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

by Colleen McCullough

  Not that the fate of this segment of the Spartacani held any interest for Marcus Licinius Crassus. When the snow began to lessen he struck camp and moved his eight legions out onto the Via Popillia in the wake of the Spartacani soldiers.

  His progress was as plodding as an ox, for he was always methodical, always in possession of his general’s wits. There was no use in chasing; cold, hunger and lack of real purpose would combine to slow the Spartacani down, as would the size of their army. Better to have the baggage train in the middle of the legionary column than run the risk of losing it. Sooner or later he would catch up.

  His scouts, however, were very busy, very swift. As March ground to its end they reported to Crassus that the Spartacani, having reached the river Silarus, had divided into two forces. One, under Spartacus, had continued up the Via Popillia toward Campania, while the other, under Castus and Gannicus, had struck east up the valley of the middle Silarus.

  “Good!” said Crassus. “We’ll leave Spartacus alone for the moment and concentrate on getting rid of the two Samnites.”

  The scouts then reported that Castus and Gannicus had not gone very far; they had encountered the prosperous little town of Volcei and were eating well for the first time in two months. No need to hurry!

  When the four legions preceding Crassus’s baggage train came up, Castus and Gannicus were too busy feasting to notice. The Spartacani had spread without making more than an apology for a camp on the foreshores of a little lake which at this time of the year contained sweet, potable water; by autumn the same locale would have held few charms. Behind the lake was a mountain. Crassus saw immediately what he had to do, and decided not to wait for the four legions which followed the baggage train.

  “Pomptinus and Rufus, take twelve cohorts and sneak around the far side of the mountain. When you’re in position, charge downhill. That will take you right into the middle of their—camp? As soon as I see you I’ll attack from the front. We’ll squash them between us like a beetle.”

  The plan should have worked. It would have worked, except for the vagaries of chance the best scouts could not divine. For when they saw how much food Volcei could provide, Castus and Gannicus sent word to Spartacus to retrace his footsteps, join the revelry. Spartacus duly retraced his footsteps and appeared on the far side of the lake just as Crassus launched his attack. The men belonging to Castus and Gannicus bolted into the midst of the newcomers, and all the Spartacani promptly vanished.

  Some generals would have clawed the air, but not Crassus. “Unfortunate. But eventually we’ll succeed,” he said, unruffled.

  A series of storms slowed everybody down. The armies of both sides lingered around the Silarus, though it appeared that it was now Spartacus’s turn to leave the Via Popillia, while Castus and Gannicus used the road to march into Campania. Crassus lurked well in the rear, a fat spider bent on getting fatter. He too had decided to split his forces now that his eight legions were reunited; the baggage train, he knew, was safe. Two legions of infantry and all the cavalry were put under the command of Lucius Quinctius and Tremellius Scrofa, and ordered to be ready to follow whichever segment of Spartacani left the Via Popillia, while Crassus himself would pursue the segment on the road.

  Like a millstone he ground on; as his legion was attached to the general’s division, Caesar could only marvel at the absolute tenacity and method of this extraordinary man. At Eburum, not far north of the Silarus, he caught Castus and Gannicus at last, and annihilated their army. Thirty thousand died on the field, tricked and trapped; only a very few managed to slip through the Roman lines and flee inland to find Spartacus.

  Greatest pleasure of all to every soldier in the victorious army was what Crassus discovered among the tumbled heaps of Spartacani baggage after the battle; the five eagles which had been taken when various Roman forces had been defeated, twenty-six cohort standards, and the fasces belonging to five praetors.

  “Look at that!” cried Crassus, actually beaming. “Isn’t it a wonderful sight?”

  The general now displayed the fact that when he needed to, he could move very fast indeed. Word came from Lucius Quinctius that he and Scrofa had been ambushed—though without grievous losses—and that Spartacus was still nearby.

  Crassus marched.

  *

  The grand undertaking had foundered. Left in the possession of Spartacus was the part of the army marching with him up to the sources of the Tanagrus River; that, and Aluso, and his son.

