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

by Colleen McCullough

  But Titus Labienus was not a deep thinker, nor political. And he had conceived a hatred for Commius based on the fact that Commius had preferred not to use Labienus as his conduit to Caesar.

  Aware of this, Caesar had always been careful to keep a distance between Labienus and King Commius of the Atrebates. Though until Hirtius had come in a hurry from Further Gaul yesterday, he hadn’t realized the reason behind Labienus’s request that Gaius Volusenus Quadratus, a military tribune senior enough for a prefecture, be seconded to duty with him over the winter.

  “Another one who hates Commius,” said Hirtius, looking worn out from his journey. “They hatched a plot.”

  “Volusenus hates Commius? Why?” asked Caesar, frowning.

  “It happened during the second expedition to Britannia, I gather. The usual thing. They both fancied the same woman.”

  “Who spurned Volusenus in favor of Commius.”

  “Exactly. Well, why should she not? She was a Briton, and already under Commius’s protection. I remember her. Pretty girl.”

  “Sometimes,” said Caesar wearily, “I wish we just went off somewhere and budded. Women are a complication we men do not need to suffer.”

  “I suspect,” said Hirtius, smiling, “that women often feel the same way.”

  “Which philosophical discussion is not getting us any closer to the truth about Volusenus and Labienus. What sort of plot did they hatch?”

  “The report came to me from Labienus that Commius was preaching sedition.”

  “Is that all? Did Labienus give details?”

  “Only that Commius was going about among the Menapii, the Nervii and the Eburones stirring up a new revolt.”

  “Among three tribes reduced to skeletons?”

  “And that he was thick with Ambiorix.”

  “A convenient name to use. But I would have thought Commius would deem Ambiorix more a threat to his cherished high kingship than an ally willing to put him there.”

  “I agree. Which is why I began to smell rotting fish. A long acquaintance with Commius has convinced me that he knows very well who can assist him onto his throne—you.”

  “What else?”

  “Had Labienus said no more, I might not have stirred out of Samarobriva,” said Hirtius. “It was the last part of his typically curt letter which made me decide to seek more information about this so-called plot from Labienus himself.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That I was not to worry. That he would deal with Commius.”

  “Ah!” Caesar sat forward and linked his hands between his knees. “So you went to see Labienus?”

  “Too late, Caesar. The deed was done. Labienus summoned Commius to a parley. Instead of going himself, he deputed Volusenus to go on his behalf. With a guard of hand-picked centurions from among Labienus’s cronies. Commius—who cannot have suspected any foul play— appeared with a few friends, no troops. I imagine he wasn’t pleased to discover Volusenus there, though what the truth of the matter is I can have no idea. All I know is what Labienus told me with a mixture of pride in his own cleverness at thinking of the scheme, and chagrin that it went amiss.”

  “Are you trying to say,” asked Caesar incredulously, “that Labienus intended to assassinate Commius?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Hirtius simply. “He made no secret of it. According to Labienus, you’re an absolute fool for trusting Commius. Labienus knows he’s plotting sedition.”

  “Without proof which would stand up to close examination?”

  “He could produce none when I pressed the matter, certainly. Just kept insisting he was right and you were wrong. You know the man, Caesar. He’s a force of nature!”

  “What happened?”

  “Volusenus had instructed one of the centurions to do the killing, while the other centurions were to concentrate on making sure none of the Atrebatans escaped. The signal for the centurion to strike was the moment in which Volusenus extended his hand to shake Commius’s.”

  “Jupiter! What are we, adherents of Mithridates? That’s the sort of ploy an eastern king would use! Ohhh… Go on.”

  “Volusenus extended his hand, Commius extended his. The centurion whipped his sword from behind his back and swung it. Either his eye was out or he misliked the task. He caught Commius across the brow, a glancing blow which didn’t even break the bone or render him unconscious. Volusenus drew his sword, but Commius was gone, gushing blood. The Atrebatans formed up around their king and extricated themselves without anyone else’s so much as being wounded.”

