6. The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  Yielding up ten talents of Cornelia Metella's gift enabled the men to eat bread during those two months of preparation, sop it in good olive oil; enquiries produced bacon, and Cato still had a great deal of chickpea. His own thousand men were superbly fit, thanks to almost a month of rowing, but between their wounds and inertia, the later arrivals were weaker. Cato sent for all his centurions and issued orders: every man intending to march had to submit himself to a rigorous program of drill and exercise, and if, when January arrived, he was not fit, he would be left in Arsino to fend for himself. The dioiketes of Arsino, one Socrates, was a great help, a treasure house of good advice. Scholarly and fair-minded, his imagination had soared the moment Cato told him what he intended to do. "Oh, Marcus Cato, a new anabasis!" he squawked. "I am no Xenophon, Socrates, and my ten thousand men are good Roman citizen soldiers, not Greek mercenaries prepared to fight for the Persian enemy," Cato said, trying these days to moderate his voice and not offend people he needed. Thus he hoped that his tones were not indicative of the horror he felt at being likened to that other, very famous march of ten thousand men almost four hundred years ago. "Besides, my march will fade from the annals of history. I do not have Xenophon's compulsion to explain away treachery in writing because no treachery exists. Therefore I will write no commentary of my march of the ten thousand." "Nonetheless, it is a very Spartan thing you do." "It is a very sensible thing I do" was Cato's answer. To Socrates he confided his greatest worry that the men, raised on an Italian diet of starches, oils, greens and fruits, with the sole meat for a poor man a bit of bacon for flavoring, would not be able to tolerate a diet consisting of meat. "But you must surely know of laserpicium," said Socrates. "Yes, I know of it." What was visible of Cato's face between the hair and the beard screwed itself up in revulsion. "The kind of digestive men like my father-in-law pay a fortune for. It is said to help a man's stomach recover from a surfeit of" he drew a breath, looked amazed "meat! A surfeit of meat! Socrates, Socrates, I must have laserpicium, but how can I afford enough of it to dose ten thousand men every single day for months?" Socrates laughed until the tears ran down his face. "Where you are going, Marcus Cato, is a wilderness of silphium, a scrubby little bush that your mules, goats and oxen will feast on. From silphium a people called the Psylli extract laserpicium. They live on the western edge of Cyrenaica, and have a tiny port town, Philaenorum. Were a surfeit of meat a dietary custom around Your Sea, the Psylli would be a great deal richer than they are. It is the canny merchants who visit Philaenorum who make the big profits, not the Psylli." "Do any of them speak Greek?" "Oh, yes. They have to, else they'd get nothing for their laserpicium." The next day Cato was off to Philaenorum on a horse, with Sextus Pompey galloping to catch him up. "Go back and be useful in the camp," Cato said sternly. "You may order everyone around as much as you like, Cato," Sextus caroled, "but I am my father's son, and dying of curiosity. So when Socrates said that you were off to buy whole talents of laserpicium from people called Psylli, I decided that you needed better company than Statyllus and Athenodorus Cordylion." "Athenodorus is ill," Cato said shortly. "Though I've had to forbid anyone to ride, I'm afraid I must relax that rule for Athenodorus. He can't walk, and Statyllus is his nursemaid."

  Philaenorum turned out to be two hundred miles south, but the countryside was populated enough to procure a meal and a bed each night, and Cato found himself glad of Sextus's cheerful, irreverent company. However, he thought as they rode the last fifty miles, I see a hint of what we must contend with. Though there is grazing for stock, it is a barren wasteland. "The one grace," said Nasamones, leader of the Psylli, "is the presence of groundwater. Which is why silphium grows so well. Grasses don't because their root systems can't burrow deeply enough to find a drink silphium has a little taproot. Only when you cross the salt pans and marshes between Charax and Leptis Major will you need all the water you can carry. There is more salt desert between Sabrata and Thapsus, but that is a shorter distance and there is a Roman road for the last part of the way." "So there are settlements?" Cato asked, brightening. "Between here and Leptis Major, six hundred miles to the west, only Charax." "How far is Charax?" "Around two hundred miles, but there are wells and oases on the shore, and the people are my own Psylli." "Do you think," Cato asked diffidently, "that I could hire fifty Psylli to accompany us all the way to Thapsus? Then, if we encounter people who have no Greek, we will be able to parley. I want no tribes afraid that we are invading their lands." "The price of hire will be expensive," said Nasamones. "Two silver talents?" "For that much, Marcus Cato, you may have us all!" "No, fifty of you will be enough. Just men, please." "Impossible!" Nasamones shot back, smiling. "Extracting laserpicium from silphium is women's work, and that is what you must do extract it as you march. The dose is a small spoonful per day per man, you'd never be able to carry half enough. Though I'll throw in ten Psylli men free of charge to keep the women in order and deal with snakebites and scorpion stings." Sextus Pompey went ashen, gulped in terror. "Snakes?" He shuddered. "Scorpions?" "In great numbers," Nasamones said, as if snakes and scorpions were just everyday nuisances. "We treat the bites by cutting into them deeply and sucking the poison out, but it is easier said than done, so I advise you to use my men, they are experts. If the bite is properly treated, few men die only women, children, and the aged or infirm." Right, thought Cato grimly, I will have to keep sufficient mules free of cargo to bear men who are bitten. But my thanks, gracious Fortuna, for the Psylli! "And don't you dare," he said savagely to Sextus on the way back to Arsino, "say one word about snakes or scorpions to a single soul! If you do, I'll send you in chains to King Ptolemy."