  When his defeat of Quinctius and Scrofa proved indecisive because their cavalry—fleeter by far than infantry—mustered and allowed the Roman foot to withdraw, Spartacus made no move to leave the area. Three little towns had provided his men with ample food for the moment, but what the next valley and the one after that held, he no longer had any idea. It was approaching spring; granaries were low, no vegetables had yet formed and plumped after the hard winter, the hens were scrawny, and the pigs (crafty creatures!) had gone into hiding in the woods. An obnoxious local from Potentia, the closest town, had taken great pleasure in journeying out to see Spartacus in order to tell him that Varro Lucullus was expected any day to land in Brundisium from Macedonia, and that the Senate had ordered him to reinforce Crassus immediately.

  “Your days are numbered, gladiator!” said the local with glee. “Rome is invincible!”

  “I should cut your throat,” said the gladiator wearily.

  “Go ahead! I expect you to! And I don’t care!”

  “Then I won’t give you the satisfaction of a noble death. Just go home!”

  Aluso was listening. After the fellow had taken himself off (very disappointed that his lifeblood had not streamed out upon the ground) she moved close to Spartacus and put her hand gently upon his arm.

  “It finishes here,” she said.

  “I know, woman.”

  “I see you fall in battle, but I cannot see a death.”

  “When I fall in battle I’ll be dead.”

  He was so very tired, and the catastrophe at Scyllaeum still haunted him. How could he look his men in the face knowing that it had been his own misguided carelessness which had ended in their being penned in by Crassus? The women and children were gone and he knew they would not reappear. They had all died from starvation somewhere in the wild Bruttian countryside.

  With no idea whether what the man from Potentia had told him about Varro Lucullus was true or not, he knew that it cut him off from Brundisium nonetheless. Crassus controlled the Via Popillia; the news of Castus and Gannicus had reached him even before he ambushed Quinctius and Scrofa. Nowhere to go. Nowhere, that is, except one last battlefield. And he was glad, glad, glad…. Neither birth nor ability had tailored him for such an enormous responsibility, the lives and welfare of a whole people. He was just an ordinary Roman of Italian family who had been born on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, and ought to have spent his life there alongside his father and his brother. Who did he think he was, to attempt to give birth to a new nation? Not noble enough, not educated enough, not grand enough. But there was some honor in dying a free man on a battlefield; he would never go back to a prison. Never.

  When word came that Crassus and his army were approaching, he took Aluso and his son and put them in a wagon harnessed to six mules far enough away from where he intended to make his last stand to ensure that they would elude pursuit. He would have preferred that they leave immediately, but Aluso refused, saying she must wait for the outcome of the conflict. In the covered rear of the vehicle lay gold, silver, treasures, coin; a guarantee that his wife and child would prosper. That they might be killed he understood. Yet their fates were on the laps of the gods, and the gods had been passing strange.

  Some forty thousand Spartacani formed up to meet Crassus. Spartacus made no speech to them before the battle, but they cheered him deafeningly as he rode down their ranks on beautiful dappled grey Batiatus. He took his place beneath the standard of his people—the leaping enameled fish of a Gaul’s fighting helmet—turned in the s
addle to raise both hands in the air, fists clenched, then slid out of the horse’s saddle. His sword was in his right hand, the curved saber of a Thracian gladiator; he closed his eyes, raised it, and brought it down into Batiatus’s neck. Blood sprayed and gushed, but the lovely creature made no protest. Like a sacrificial victim it went down on its knees, rolled over, died.

  There. No need for a speech. To kill his beloved horse told his followers everything. Spartacus did not intend to leave the field alive; he had dispensed with his means of escape.

  As battles went it was straight, uncomplicated, extremely bloody. Taking their example from Spartacus, most of his men fought until they dropped, some in death, some in utter exhaustion. Spartacus himself killed two centurions before an unknown in the struggling mass cut the hamstrings in one leg. Unable to stand, he fell to his knees, but fought on doggedly until a huge pile of bodies by his side tumbled over and buried him.

  Fifteen thousand Spartacani survived to flee the field; six thousand went in the direction of Apulia, the rest south toward the Bruttian mountains.

