Masters of Rome Boxset: First Man in Rome, the Grass Crown, Fortune's Favourites, Caesar's Women, Caesar

by Colleen McCullough

  “I have something to show you,” said Crixus to Spartacus, voice eager; it was the morning of the last day of September.

  Drilling a century of slaves, Spartacus handed the task to another gladiator and moved off with Crixus, who was dragging anxiously at his arm. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Better to see for yourself,” said Crixus as he led Spartacus to a gap in the crater wall which allowed a far and sweeping view of Vesuvius’s northern slopes.

  Two Samnites were on sentry duty, and turned excited faces toward their leader. “Look!” said one.

  Spartacus looked. Below him for a thousand feet the crags and pockets of the upper mountain presented an inhospitable mien; below that lay ordered fields. And through the wheat stubble there wound a column of Roman soldiers led by four mounted men in the Attic helmets and contoured cuirasses of high officers, the man riding alone behind three riding abreast wearing the looped and ritually knotted scarlet sash of high imperium around his glittering chest.

  “Well, well! They’ve sent a praetor against us at the very least!” said Spartacus with a chuckle.

  “How many legions?” asked Crixus, looking worried.

  Spartacus stared, astonished. “Legions? You were in them, Crixus, you ought to be able to tell!”

  “That’s just it! I was in them. When you’re in them, you never get to see what you look like.”

  Spartacus grinned, ruffled Crixus’s hair. “Rest easy, there’s no more than half a legion’s worth down there—five cohorts of the greenest troops I’ve ever seen. Notice how they straggle, can’t keep a straight line or an even distance apart? What’s more important, they’re being led by someone just as green! See how he rides behind his legates? Sure sign! A confident general is always out in front.”

  “Five cohorts? That’s at least two and a half thousand men.”

  “Five cohorts that have never been in a legion, Crixus.”

  “I’ll sound general quarters.”

  “No, stay here with me. Let them think we haven’t noticed them. If they hear bugles and shouting, they’ll stop and camp down there on the slopes. Whereas if they think they’ve stolen a march on us, that idiot leading them will keep on coming until he’s among the rocks and realizes he can’t make a camp. By then it will be too late to re-form and march down again—the whole lot will have to doss down in little groups wherever they can find the room. Idiots! If they’d gone round to the south, they could have used the track right up to our hollow.”

  By the time darkness fell Spartacus had established beyond doubt that the punitive expedition was indeed composed of raw recruits, and that the general was a praetor named Gaius Claudius Glaber; the Senate had ordered him to pick up five cohorts in Capua as he passed through—and keep on marching until he found the rebels and flushed them out of their Vesuvian hole.

  By dawn the punitive expedition no longer existed. Throughout the night Spartacus had sent silent raiding parties down into the crags, some even lowered on ropes, to kill swiftly and noiselessly. So green indeed were these recruits that they had shed their armor and piled their arms together before cuddling up to campfires which betrayed where every pocket of them slept, and so green was Gaius Claudius Glaber that he thought the lie of the land a greater protection than a proper camp. Closer to dawn than to dusk some of the more wakeful soldiers began to understand what was going on, and gave the alarm. The stampede began.

  Spartacus struck then in force, using his women followers as torchbearers to light his way. Half Glaber’s troops died, the other half fled—but left their arms and armor behind them. Chief among the fugitives were Glaber and his three legates.

  Two thousand eight hundred sets of infantry equipment went to swell the cache in the hollow; Spartacus stripped his growing army of its gladiatorial accoutrements in favor of legionary gear and added Glaber’s baggage train to his carts and animals. Volunteers were now streaming in, most of them trained soldiers; when his tally grew to five thousand, Spartacus decided the hollow on Vesuvius had outlived its usefulness and moved his legion out.

  He knew exactly where he was going.