  The hats were woven, Arsino and the surrounding countryside denuded of its donkeys. For, Cato discovered from Socrates and Nasamones, mules would drink too much, eat too much. Asses, smaller and hardier, were the burden beasts of choice. Luckily no farmer or merchant minded trading his asses for mules; these were Roman army mules, bred from the finest stock. Cato acquired 4,000 asses in return for his 3,000 mules. For the wagons he took oxen, but it turned out that sheep were impossible to buy. In the end he was forced to settle for 2,000 cattle and 1,000 goats. This is not a march, it is an emigration, he thought dourly; how Labienus, safe in Utica by now, must be laughing! But I will show him! If I die in the effort, I will get my Ten Thousand to Africa Province fit to fight! For ten thousand there were; Cato took his noncombatants with him as well. No Roman general asked his troops to march, build, fight and care for themselves. Each century held a hundred men, but only eighty of them were soldiers; the other twenty were noncombatant servants who ground the grain, baked the bread, handed out water on the march, cared for the century's beasts and wagon, did the laundry and cleaning. They were not slaves, but Roman citizens who were deemed unsuitable soldier material mentally dull yokels who received a tiny share of the booty as well as the same wages and rations as the soldiers. While the Cyrenaican women labored over the hats, Cyrenaican men were put to making water skins; earthenware amphorae, with their pointed bottoms and a shape designed for setting in a frame or a thick bed of sawdust, were too cumbersome to strap on panniers astride a donkey's back. ''No wine?" asked Sextus, dismayed. "No, not a drop of wine," Cato answered. "The men will be drinking water, and so will we. Athenodorus will have to go without his little invalid fortification."

  Two days into January the gigantic migration commenced its walk, cheered by the entire population of Arsino. Not a neat military column on the march, rather a wandering mass of animals and tunic-clad men with big straw hats on their heads moving among the animals to keep them more or less in one enormous group as Cato headed south for Philaenorum and the Psylli. Though the sun blazed down at lingering summer heat, the pace, Cato soon learned, would not enervate his men. Ten miles a day, set by the animals. But though Marcus Porcius Cato had never generaled troops or been thought of by noble Rome, perpetually exasperated by his stubbornness and single-mindedness, as a person with any common sense whatsoever, Cato turned out to be the
ideal commander of a migration. Eyes everywhere, he observed and adapted to mistakes no one, even Caesar, could have foreseen. At dawn on the second day his centurions were instructed to make sure every man's caligae were laced ruthlessly tight around his ankles; they were walking over unpaved land full of small potholes, often concealed, and if a man sprained an ankle or tore a ligament, he became a burden. By the end of the first nundinum, not yet halfway to Philaenorum, Cato had worked out a system whereby each century took charge of a certain number of asses, cattle and goats, designated its own property; if it ate too well or drank too much, it could not filch stock or water from another, more prudent century. Each dusk the mass stopped, replenished its water from wells or springs, each man settling to sleep on his waterproof felt sagum, a circular cape with a hole in its middle through which, on a rainy or snowy march, he thrust his head. All the bread and chickpea Cato could carry went on this first segment of the march, for laserpicium would not be a part of the menu until Philaenorum. Ten miles a day. As well, then, that these first two hundred miles were through kinder country; they were the learning experience. After Philaenorum, things were going to get a lot worse. When by some miracle they reached Philaenorum in eighteen rather than twenty days, Cato gave the men three days of rest in a slipshod camp just behind a long, sandy beach. So people swam, fished, paid a precious sestertius to some Psylli woman for sex. All legionaries knew how to swim, it was a part of their boot-camp training who knew when someone like Caesar would order them to swim a lake or a mighty river? Naked and carefree, the men frolicked, gorged on fish. Let them, thought Cato, down swimming too. "I say!" Sextus exclaimed, looking at the naked Cato, "I never realized how well you're built!" "That," said the man with no sense of humor, "is because you are too young to remember the days when I wore no tunic under my toga to protest against the erosion of the mos maiorum."

