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

by Colleen McCullough

  *

  At about the same moment, the consuls Gellius and Clodianus left Rome to pick up their troops from Capua, Quintus Arrius the ex-praetor having told the Senate that the four legions of new soldiers assembled in Capua were as good as they were ever going to be; he could not guarantee that they were battleworthy, but he hoped they were.

  When the consuls reached Capua they were informed of the split between Spartacus and Crixus, and of the new direction into the north that Spartacus himself was taking. A plan was developed; Quintus Arrius would take one legion south to deal with Crixus at once, Gellius would take the second legion and shadow Spartacus from behind until Arrius could rejoin him, while Clodianus took the other two legions on a rapid march past Rome, then east on the Via Valeria to emerge on the Adriatic coast well to the north of Spartacus. The two consuls would then have Spartacus between them and could close the jaws of their pincer.

  Some days later came splendid news from Quintus Arrius. Though outnumbered five to one, he had concealed himself in ambush on Mount Garganus in Apulia and fallen upon the undisciplined, jostling mass of men Crixus led into the trap. Crixus himself and all thirty thousand of his followers were killed, those who survived the ambush by execution afterward; Quintus Arrius had no intention of leaving live enemy in his wake.

  Gellius was not so lucky. What Arrius had done to Crixus, Spartacus did to him. The troops of the single legion Gellius possessed scattered in wild panic the moment they saw a vast force descending upon them—a good thing, as it turned out, for those who stayed were slaughtered. And at least they fled without abandoning arms or armor, so that when the reunited Arrius and Gellius managed to round them up they still had their equipment and could (theoretically, anyway) fight again without needing to return to Capua.

  The course Arrius and Gellius took after their defeat was of no moment to Spartacus; he marched immediately into the north to deal with Clodianus, of whose ploy he had been informed by a captured Roman tribune. At Hadria on the Adriatic coast the two armies met with much the same result for Clodianus as for Gellius. The troops of Clodianus dispersed in panic. Victor on both fields, Spartacus continued his northward progress unopposed.

  Nothing daunted, Gellius, Clodianus and Arrius collected their men and tried again at Firmum Picenum. Again they were defeated. Spartacus marched into the Ager Gallicus. He crossed the Rubico into Italian Gaul at the end of Sextilis and started up the Via Aemilia toward Placentia and the western Alps. Quintus Sertorius, here we come!

  The valley of the Padus was lush, rich countryside which provided forage aplenty and towns with granaries full to overflowing. As he now systematically sacked towns likely to yield good plunder, Spartacus did not endear himself or his army to the citizens of Italian Gaul.

  At Mutina, halfway to the Alps, the vast army encountered the governor of Italian Gaul, Gaius Cassius Longinus, who tried valiantly to block their progress with a single legion. Gallant though the action was, it could not but fail; Cassius’s legate Gnaeus Manlius came up two days later with Italian Gaul’s other legion and suffered the same fate as Cassius. On both occasions the Roman troops had stayed to fight, which meant that Spartacus collected over ten thousand sets of arms and armor on the field.

  The last Roman to whom Spartacus had personally spoken—and if he spoke to none, then nor did anyone else in that vast and terrifying horde—had been the tribune captured during the first defeat of Gellius months before. Neither at Hadria nor at Firmum Picenum did he so much as see Gellius, Clodianus or Arrius at close quarters. But now at Mutina he had two high—ranking Roman prisoners, Gaius Cassius and Gnaeus Manlius, and he fancied the idea of speaking with them: time to let a couple of members of the Senate see the man of whom all Italy and Italian Gaul was talking! Time to let the Senate know who he was. For he had no intention of killing or detaining Cassius and Manlius; he wanted them to return to Rome and report in person.

  He had, however, loaded his prisoners down with chains, and made sure that when they were brought into his presence he was seated on a podium and wearing a plain white toga.

  Cassius and Manlius stared, but it was when Spartacus addressed them in good, Campanian—accented Latin that they realized what he was.

  “You’re an Italian!” said Cassius.

  “I’m a Roman,” Spartacus corrected him.