  “If I hadn’t heard it from you, Hirtius, I would never have believed it,” said Caesar slowly.

  “Believe it, Caesar, believe it!”

  “So Rome has lost a very valuable ally.”

  “I would think so.” Hirtius produced a slender scroll. “I received this from Commius. It was waiting when I returned to Samarobriva. I haven’t opened it because it is intended for you. Rather than write to you, I came in person.”

  Caesar took the scroll, broke its seal and spread it.

  I have been betrayed, and I have every reason to think that it was your doing, Caesar. You don’t keep men working for you who disobey orders or act on their own initiative to this extent. I had thought you honorable, so I write this with a grief as painful as my head. You can keep your high kingship. I will throw in my lot with my own people, who are above this kind of assassination. We kill each other, yes, but not without honor. You have none. I have made a vow. That never again as long as I live will I come into the presence of a Roman voluntarily.

  “The world at the moment seems to be an endless torment of severed heads,” said Caesar, white about the lips, “but I tell you, Aulus Hirtius, that it would give me great pleasure to lop the head off Labienus’s shoulders! A fraction of an inch at a time. But not before I had him flogged just enough.”

  “What do you intend to do in actuality?”

  “Nothing whatsoever.”

  Hirtius looked shocked. “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But—but—you can at least say what happened in your next dispatch to the Senate!” cried Hirtius. “It may not be the kind of punishment you would prefer to dish out to Labienus, but it will certainly kill any hopes he might have of a public career.”

  The expression on Caesar’s face as he turned his head and tucked his chin in was derisive, angrily amused. “I can’t do that, Hirtius! Look at the trouble Cato made for me over the so-called German ambassadors! Were I to breathe a word of this to the Senate or any other persons who would leak it to Cato, my name would stink to the farthest reaches of the sky. Not Labienus’s. Those senatorial dogs wouldn’t waste an expirated breath in baying for Labienus’s hide. They’d be too busy fixing their teeth in mine.”

  “You’re right, of course,” said Hirtius, sighing. “Which means that Labienus will get away with it.”

  “For the moment,” said Caesar tranquilly. “His time will come, Hirtius. When next I see him, he’ll know exactly where he stands in my estimation. And where his career is going to go if I have any say in the matter. As soon as his usefulness in Gaul is over, I’ll divorce him more thoroughly than Sulla did his poor dying wife.”

  “And Commius? Perhaps if I worked very hard, Caesar, I could persuade him to meet with you privately. It wouldn’t take long to make him see your side of it.”

  Caesar shook his head. “No, Hirtius. It wouldn’t work. My relationship with Commius was based on complete mutual trust, and that is gone. From this time forward each of us would look askance at the other. He took a vow never again voluntarily to come into the presence of a Roman. The Gauls take such vows quite as seriously as we do. I’ve lost Commius.”

  *

  Lingering in Ravenna was not a hardship. Caesar kept a villa there because he also kept a school for gladiators there; the climate was considered the best in all Italia and was ague-free, which made Ravenna a wonderful place for hard physical training.

  Keeping gladia
tors was a profitable hobby, one Caesar found so absorbing he had several thousand, though most of them were billeted in a school near Capua. Ravenna was reserved for the cream of them, the ones Caesar had plans for after they finished their time in the sawdust ring.

  His agents bought or acquired through the military courts none but the most promising fellows, and the five or six years these men spent exhibition-fighting were good years if Caesar was their owner. They were mainly deserters from the legions (offered a choice between disenfranchisement and life as a gladiator), though some were convicted murderers, and a few volunteered their services. These last Caesar would never accept, saying that a free Roman with a taste for battle should enlist in the legions.

  They were well housed, well fed and not overworked, as indeed was true of most gladiatorial schools, which were not prisons. The men came and went as they pleased unless they were booked for a bout, before which they were expected to stay in school, remain sober and train industriously; no man who owned gladiators wanted to see his expensive investment killed or maimed in the ring.