  * * *

  Nor required to herd animals or participate in century doings, the centurions had other duties. Cato called them together and issued instructions about laserpicium and the coming all-meat diet. "You will eat no plant that the Psylli traveling with us say is inedible, and you will make sure that your men do the same, he yelled. "Each of you will be issued with a spoon and your century's supply of laserpicium, and every evening after the men have eaten their beef or goat, you will personally administer half of that spoon to each man. It will be your duty to accompany the Psylli women and two hundred noncombatants as they gather silphium and process it I understand that the plant has to be crushed, boiled and cooled, after which the laserpicium is skimmed off the top. Which means we need firewood in country devoid of all trees. Therefore you will ensure that every dead plant and the dried crushed plants are collected and carried for burning. Any man who attempts to violate a Psylli woman will be stripped of his citizenship, flogged and beheaded. I mean what I say." If the centurions thought he was finished, they were wrong. "One other point!" Cato roared. "Any man, no matter what his rank, who allows a goat to eat his hat, will have to go without a hat. That means sunstroke and death! As it happens, I have sufficient spare hats to replace those already eaten by goats, but I am about to run out. So let every man on this expedition take heed no hat, no life!" "That's telling them," said Sextus as he accompanied Cato to the house of Nasamones. "The only trouble, Cato, is that a goat determined to eat a hat is as difficult to elude as a whore with her sights on a rich old dodderer. How do you protect your hat?" "When it is not on my head, I am lying flat with my hat under me. What does it matter if the crown is crushed? Each morning I plump it out again, and tie it firmly on my head with the ribbons those sensible women who made it, gave it." "The word is out," Nasamones said, sorry that this wonderful circus treat was about to leave. "Until you reach Charax, my people will give you all the help they can." He coughed delicately. "Er may I offer you a little hint, Marcus Cato? Though you will need the goats, you will never get to Africa Province alive if you continue to let the goats roam free. They will not only eat your hats, they will eat your very clothes. A goat will eat anything. So tie them together as you walk, and pen them at night." "Pen them with what?" Cato cried, fed up with goats. "I note that every legionary has a palisade stake in his pack. It is long enough to serve as a staff for help covering uneven ground, so each man can carry it. Then at night he can use it as part of a fence to pen up the goats." "Nasamones," said Cato with a smile more joyous than any Sextus had ever seen, "truly I do not know what we would have done without you and the Psylli."

  The beautiful mountains of Cyrenaica were gone; the Ten Thousand set off into a flat wilderness of silphium and little else, the ocher ground between those drab, greyish little bushes littered with rubble and fist-sized stones. The palisade stake staffs were proving invaluable. Nasamones had been right; the wells and soaks were frequent. However, they were not multiple, so it was impossible to water ten thousand men and seven thousand beasts each night that would have taken a river the size of the Tiber. So Cato had a century and its beasts refill their water skins at each well or soak they passed. This kept the spectacular horde moving, and at sundown everyone could settle for a meal of beef or goat boiled in seawater the whole Ten Thousand collected dead bushes and a sleep. Apart from a brazen sky and silphium scrub, their constant companion was the sea, a huge expanse of polished aquamarine, fluffed with white where rocks lurked, breaking in gentle wavelets upon beach after beach after beach. At the pace the animals moved, men could take a quick dip to cool off and keep clean; if all they could cover were ten miles a day, it would be the end of April before they reached Hadrumetum. And, thought Cato with huge relief, by that time the squabbles as to who will be commander-in-chief of our armies will be over. I can simply slide my Ten Thousand into the legions I myself will serve in some peaceful capacity. No Roman ate beef, no Roman ate goat; cattle had but one use, the production of leather, tallow and blood-and-bone fertilizer, and goats were for milk and cheese. One steer provided about five hundred pounds of edible parts, for the men ate all save the hide, the bones and the intestines. A pound of this per day per man no one could force himself to eat more saw the herd dwindle at the rate of twenty beasts a day for six days; the eight-day nundinum was made up with two days of goat, even worse. At first Cato had hoped that the goats would yield milk from which cheese might be made, but the moment Philaenorum was left behind, the nanny goats nursing kids rejected them and dried up. No goat expert, he supposed this had something to do with too much silphium and no straw hats or other delicacies. The long-horned cattle ambled along without annoying the human complement, their hip bones protruding starkly from their nether regions like vestigial wings, shriveled empty udders swinging beneath the cows. No cattle expert either, he supposed that bulls were a nuisance, since all the male cattle were castrated. Be it a tomcat, a dog, a ram, a billy goat or a bull, a wholly male beast wore itself thin and stringy pursuing sex. Scatter the seed, reap a bumper crop of kittens, pups, lambs, kids or calves. Some of this he voiced to Sextus Pompey, who was fascinated at aspects of the fanatical Marcus Porcius Cato that he fancied no other Roman had ever witnessed. Was this the man who had hectored his father into civil war? Who as a tribune of the plebs had vetoed any legislation likely to improve the way things worked? Who, when as young as Sextus was now, had intimidated the entire College of Tribunes of the Plebs into keeping that wretched column inside the Basilica Porcia? Why? Because Cato the Censor had put the column there; it was a part of the mos maiorum and could not be removed for any reason. Oh, all the stories he had heard about Cato the incorruptible urban quaestor Cato the drinker Cato the seller of his beloved wife! Yet here was that selfsame Cato musing about males and their hunger for sex, just as if he himself were not a male and a very well-endowed male at that. "Speaking for myself," Sextus said chattily, "I'm looking immensely forward to civilization. Civilization means women. I'm desperate for a woman already." The grey eyes turned his way looked frosty. "If a man is a man, Sextus Pompeius, he should be able to control his baser instincts. Four year
s are nothing," Cato said through his teeth. "Of course, of course!" Sextus said, beating a hasty retreat. Four years, eh? An interesting span to come up with! Marcia had spent four years as wife of Quintus Hortensius between two bouts of Cato. Did he love her, then? Did he suffer, then?