  *

  Thus it was that when the praetors Publius Varinius and Lucius Cossinius marched two legions of recruits out of camp in Capua and headed off along the Nola road, they encountered a well laid out Roman fortification not far from the devastated Villa Batiatus. Varinius, the senior in command, was experienced. So was Cossinius, his second-in-command. One look at the men of their two legions had horrified them; so raw were these recruits that their basic training had only just begun! To add to the praetors’ difficulties the weather was cold, wet, and windy, and some kind of virulent respiratory infection was raging through the ranks. When Varinius saw the workmanlike structure beside the Nola road he knew at once that it belonged to the rebels—but also knew that his own men were not capable of attacking it. Instead he put the two legions into a camp alongside the rebels.

  No one knew a name then, nor any details about the rebels save that they had extirpated the gladiatorial school of Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Batiatus (who appeared on its books as the proprietor), gone to earth on Mount Vesuvius, and had been joined by some thousands of discontented Samnites, Lucanians, and slaves. From the disgraced Glaber had come the news that the rebels now owned every scrap of his gear, and that they were well enough led to have gone about destroying Glaber’s five cohorts like experts.

  However, some thorough scouting revealed to Varinius and Cossinius that the force inside the rebel camp numbered only about five thousand, and that a certain proportion were women. Heartened, Varinius deployed his two legions for battle the next morning, secure in the knowledge that even with sick raw troops he had the numbers to win. It was still raining hard.

  When the battle was over Varinius didn’t know whether to blame his defeat upon the sheer terror the sight of the rebels had inspired in his men, or upon the illness which caused so many of his legionaries to lay down their arms and refuse to fight, pleading that they couldn’t, they just couldn’t. Worst blow of all was that Cossinius had been killed trying to rally a group of would—be deserters—and that a great deal of equipment had been spirited off the field by the rebels. There was no point in pursuing the rebels, who had marched off through the rain in the direction of their camp. Varinius wheeled his bedraggled and demoralized column about and went back to Capua, where he wrote to the Senate frankly, not sparing himself—but not sparing the Senate either. There were no experienced troops in Italy, he said, except for the rebels.

  He did have a name to illuminate his report: Spartacus, a Thracian gladiator.

  For six market intervals Varinius concentrated upon the training of his miserable soldiers, most of whom had survived the battle, but seemed less likely to survive the respiratory disease which still raged through their ranks. He commandeered the services of some old Sullan veteran centurions to help him train, though he couldn’t persuade them to enlist. The Senate thought it prudent to begin recruiting four more legions, and assured Varinius that he had its support in whatever measures he felt called upon to execute. A fourth praetor out of that year’s group of eight was dispatched from Rome to act as Varinius’s senior legate: Publius Valerius. One fled, one dead, one vanquished; the fourth was not a happy man.

  Varinius thought his men sufficiently well trained to begin operations at the end of November, and led them out of Capua to attack Spartacus’s camp. Only to find it deserted. Spartacus had stolen away, yet one more indication that, Thracian or no, he was a military man in the Roman manner. Illness still dogged poor Varinius. As he led his two under—strength legions south he had to watch helplessly as whole cohorts were forced to abandon the march, their centurions promising to catch up with him as soon as the men felt better. Near Picentia, just before the ford across the Silarus River, he caught up with the rebels at last; only to see in horror that Spartacus’s legion had mushroomed into an army. Five thousand less than two months ago—twenty-five thousand now! Not darin
g to attack, Varinius was obliged to watch this suddenly great force cross the Silarus and march off along the Via Popillia into Lucania.

  When the sick cohorts caught up and the stricken men still with him showed signs of recovering, Varinius and Valerius held a conference. Did they follow the rebels into Lucania or return to Capua to spend the winter training a bigger army?

  “What you really mean,” said Valerius, “is whether we would do better to give battle now, even though outnumberedbadly, or whether we can raise enough extra men during the winter to make delaying a confrontation until the spring a wiser move.”