  *

  “Over in just six months, and a winter campaign at that,” said Crassus to Caesar. “I’ve lost very few men all considered, and Spartacus is dead. Rome has her eagles and fasces back, and a lot of the plunder will prove impossible to return to its original owners: We’ll all do quite well out of it.”

  “There is a difficulty, Marcus Crassus,” said Caesar, who had been delegated to inspect the field for men still alive.

  “Oh?”

  “Spartacus. He isn’t there.”

  “Rubbish!” said Crassus, startled. “I saw him fall!”

  “So did I. I even memorized exactly where the spot was. I can take you straight to it—in fact, come with me now and I will! But he isn’t there, Marcus Crassus. He isn’t there.”

  “Odd!” The general huffed, pursed his lips, thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, what does it really matter? His army’s gone, that’s the main thing. I can’t celebrate a triumph over an enemy classified as slave. The Senate will give me an ovation, but it’s not the same. Not the same!” He sighed. “What about his woman, the Thracian witch?”

  “We haven’t found her either, though we did round up quite a few camp followers who had huddled together out of the way. I questioned them about her—and found out that her name is Aluso—but they swore she had climbed into a red-hot, sizzling chariot drawn by fiery snakes and driven off into the sky.”

  “Shades of Medea! I suppose that makes Spartacus Jason!” Crassus turned to walk with Caesar toward the heap of dead that had buried the fallen Spartacus. “I think somehow the pair of them got away. Don’t you?”

  “I’m sure they did,” said Caesar.

  “Well, we’ll have to scour the countryside for Spartacani anyway. They might come to light.”

  Caesar made no reply. His own opinion was that they would never come to light. He was clever, the gladiator. Too clever to try to raise another army. Clever enough to become anonymous.

  All through the month of May the Roman army tracked down Spartacani in the fastnesses of Lucania and Bruttium, ideal locations for brigandry which made it imperative that every surviving Spartacanus be captured. Caesar had estimated those who escaped southward at about nine or ten thousand, but all he and the other hunting details managed to find were some six thousand six hundred all told. The rest would probably become brigands, contribute to the perils of journeying down the Via Popillia to Rhegium without an armed escort.

  “I can keep on going,” he said to Crassus on the Kalends of June, “though the catch will become progressively smaller and harder to snare.”

  “No,” said Crassus with decision. “I want my army back in Capua by the next market day. Including the consuls’ legions. The curule elections are due next month and I intend to be back in Rome in plenty of time to stand for the consulship.”

  That was no surprise; Caesar in fact did not consider it worthy of comment. Instead he continued on the subject of the fugitive Spartacani. “What about the six thousand or so who fled northeast into Apulia?”

  “They got as far as the border of Italian Gaul, actually,” said Crassus. “Then they ran into Pompeius Magnus and his legions returning from Spain. You know Magnus! He killed the lot.”

  “So that only leaves the prisoners here. What do you want to do with them?”

  “They’ll go with us as far as Capua.” The face Crassus turned upon his senior tribune of the soldiers was its usual phlegmatic self, but the eyes held an obdurate coldness. “Rome doesn’t need these futile slave wars, Caesar. They’re just one more drain on the Treasury. Had we not been lucky, five eagles and five sets of fasces might have been lost forever, a stain on Rome’s honor I for one would have found unendurable. In time men like Spartacus might be blown up out of all proportion by some enemy of Rome’s. Other men might strive to emulate him, never knowing the grubby truth. You and I know that Spartacus was a product of the legions, far more a Quintus Sertorius than a maltreated slave. Had he not been a product of the legions he could never have gone as far as he did. I do not want him turning into some sort of slave hero. So I will use Spartacus to put a stop to the whole phenomenon of slave uprisings.”

  “It was far more a Samnite than a slave uprising.”

  “True. But the Samnites are a curse Rome will have to live with forever. Whereas slaves must learn their place. I have the means to teach them their place. And I will. After I finish with the remnants of the Spartacani, there will be no more slave uprisings in our Roman world.”

