untalented.”

  “Mamercus?”

  “No, Lucius Marcius, I do not. My army is disaffected.”

  “Urban praetor?”

  “Even if my magistracy permitted me to leave Rome for more than ten days, I do not,” said Gnaeus Aufidius Orestes.

  “Foreign praetor?”

  “No, Lucius Marcius, I do not,” said Marcus Aurelius Cotta.

  After which six more praetors declined.

  Philippus turned then to the front rows and began to ask the consulars.

  “Marcus Tullius Decula?”

  “No.”

  “Quintus Lutatius Catulus?”

  “No.”

  And so it went, one nay after another.

  Philippus presumed to ask himself, and answered: “No, I do not! I am too old, too fat—and too militarily inept.”

  He turned then from one side of the House to the other. “Is there any man present who feels himself qualified to take this high command? Gaius Scribonius Curio, what about you?”

  Nothing would Curio have liked better than to say yes: but Curio had been bought, and honor dictated his reply. “No.”

  There was one very young senator in attendance who had to sit on both his hands and bite his itching tongue to remain still and silent, but he managed it because he knew Philippus would never countenance his appointment. Gaius Julius Caesar was not going to draw attention to himself until he stood at least an outside chance of winning.

  “So then,” said Philippus, “it comes back to the special commission and to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. With your own ears you have heard man after man disqualify himself. Now it may be that among those senators and promagistrates at this moment on duty abroad, there is a suitable man. But we cannot afford to wait! The situation must be dealt with now or we will lose the Spains! And it is very clear to me that the only man available and suitable is Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus! A knight rather than a senator. But he has been under arms since his sixteenth year, and since his twentieth year he has led his own legions into battle after battle! Our late lamented Lucius Cornelius Sulla preferred him over all other men. Rightly so! Young Pompeius Magnus has experience, talent, a huge pool of veteran soldiers, and Rome’s best interests at heart.

  “We own the constitutional means to appoint this young man governor of Nearer Spain with a proconsular imperium, to authorize him to command however many legions we see fit, and to overlook his knight status. However, I would like to request that we do not word his special commission to suggest that we deem him to have already served as consul. Non pro consule, sed pro consulibus—not as a consul after his year in office, but rather on behalf of the consuls of the year. That way he is permanently reminded of his special commission.”

  Philippus sat down; Decimus Junius Brutus the senior consul stood up. “Members of this house, I will see a division. Those in favor of granting a special commission with a proconsular imperium and six legions to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, knight, stand to my right. Those opposed, stand to my left.”

  No one stood to Decimus Brutus’s left, even the very young senator Gaius Julius Caesar.

  PART VI

  from SEPTEMBER 77 B.C.

  until WINTER 72—71 B.C.

  1

  There was no one with whom Pompey could share the news when Philippus’s letter arrived in Mutina, and no one when the Senate’s decree came through on the Ides of Sextilis. He was still trying to persuade Varro that the expedition to Spain would be as interesting as it was beneficial to an up—and—coming author of natural and man—made phenomena, but Varro’s responses to his many missives were lukewarm. Varro’s children had arrived at an age he found delightful and he had no wish to absent himself from Rome for what might be a long time.

  The new proconsul who had never been consul was very well prepared, and knew exactly how he intended to proceed. First, he wrote to the Senate and informed it that he would take three of the four legions which had belonged to Catulus and then to Mamercus, and three legions made up of his own veterans. However, he said, the kind of war Metellus Pius was waging in Further Spain did not seem to be an attacking one, and the emphasis had shifted from the Further to the Nearer province since Metellus Pius’s early days; therefore he requested that the Senate instruct Metellus Pius to give up one of his seven legions to Pompey. That worthy’s brother-in-law, Gaius Memmius, was now a tribune of the soldiers with Metellus Pius, but the following year would see him old enough to stand for quaestor; would it be possible that Gaius Memmius be allowed to stand for quaestor in absentia, and then join Pompey’s staff as quaestor for Nearer Spain?

  The Senate’s assent (it was now clay in Philippus’s hands) came back before Pompey quit Mutina, bolstering his conviction that whatever he wanted would be given to him. Now the father of a son almost two years old and a daughter born earlier in this year, Pompey had left Mucia Tertia at his stronghold in Picenum and issued firm orders that she was not to visit Rome in his absence. He expected a long campaign and could see no virtue in exposing his beautiful and enigmatic wife to temptation.

  Though he had already raised a thousand horse—troopers from among his old cavalry units, it was Pompey’s intention to add to their number by recruiting in Gaul-across-the-Alps, one good reason why he preferred to go to Spain by the land route. He was also a poor sailor, dreaded the sea, and did not trust it as a way of reaching his new province, though the winter winds favored it.