  “I don’t think there is a decision to make,” said Varinius. “We have to follow them now. By the spring they’re likely to be doubled in strength—and every man they add to their ranks will be a Lucanian veteran.”

  So Varinius and Valerius followed, even when the evidence told them that Spartacus had departed from the Via Popillia and was moving steadily into the wilds of the Lucanian mountains. For eight days they followed without seeing more than old signs, pitching a stout camp each and every night. Taxing work, but the prudent alternative.

  On the ninth evening the same process was begun amid the grumbles of men who had not been legionaries long enough to understand the necessity or the advantages of a safe camp. And while the earth walls were being piled up out of the refuse thrown from the ditches, Spartacus attacked. Outnumbered and outgeneraled, Varinius had no choice other than to retreat, though he left his beautifully caparisoned Public Horse behind along with most of his soldiers. Of the eighteen cohorts he had started with from Capua, only five returned out of Lucania; having crossed the Silarus into Campania again, Varinius and Valerius left these five cohorts to guard the ford under the command of a quaestor, Gaius Toranius.

  The two praetors journeyed back to Rome, there to exhort the Senate to train more men as quickly as possible. The situation was undeniably growing more serious every day, but between Lucullus and Marcus Cotta in the east and Pompey in Spain, many of the senators felt that the recruiting process was a waste of time. The Italian well was dry. Then in January came the news that Spartacus had issued out of Lucania with forty thousand men organized into eight efficient legions. The rebels had rolled over poor Gaius Toranius at the Silarus, killed him and every man in his five cohorts. Campania lay at the mercy of Spartacus, who, said the report, was busy trying to persuade towns of Samnite population to come over to his side, declare for a free Italy.

  The tribunes of the Treasury were told very succinctly to cease their noises of complaint and start finding the money to lure veterans out of retirement. The praetor Quintus Arrius (who had been scheduled to replace Gaius Verres as governor of Sicily) was instructed to hustle himself to Capua and begin organizing a proper consular army of four legions, stiffened as much as possible with veteran intakes. The new consuls, Lucius Gellius Poplicola and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus, were formally given the command in the war against Spartacus.

  *

  All of this Spartacus gradually discovered from the time he had re-entered Campania. As his army was still growing, he had learned to weld it on the march, forming and drilling new cohorts as he went. It had been a grief when Oenomaus was killed during the successful attack on the camp of Varinius and Valerius, but Crixus was still very much alive and other capable legates were rising to the surface. The Public Horse which had belonged to Varinius made a wonderful mount for a supreme commander! Showy. Every morning Spartacus kissed its nose and stroked its flowing silvery mane before leaping upon its back; he called it Batiatus.

  Certain that towns like Nola and Nuceria would rally behind him, he had sent his ambassadors to see their magistrates at once, explaining that he was intent upon helping Quintus Sertorius establish a new Italian Republic, and asking for donations of men, materiel, money. Only to be told firmly that no city of Campania or any other region in Italy would support the cause of Quintus Sertorius—or of Spartacus the gladiator general.

  “We do not love the Romans,” said the magistrates of Nola, “and we are proud of the fact that we held out longer against Rome than any other place in all of Italy. But no more. Never again. Our prosperity is gone, all our young men are dead. We will not join you against Rome.”

  When Nuceria returned the same answer Spartacus held a small conference with Crixus and Aluso.

  “Sack them,” said the Thracian priestess. “Teach them that it is wiser to join us.”

  “I agree,” said Crixus, “though my reason is different. We have forty thousand men, enough equipment to outfit every last one, and plenty to eat. But we have nothing else, Spartacus. It is all very well to promise our troops lives of distinction and wealth under the government of Quintus Sertorius, but it might be better to give them some of that wealth right now. If we sack any town which refuses to join us, we will terrify the towns we have still to reach—and we will please our legions. Women, plunder—there’s not a soldier born who doesn’t love a sack!”