  Gladiatorial combat was an extremely popular spectator sport, though it was not a circus activity; it required a smaller venue like a town marketplace. Traditionally a rich man who had suffered a bereavement celebrated the memory of the dead relative with funeral games, and funeral games consisted of gladiatorial combat. He hired his sawdust soldiers from one of the many gladiatorial schools, usually between four and forty pairs, for whom he paid very heavily. They came to the town, they fought, they departed back to school. And at the end of six years or thirty bouts they retired, having completed their sentence. Their citizenship was secure, they had saved some money, and the really good ones had become public idols whose names were known all over Italia.

  One of the reasons the sport interested Caesar lay in the fate of these men once they had served their time. To Caesar, men with the kind of skills these men had acquired were wasted once they drifted to Rome or some other city and there hired themselves out as bodyguards or bouncers. He preferred to woo them for his legions, but not as rankers. A good gladiator who hadn’t suffered too many blows to the head made an excellent instructor in military training camp, and some made splendid centurions. It also amused him to send deserters from the legions back to the legions as officers.

  Thus the school in Ravenna, where he kept his best men; the majority lived in the school he owned near Capua. The Capuan school of course had not seen him since he assumed his governorships, for the governor of a province could not set foot in Italia proper while ever he commanded an army.

  There were other reasons too why Ravenna saw Caesar for longer than any other place in Illyricum or Italian Gaul. It was close to the Rubicon River, the boundary between Italian Gaul and Italia proper, and the roads between it and Rome, two hundred miles away, were excellent. Which meant fast travel for the couriers who rode back and forth constantly, and comfortable travel for the many people who came from Rome to see Caesar in person, since he could not go to see them.

  After the death of Clodius he followed events in Rome with some anxiety, absolutely sure that Pompey was aiming at the dictatorship. For this reason had he written to Pompey with his marriage and other proposals, though afterward he wished he had not; rejection left a sour taste in the mouth. Pompey had grown so great that he didn’t think it necessary to please anyone save himself, even Caesar. Who perhaps was becoming a trifle too famous these days for Pompey’s comfort. Yet when Pompey’s Law of the Ten Tribunes of the Plebs gave Caesar permission to stand for the consulship in absentia, he wondered if his misgivings about Pompey were simply the imaginings of a man forced to obtain all his news at second hand. Oh, for the chance to spend a month in Rome! But one drip of one hour was impossible. A governor with eleven legions under his command, Caesar was forbidden to cross the river Rubicon into Italia.

  Would Pompey succeed in being appointed Dictator? Rome and the Senate in the persons of men like Bibulus and Cato were resisting it strenuously, but sitting in Ravenna at a distance from the convulsions which wracked Rome every day, it wasn’t difficult to see whose was the hand behind the violence. Pompey’s. Yearning to be Dictator. Trying to force the Senate’s hand.

  Then when the news came that Pompey had been made consul without a colleague, Caesar burst out laughing. As brilliant as it was unconstitutional! The boni had tied Pompey’s hands even as they put the reins of government into them. And Pompey had been naive enough to fall for it. Yet another unconstitutional extraordinary command! While failing to see that in accepting it, he had shown all of Rome—and especially Caesar—that he did not have the sinew or the gall to keep grinding on until he was offered a perfectly constitutional command: the dictatorship.

  You’ll always be a country boy, Pompeius Magnus! Not quite up to every trick in town. They outfoxed you so deftly that you don’t even see what they’ve done. You’re sitting there on the Campus Martius congratulating yourself that you’re the winner. But you are not. Bibulus and Cato are the winners. They exposed your bluff and you backed down. How Sulla would laugh!

  2

  The main oppidum of the Senones was Agedincum on the Icauna River, and here Caesar had concentrated six of his legions for the winter; he was still unsure of that very powerful tribe’s loyalties, particularly in light of the fact that he had been forced to execute Acco.