  No Cassius was easily cowed; the clan was warlike and very fierce, and if an occasional Cassius committed a military blunder, no Cassius had ever run away. So this Cassius proved himself a true member of his family by lifting one manacled arm and shaking his fist at the big, handsome fellow on the podium.

  “Free me from the indignity of these bonds and you’ll soon be a dead Roman!” he snarled. “A deserter from the legions, eh? Put in the ring as a Thracian!”

  Spartacus flushed. “I’m no deserter,” he said stiffly. “In me you see a military tribune who was unjustly convicted of mutiny in Illyricum. And you find your bonds an indignity? Well, how do you think I found my bonds when I was sent to the kind of school run by a worm like Batiatus? One set of chains deserves another, Cassius the proconsul!”

  “Kill us and get it over and done with,” said Cassius.

  “Kill you? Oh, no, I have no intention of doing that,” said Spartacus, smiling. “I’m going to set you free now that you’ve felt the indignity of bonds. You will go back to Rome and you will tell the Senate who I am, and where I’m going, and what I intend to do when I get there—and what I will be when I come back.”

  Manlius moved as if to answer; Cassius turned his head and glared; Manlius subsided.

  “Who you are—a mutineer. Where you’re going—to perdition. What you’re going to do when you get there—rot. What you’ll be when you come back—a mindless shade without substance or shadow,” sneered Cassius. “I’d be glad to tell the Senate all of that!”

  “Then tell the Senate this while you’re about it!” snapped Spartacus, rising to his feet and ripping off the immaculate toga; he raked his feet on it with the relish of a dog raking its hind legs after defaecation, then kicked it off the podium. “In my train I have eighty thousand men, all properly armed and trained to fight like Romans. Most of them are Samnites and Lucanians, but even the slaves who enlisted under me are brave men. I have thousands of talents in plunder. And I am on my way to join Quintus Sertorius in Nearer Spain. Together he and I will inflict total defeat upon Rome’s armies and generals in both the Spains, and then Quintus Sertorius and I will march back to Italy. Your Rome doesn’t stand a chance, proconsul! Before the next year has passed, Quintus Sertorius will be the Dictator of Rome, and I will be his Master of the Horse!”

  Cassius and Manlius had listened to this with a series of expressions chasing each other across their faces—fury, awe, anger, bewilderment, amazement—and finally, when they were sure Spartacus had ended, amusement! Both men threw their heads back and roared with unfeigned laughter while Spartacus stood feeling a slowly rising tide of red suffuse his cheeks. What had he said that they found so funny? Did they laugh at his temerity? Did they think him mad?

  “Oh, you fool!” said Cassius when he was able, the tears of hilarity running like a freshet. “You great bumpkin! You booby! Don’t you have an intelligence network? Of course you don’t! You’re not a Roman commander’s anus! What’s the difference between this horde of yours and a horde of barbarians? Nothing, and that is the simple truth! I can’t believe you don’t know, but you really don’t know!”

  “Know what?” asked Spartacus, his color gone. There had been no room for rage at the derision in Cassius’s voice, at the epithets he hurled; all that filled Spartacus’s mind was fear.

  “Sertorius is dead! Assassinated by his own senior legate Perperna last winter. There is no rebel army in Spain! Just the victorious legions of Metellus Pius and Pompeius Magnus, who will soon be marching back to Italy to put paid to you and your whole horde of barbarians!” And Cassius laughed again.

  Spartacus didn’t stay to hear, he fled fr
om the room with his hands clapped against his ears and sought out Aluso.

  Now the mother of Spartacus’s son, Aluso could find nothing to say to console him; he covered his head in folds of his scarlet general’s cape snatched from the couch, and wept, wept, wept.

  “What can I do?’’ he asked her, rocking back and forth. “I have an army with no objective, a people with no home!”

  Hair hanging in strings over her face, knees wide apart as she squatted with her blood—cup and her knucklebones and the grisly tattered hand of Batiatus, Aluso whipped the bones with the hand, stared and muttered.

  “Rome’s great enemy in the west is dead,” she said at last, “but Rome’s great enemy in the east still lives. The bones say we must march to join Mithridates.”