  His temper frayed by what he saw as unappreciative rejection, Spartacus made up his mind more quickly than the old Spartacus of pregladiatorial days would have; that had been a different life, he a different sort of man. “Very well. We attack Nuceria and Nola. Tell the men to have no mercy.”

  The men had no mercy. Looking at the results, Spartacus decided that there was much merit in sacking towns. Nuceria and Nola had yielded treasure as well as money, food, women; if he continued to sack, he would be able to present Quintus Sertorius with a huge fortune as well as an army! And if he did, then it seemed likely that Quintus Sertorius the Dictator of Rome would make Spartacus the Thracian gladiator his Master of the Horse.

  Therefore the huge fortune had to be obtained before he left Italy. Requests were still pouring in from whole districts of men anxious to join him, and telling of rich pickings in parts of Lucania, Bruttium and Calabria which had not been touched by the Italian War. So from Campania the rebels journeyed south to sack Consentia in Bruttium and then Thurii and Metapontum on the Gulf of Tarentum. Much to Spartacus’s delight, all three towns were possessed of staggering wealth.

  When Aluso had finished scarifying the skull of Batiatus, he had given her a sheet of silver with which to line it; but after Consentia, Thurii and Metapontum, he told her to throw the silver on the nearest rubbish heap, replace it with gold. And there was a certain seduction in all this—as well as the ever—present seduction of Aluso, who thought like a barbarian but had terrible magic and stood to him as the talisman of his luck. As long as he had Aluso by his side, he was one of Fortune’s favorites.

  Yes, she was wonderful. She could find water, she sensed when disaster was looming, she always gave him the right advice. Growing heavy with his child, her rich red mouth a perfect foil for flaxen hair and wild white wolf’s pallid eyes, ankles and wrists clashing with the gold she loaded upon them, he thought her perfect, not the least because she was a Thracian and he had become a Thracian. They belonged together; she was the personification of this strange new life.

  Early in April he was marching into eastern Samnium, sure that here at least the towns would join him. But Asernia, Bovianum, Beneventum and Saepinum all rejected his overtures—we won’t join you, we don’t want you, go away! Nor were they worth sacking. Verres and Cethegus had left nothing. However, individual Samnites kept flocking to join his army, which had now swelled to ninety thousand men.

  So many people, Spartacus was finding out, were difficult to manage. Though the troops were organized into proper Roman legions and were armed in Roman style, he could never seem to find enough capable legates and tribunes to keep an iron control over soldierly impulses, wine, the hideous strife the female camp followers provoked. Time, he decided, to march for Italian Gaul, Gaul-across-the-Alps, and Quintus Sertorius in Nearer Spain. Not to the west of the Apennines—he had no desire to venture anywhere near the city of Rome. He would proceed up the Adriatic littoral through regions which had fought bitterly against Roman control of the peninsula—M
arrucini, Vestini, Frentani, southern Picentines. Many of their men would join him!

  But Crixus didn’t want to go to Nearer Spain. Nor did the thirty thousand men in his division of the army.

  “Why go so far?” he asked. “If what you say about Quintus Sertorius is true, then one day he will arrive in Italy. It’s better that he finds us in Italy still, with our foot on Rome’s neck. The distance from here to Spain is half as far again as a thousand miles, and we’d be marching the whole way through barbarian tribes who would see us as just another lot of Romans. My men and I are against the idea of leaving Italy.”

  “If you and your men are against the idea of leaving Italy,” said Spartacus angrily, “then don’t leave Italy! What do I care? I’ve close to a hundred thousand men to look after, and that’s far too many! So off you go, Crixus—the further, the better! Take your thirty thousand idiots, stay in Italy!”

  So when Spartacus and seventy thousand soldiers—together with a vast baggage train and forty thousand women, not to mention babies and young children—turned north to cross the Tifernus River, Crixus and his thirty thousand followers turned south in the direction of Brundisium. It was the end of April.