  Gaius Trebonius occupied the interior of Agedincum himself, and had the high command while Caesar was in Italian Gaul. Which did not mean he had been given the authority to go to war, a fact all the Gallic tribes were aware of. And were counting on.

  In January Trebonius’s energies were absorbed by the most exasperating task a commander knew: he had to find sufficient grain and other supplies to feed thirty-six thousand men. The harvest was coming in, so bountiful this year that, had he had fewer legions to provision, Trebonius would not have needed to go any further than the local fields. As it was, he had to buy far and wide.

  The actual buying-in of grain was in the hands of a civilian Roman, the knight Gaius Fufius Cita; an old resident of Gaul, he spoke the languages and enjoyed a good relationship with the tribes of this central region. Off he trotted with his cartload of money and a heavily armed three-cohort guard to see which Gallic thanes were of a mind to sell at least a part of their harvest. In his wake trundled the high-sided wagons drawn by teams of ten oxen poled up two abreast; as each wagon filled with the precious wheat it peeled off from the column and returned to Agedincum, where it was unloaded and sent back to Fufius Cita.

  Having exhausted the territory to the north of the Icauna and the Sequana, Fufius Cita and his commissioners transferred to the lands of the Mandubii, the Lingones and the Senones. At first the wagons continued to fill in a most satisfactory manner; then as the seemingly endless caravan entered the lands of the Senones, the amount of grain to be had dropped dramatically. The execution of Acco was having an effect; Fufius Cita decided that he would not prosper trying to buy from the Senones, so he moved westward into the lands of the Carnutes. Where sales picked up immediately.

  Delighted, Fufius Cita and his senior commissioners settled down inside Cenabum, the Carnute capital; here was a safe haven for the cartload of money (it was, besides, not nearly as full as it had been) and no need for the three cohorts of troops who had escorted him. He sent them back to Agedincum. Cenabum was almost a second home for Fufius Cita; he would remain there among his Roman friends and conclude his purchasing in comfort.

  Cenabum, in fact, was something of a Gallic metropolis. It permitted some wealthier people—mostly Romans but also a few Greeks—to live inside the walls, and had quite a township outside the walls wherein thrived a metal-working industry. Only Avaricum was larger, and if Fufius Cita sighed a little as he thought of Avaricum, he was actually well content where he was.

  *

  The pact among Vercingetorix, Lucterius, Litaviccus, Cotus, Gutruatus and Sedulius, though made in the highly emotional aftermath of Acco’s execution,
had not fallen by the wayside. Each man went off to his people and talked, and if some of them made no reference to unification of all the Gallic peoples under one leadership, they did harp relentlessly on the perfidy and arrogance of the Romans, the unjustifiable death of Acco, the loss of liberty. Very fertile ground to work; Gaul still hungered to throw off the Roman yoke.

  Gutruatus of the Carnutes had needed little to push him into the pact with Vercingetorix; he was well aware that Caesar deemed him as guilty of treason as Acco. The next back to feel the lash and the next head to roll belonged to him. He knew it. Nor did he care, provided that before it happened he had managed to make Caesar’s life a misery. So when he returned to his own lands, he did as he had promised Vercingetorix: he went straight to Carnutum, where the Druids dwelled, and sought Cathbad.

  “You are right,” said Cathbad when the story of Acco was finished. The Chief Druid paused, then added, “Vercingetorix is right too, Gutruatus. We must unite and drive the Romans out as one people. We cannot do it otherwise. I will summon the Druids to a council.”

  “And I,” said Gutruatus, enthusiasm soaring, “will travel among the Carnutes to spread the warcry!”

  “Warcry? What warcry?”

  “The words Dumnorix and Acco both shouted before they were killed. ‘A free man in a free country!’ ”

  “Excellent!” said Cathbad. “But amend it. ‘Free men in a free country!’ That is the beginning of unification, Gutruatus. When a man thinks of men before he thinks in the singular.”