  Oh, why hadn’t he thought of that for himself? Spartacus threw away the general’s cape, looked at Aluso with wide, tear—blurred eyes. “Mithridates! Of course Mithridates! We will march across the eastern Alps into Illyricum, cross Thrace to the Euxine and join ourselves to Pontus.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, snuffled, gazed at Aluso wildly. “In Thrace is your homeland, woman. Would you rather stay there?’’

  She snorted scornfully. “My place is with you, Spartacus. Whether they know it or not, the Bessi are a defeated people. No tribe in the world is strong enough to resist Rome forever, only a great king like Mithridates. No, husband, we will not stay in Thrace. We will join ourselves to King Mithridates.”

  *

  One of the many problems about an army as huge as that one belonging to Spartacus was the sheer impossibility of direct communication with all its members. He gathered the vast crowd together as best he could and did his utmost to make sure that all his men and their women understood why they were going to turn in their tracks and march back down the Via Aemilia toward Bononia, where they would take the Via Annia northeast to Aquileia and Illyricum. Some did understand, but many did not, either because they hadn’t heard Spartacus himself and so had received a garbled version of what he said, or because they owned all an Italian’s fear and detestation of the eastern potentate. Quintus Sertorius was Roman. Mithridates was a savage who ate Italian babies and would enslave everyone.

  The march resumed, this time eastward, but as Bononia came closer discontent among the soldiers and their camp followers grew. If Spain was an eternity away, what was Pontus? Many of the Samnites and Lucanians—and they were a majority in the army—spoke Oscan and Latin, but little or no Greek; how would they get on in a place like Pontus without Greek?

  At Bononia a hundred-strong deputation of legates, tribunes, centurions and men from the ranks came to see Spartacus.

  “We will not leave Italy” was what they said.

  “Then I will not desert you,” said Spartacus, swallowing a terrible disappointment. “Without me you will disintegrate. The Romans will kill all of you.”

  When the deputation left he turned as always to Aluso. “I am defeated, woman, but not by an external enemy, even Rome. They are too afraid. They do not understand.”

  Her bones were not lying happily. She scattered them angrily, then scooped them up and put them in their pouch. What they said she would not tell him; some things were better left in the minds and hearts of women, who were closer to the earth.

  “Then we will go to Sicily,” she said. “The slaves of that place will rise for us, as they have risen twice before. Perhaps the Romans will leave us to occupy Sicily in peace if we promise to sell them enough grain at a cheap enough price.”

  The uncertainty in her she could not disguise; sensing it, for one wild moment Spartacus toyed with the idea of deflecting his army south onto the via Cassia and marching on the city of Rome. But then the reason in what Aluso suggested won out. She was right. She was always right. Sicily it must be.

  4

  To become a pontifex was to enter the most exclusive enclave of political power in Rome; the augurship came a close second and there were some families whose augurships were as jealously guarded and prized as any family guarded and prized its pontificate, but always the pontificate came out that little bit ahead. So when Gaius Julius Caesar was inducted into the College of Pontifices he knew that he had moved more surely toward his ultimate goal, the consulship, and that this inauguration more than made up for his failure as the flamen Dialis. No one would ever be able to point the finger at him and imply that his status was in doubt, that perhaps he ought to be the flamen Dialis in fact; his position as a co-opted pontifex told everybody he was firmly ensconced at the very core of the Republic.

  His mother, he learned, had befriended Mamercus and his wife Cornelia Sulla, and moved these days more freely among the high nobles her exile to an insula in the Subura had driven away; she was so enormously respected, so admired. The odium of her marriage to Gaius Marius had removed his Aunt Julia from the position she might otherwise have come to occupy with increasing age—that of the modern Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi. And it now seemed as if his mother might inherit the title! These days she dined with women like Catulus’s wife, Hortensia, and Hortensius’s wife, Lutatia, with young matrons like Servilia—the widow of a Brutus and the wife of Decimus Junius Silanus (by whom she now had two little girls to add to Brutus’s son)—and with several Licinias, Marcias, Cornelia Scipiones and Junias.

  “It’s wonderful, Mater, but why?” he asked, eyes twinkling.