  Used to thinking so quickly and summing men up so well that he had arrived at the answer long before anyone else, Caesar found himself absolutely unable to guess what Crassus was up to.

  “How will you accomplish that?” he asked.

  The accountant took over. “It was the fact that there are six thousand six hundred prisoners gave me the idea,” Crassus said. “The distance between Capua and Rome is one hundred and thirty-two miles, each of five thousand feet. That is a total of six hundred and sixty thousand feet. Divided by six thousand six hundred, a distance of one hundred feet. I intend to crucify one Spartacanus every hundred feet between Capua and Rome. And they will remain hanging from their crosses until they rot away to bare bones.”

  Caesar drew a breath. “A terrible sight.”

  “I have one question,” said Crassus, his smooth and un—lined brow creasing. “Do you think I ought to put all the crosses on one side of the road, or alternate between both sides?”

  “One side of the road,” said Caesar instantly. “Definitely on one side of the road only. That is, provided by road you mean the Via Appia rather than the Via Latina.”

  “Oh yes, it has to be the Via Appia. Straight as an arrow for miles and miles, and not as many hills.”

  “Then one side of the road. The eye will take the sight in better that way.” Caesar smiled. “I have some experience when it comes to crucifixion.”

  “I heard about that,” said Crassus seriously. “However, I can’t give you the job. It’s not a fitting one for a tribune of the soldiers. He’s an elected magistrate. By rights it belongs to the praefectus fabrum.’’

  As the praefectus fabrum —the man who looked after all the technical and logistic factors involved in army supply—was one of Crassus’s own freedmen and brilliant at his work, neither Caesar nor Crassus doubted that it would be a smooth operation.

  *

  Thus it was that at the end of June when Crassus, his legates, his tribunes of the soldiers and his own appointed military tribunes rode up the Via Appia from Capua escorted by a single cohort of troops, the left—hand side of the ancient and splendid road was lined with crosses all the way. Every hundred feet another Spartacanus slumped from the ropes which cruelly bound arms at the elbow and legs below the knees. Nor had Crassus been kind. The six thousand six hundred Spartacani died slowly with unbroken limbs, a soughing of moans from Capua to the Capena Gate of Rome.

 
Some people came to sightsee. Some brought a recalcitrant slave to look upon Crassus’s handiwork and point out that this was the right of every master, to crucify. But many upon looking turned immediately to go home again, and those who were obliged to travel on the Via Appia anywhere between Capua and Rome were grateful that the crosses adorned only one side of the road. As the distance rendered the sight more bearable, the popular spot for those who lived in Rome to see was from the top of the Servian Walls on either side of the Capena Gate; the view extended for miles, but the faces were blurs.

  They hung there for eighteen months enduring the slow cycle of decay that took them from living skin and muscle to clacking bones, for Crassus would not permit that they be taken down until the very last day of his consulship.

  And, thought Caesar in some wonder, surely no other military campaign in the whole history of Rome had been so rounded, so neat, so finite: what had begun with a decimation had ended with a crucifixion.

  PART VIII

  from MAY 71 B.C.

  until MARCH 69 B.C.

  1

  When Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus reached the border at the Rubico River, he didn’t halt his army. That part of the Ager Gallicus he owned lay in Italy, and to Italy he would go, no matter what Sulla’s laws said. His men were starved to see their homes, and there were still more among them who were his Picentine and Umbrian veterans than there were others. Outside Sena Gallica he put them into a vast camp under orders not to stray without leave from a tribune and proceeded then to Rome with a cohort of foot to escort him down the Via Flaminia.

  The answer had come to him shortly after he began the long march from Narbo to his new pass across the Alps, and he wondered then at his denseness in not seeing it sooner. Three times he had been given a special commission: once by Sulla, twice by the Senate; twice with propraetorian status, once with proconsular status. He was, he knew, undoubtedly the First Man in Rome. But he also knew that no one who mattered would ever admit the fact. So he would have to prove it to everyone, and the only way he could do that was to bring off some coup so staggering in its audacity and so glaringly unconstitutional that after it was done all men would have to accord him his rightful title of the First Man in Rome.