  Every map had been studied, every trader and frequenter of the land route to Spain had been interviewed. The Via Domitia was, however, fraught with difficulties: as Pompey now knew. After Marcus Perperna Veiento had crossed with the remnants of Lepidus’s army from Sardinia to Liguria and headed off in the direction of Spain, he had taken great delight in working as much mischief for Rome along the way as he could. The result was that all the principal tribes of Gaul-across-the-Alps were in revolt—Helvii, Vocontii, Salluvii, Volcae Arecomici.

  The worst aspect of tribal unrest in the further Gallic province lay in the delays Pompey would suffer as he fought his way to Spain through territory full of hostile and formidably warlike peoples. Of eventual success he had no doubt, but he desperately wanted to arrive in Nearer Spain before this coming winter cracked down; if he was to make sure that he and not Metellus Pius won the war against Sertorius, he could not afford to spend a whole year getting to Spain, and that see
med a likely prospect given the unrest in Gaul-across-the-Alps. All the passes through the Alps were in the custody of one or another of the tribes at present in revolt; the headhunting Salluvii controlled the lofty ranges of the Alpes Maritimae closest to the sea, the Vocontii occupied the valley of the Druentia River and the Mons Genava Pass, the Helvii guarded the middle reaches of the Rhodanus Valley, and the Volcae Arecomici lay athwart the Via Domitia to Spain below the central massif of the Cebenna.

  It would add laurels to his brow if he suppressed all these barbarian insurrections, of course—but not laurels of high enough quality. They lay in the purlieu of Sertorius. Therefore—how to avoid a long and costly transit of Gaul-across-the-Alps?

  The answer had occurred to Pompey before he marched from Mutina in the first part of September: he would avoid the usual roads by blazing a new one. The largest of the northern tributaries which fed into the Padus River was the Duria Major, which came down rushing and roaring from the highest alps of all, those towering between the bowl of western Italian Gaul and the lakes and rivers feeding eastern Gallia Comata—Lake Lemanna, the upper Rhodanus River, and the mighty Rhenus River which divided the lands of the Gauls from the lands of the Germans. The beautiful cleft carved out of the mountains by the Duria Major was always known as the Vale of the Salassi because it was inhabited by a Gallic tribe called the Salassi; when a generation ago gold had been found in the stream as an alluvium and Roman prospectors had begun to cull it, the Salassi had so strenuously resisted this Roman intrusion that no one any longer tried to retrieve the gold much further up the Vale than the town of Eporedia.

  But at the very top of the Vale of the Salassi there were said to be two passes across the Alpes Penninae. One was a literal goat track which led over the very highest mountains and down to a settlement of the tribe Veragri called Octodurum, and then followed the source—stream of the Rhodanus until it entered the eastern end of Lake Lemanna; because of its ten—thousand—foot altitude this pass was only open during summer and early autumn, and was too treacherous to permit the passage of an army. The second pass lay at an altitude of about seven thousand feet and was wide enough to accommodate wagons, though its road was not paved or Roman—surveyed; it led to the northern sources of the Isara River and the lands of the Allobroges, then to the Rhodanus about halfway down its course to the Middle Sea. The German Cimbri had fled through this pass after their defeat by Gaius Marius and Catulus Caesar at Vercellae, though their progress had been slow and most of them had been killed by the Allobroges and the Ambarri further west.

  During the first interview Pompey conducted with a group of tamed Salassi, he abandoned any thought of the higher pass; but the lower one interested him mightily. A path wide enough for wagons—no matter how rough or perilous it might prove to be—meant that he could traverse it with his legions—and, he hoped, his cavalry. The season was about a month behind the calendar, so he would cross the Alpes Graiae in high summer if he got going by early September, and the chances of snow even at seven thousand feet were minimal. He decided not to cart any baggage by wagon, trusting that he would be able to find his heavier provisions and equipment around Narbo in the far Gallic province, and thus commandeered every mule he could find to serve as a pack animal.

  “We’re going to move fast, no matter how difficult the terrain,” he told his assembled army at dawn on the day he marched. “The less warning the Allobroges have of our advent, the better our chances of not becoming bogged down in a war I’d much rather not fight. Nothing must be allowed to prevent us reaching the Pyrenees before the lowest pass into Spain is closed! Gaul-across-the-Alps morally belongs to the Domitii Ahenobarbi—and as far as I’m concerned, they can keep it! We want to be in Nearer Spain by winter. And be in Nearer Spain by winter we will be!”

  The army crossed the lower of the two passes at the top of the Vale of the Salassi at the end of September and encountered surprisingly little opposition from either the route itself or the people who lived along it. When Pompey descended into the Isara valley and the lands of the fierce Allobroges, he caught them so much by surprise that they brandished their spears in the direction of his dust and never succeeded in catching up with him. It was not until he reached the Rhodanus itself that he chanced upon organized opposition. This came from the Helvii, who lived on the great river’s western bank and in part of the Cebenna massif behind. But they proved easy meat for Pompey, who defeated several contingents of Helvii warriors sent against him, then demanded and took hostages against future good behavior. The Vocontii and Salluvii courageous enough to venture down onto the Rhodanus plains met the same fate, as did the Volcae Arecomici after Pompey’s army had crossed the causeway through the marshes between Arelate and Nemausus. Past the last danger, Pompey then bundled up his cache of several hundred child hostages and sent them to Massilia for custody.