  Her beautiful eyes gleamed, the creases at the corners of her mouth compressed until little dimples popped up in her cheeks. “Why do you expect answers to rhetorical questions?” she asked. “You know as well as I do, Caesar. Your career is accelerating, and I am helping.” She gave a slight cough. “Besides, most of these women seem to me to be utterly lacking in common sense. So they tend to come to me with their problems.” She thought about that statement, amended it: “All, that is, except Servilia. Now she is a very structured woman! Knows exactly where she’s going. You ought to meet her, Caesar.”

  He looked indescribably bored. “Thank you, Mater, but no. I am extremely grateful for every little bit of help you can give me, but that does not mean I’ll join the sweet—watered—wine—and—little—cakes circle. The only women aside from you and Cinnilla who interest me are the wives of men I intend to cuckold. As I have no quarrel with Decimus Junius Silanus, I fail to see why I should cultivate his wife. The patrician Servilii are insufferable!”

  “This one isn’t insufferable,” said Aurelia, but not in the tone of voice which suggested she had an end to pursue. Instead she changed the subject. “I haven’t seen any evidence that you intend to settle back into city life.”

  “That’s because I don’t. I have just enough time to join Marcus Fonteius in Gaul-across-the-Alps for a quick campaign, so that’s where I’m off to. I’ll be back by next June—I’m going to stand for election as one of the tribunes of the soldiers.”

  “Sensible,” she approved. “I’m told that you’re a superlative soldier, so you’ll do well in an official capacity.”

  He winced. “Unkind and unfair, Mater!”

  *

  Fonteius, who like most of the Transalpine governors had based himself in Massilia, was perfectly willing to keep Caesar busy for ten months. He had sustained a bad leg wound fighting the Vocontii, and chafed at the thought of watching all his work go for nothing because he could not ride. So when Caesar arrived Fonteius handed him the province’s two legions and told him to finish the campaign up the Druentia River; Fonteius would occupy himself dealing with the supply lines to Spain. After the news of the death of Sertorius came, the governor breathed a sigh of relief and embarked in tandem with Caesar upon a sweeping campaign up the Rhodanus valley into the lands of the Allobroges.

  Born soldiers both, Fonteius and Caesar got on famously together, and admitted freely to each other at the end of the second campaign that there was no joy quite like working with a man of eminent military sense. So when Caesar returned to Rome in his habitual headlong fashion, he rode in the knowledge that his
record now stood at seven campaigns—only three to go! He had loved his time in Gaul, never having ventured west of the Alps before, and found it considerably easier dealing with the Gauls themselves because (thanks to his old tutor, Marcus Antonius Gnipho, to Cardixa and to some of his mother’s tenants) he spoke several Gallic dialects fluently. Deeming no Roman conversant with their tongues, the Salluvian and Vocontian scouts tended to slip into Gallic whenever they wished to exchange information not for Roman ears; but Caesar understood very quickly, learned much he wasn’t supposed to—and never gave himself away.

  It was a good time to be standing for election as a tribune of the soldiers. The presence of Spartacus meant that his duty in the consuls’ legions would be within Italy. But first he had to get himself elected—don the specially chalked, snow—white toga of the candidate and move among the electors in every marketplace and basilica in Rome, not to mention arcades and colonnades, guilds and colleges, the porticus and the portico. Since there were twenty-four tribunes of the soldiers elected annually by the Assembly of the People, it was not a particularly difficult feat to be voted in, but Caesar had set himself a much harder task than mere election: he was resolved to be the candidate who polled the highest number of votes in every election he would contest as he climbed the cursus honorum. Thus he put himself through much that the average candidate for that lowest of all magistracies deemed superfluous effort. Nor would he avail himself of the services of a privately employed nomenclator, that arch—recollector of people’s names; Caesar would be his own nomenclator, never forget a face or the name associated with it. A man flattered by instant placing of his name with his face after some years had elapsed since the last meeting was very prone to think highly of such a brilliant, courteous, capable fellow—and vote for him. Curiously most candidates forgot the Subura, just looked blank and dismissed it as a low—life infestation Rome would be better without; but Caesar, who had lived in the Subura all his life, knew that it abounded with men of the lowest end of the First Class and the upper end of the Second Class. Not one of whom was unknown to him. Not one of whom would refuse to vote for him.