  Before winter he had crossed the Pyrenees and found himself an excellent campsite among the civilized Indigetes around the township of Emporiae. Pompey was into Nearer Spain, but barely. The proconsul who had never been a senator—let alone a consul—sat down to write to the Senate of his adventures since leaving Italian Gaul, with heavy emphasis upon his own courage and daring in blazing a new way across the Alps, and upon the ease with which he had defeated Gallic opposition.

  Missing the finishing touches Varro had always applied to his bald and fairly limited prose, Pompey then wrote to the other proconsul, Metellus Pius the Piglet in Further Spain.

  I have arrived at Emporiae and gone into winter camp. I intend to spend the winter toughening my troops for next year’s campaigns. I believe the Senate has ordered you to give me one of your legions. By now my brother-in-law Gaius Memmius will have been elected quaestor. He is to be my quaestor, and can lead your donated legion to me.

  Obviously the best way to defeat Quintus Sertorius is for us to work in concert. That is why the Senate did not appoint one of the two of us senior to the other. We are to be co-commanders and work together.

  Now I have spent a great deal of time talking to men who know Spain, and I have devised a grand strategy for us in this coming year. Sertorius does not care to penetrate the Further province east of the Baetis because it is so densely settled and Romanized. There are not enough savages there to make it receptive to Sertorius.

  It behooves you, Quintus Caecilius, to look after your Further province and do nothing which might provoke Sertorius to invade your lands east of the Baetis. I will eject him from coastal Nearer Spain this year. It will not be an arduous campaign from the point of view of supplies, as this coastal area contains excellent forage growing on good terrain. I will march south in the spring, cross the Iberus River and head for New Carthage, which I ought to reach comfortably by midsummer. Gaius Memmius will take the one legion you owe me and march from the Baetis via Ad Fraxinum and Eliocroca to New Carthage, which of course is still our town. Just isolated from the rest of the Nearer province by Sertorius’s forces. After I join up with Gaius Memmius in New Carthage we will return to winter at Emporiae, strengthening the various coastal towns as we go.

  The following year I will eject Sertorius from inland Nearer Spain and drive him south and westinto the lands of the Lusitani. In the third year, Quintus Caecilius, we will combine our two armies and crush him on the Tagus.

  When Metellus Pius received this communication midway through January he retired to his study in the house he occupied in the town of Hispalis, there to peruse it in private. He didn’t laugh; its contents were too serious. But smile sourly he did, unaware that Sulla had once got a letter not unlike this one, full of airy information about a country Sulla knew far better than Pompey did. Ye gods, the young butcher was sure of himself! And so patronizing!

  Three years had now gone by since Metellus Pius and his eight legions had arrived in Further Spain, three years which had seen Sertorius outgeneral and outthink him. No one had a more profound respect for Quintus Sertorius and his legate Lucius Hirtuleius than did Metellus Pius the Piglet
. And no one knew better than he how hard it would be—even for a Pompey—to beat Sertorius and Hirtuleius. As far as he was concerned, the tragedy lay in the fact that Rome had not given him long enough. According to Aesop slow but steady won the race, and Metellus Pius was the embodiment of slow but steady. He had licked his wounds and reorganized his forces to absorb the loss of one legion, then skulked in his province without provoking Sertorius. Very deliberately. For while he waited and assembled the intelligence reports detailing Sertorius’s movements, he thought. He did not believe it impossible to beat Sertorius; rather, he believed Sertorius could not be beaten by orthodox military methods. And, he had become convinced, the answer lay at least partly in establishing a more cunning and devious intelligence network—the kind of intelligence network which would make it impossible for Sertorius to anticipate his troop movements. On the surface, a tall order, as the natives were the key to intelligence for both himself and Sertorius. But not an insuperable task! Metellus Pius was working out a way.

  Now Pompey had entered upon the Spanish stage, empowered by the Senate (or rather, by Philippus) with an equal imperium, and quite sure his own talents far outshone Sertorius, Hirtuleius and Metellus Pius combined. Well, time would teach Pompey what Metellus Pius knew full well Pompey was not at the moment willing to hear; time and a few defeats. Oh, there could be no doubt that the young man was as brave as a lion—but the Piglet had known Sertorius since his eighteenth year, and knew that Sertorius too was as brave as a lion. What was more important by far, he was Gaius Marius’s military heir; he understood the art of war as few in the history of Rome ever had. However, Metellus Pius had begun to sniff out Sertorius’s weakness, and was almost sure it lay in his ideas about himself. Could those royal and magical ideas be undermined, Sertorius might unravel.