  Charax was a village on an exquisite lagoon. Its inhabitants, a mixture of Psylli and an inland people called Garamantes, made a living diving for sponges and seed pearls; they consumed nothing but fish, sea urchins and a few vegetables grown in plots painstakingly watered by the women, who, upon seeing this appalling host descending, defended their produce shrilly, brandishing hoes and shrieking curses. Cato promptly issued an order forbidding the plundering of vegetables, then set to with the local chieftain to buy whatever greens he could. Nothing like enough, naturally, though the sight of his silver coins reconciled the women into harvesting everything larger than a sprout. Romans knew well that humankind could not survive unless fruits and green vegetables were a part of the diet, but so far Cato hadn't noticed any prodromal signs of scurvy in the men, who had gotten into the habit of chewing a sprig of silphium as they walked, to have some saliva. Whatever else silphium contained besides laserpicium evidently had the same effect as greens. We are but four hundred miles along our way, he thought, but I know in my bones that we are going to make it. One day off to swim and gorge on fish, then the Ten Thousand moved on into terrible country, flat as a planed board, a wearisome trek across salt pans and brackish marshes interspersed with a few stretches of silphium. Of wells or oases there were none for four hundred miles; forty days of pitiless sun, freezing nights, of scorpions and spiders. No one in Cyrenaica had mentioned spiders, which came as a horrific shock. Italy, Greece, the Gauls, the Spains, Macedonia, Thrace, Asia Minor that part of the globe Romans marched around, across, up, down, and sideways lacked big spiders. With the result that a highly decorated primipilus centurion, veteran of almost as many battles as Caesar, would faint dead away at the sight of a big spider. Well, the spiders of Phazania, as this region was called, were not big. They were enormous, as large in the body as a child's palm, with disgustingly hairy legs that folded under them malignly when they rested. "Oh, Jupiter!" Sextus cried, shaking one of the things out of his sagum before he folded it one morning. "I tell you straight, Marcus Cato, that had I known such creatures existed, I would gladly have suffered Titus Labienus! I only half believed my father when he said that he turned back within three days of reaching the Caspian Sea because of spiders, but now I know what he meant!" "At least," said Cato, who seemed unafraid, "their bite is merely painful because of the size of their nippers. They aren't poisonous like the scorpions." Secretly he was as frightened and revolted as anyone, but pride would not let him betray what he felt; if the Commander screamed and ran, what would the Ten Thousand think? If only there were woody plants to make fires at night for warmth! Who would ever have dreamed that a place so scorching during the day could grow so cold after the sun set? Suddenly, dramatically. One moment frying, the next shivering until the teeth chattered. But what tiny supplies of driftwood they combed from the beaches had to be saved for the cooking fires, silphium and meat. The Psylli men had earned their keep. No matter how the ground was scoured for scorpions, scorpions there were. Many men were stung, but after the Psylli had trained the century medics on how to slice into the flesh and suck vigorously, few men needed to ride donkeys. One Psylli woman, small and frail, was not so lucky. Her scorpion sting killed her, but not quickly, not kindly. The more difficult the going became, the more cheerful Cato became. How he managed to cover as much territory as he did in a day escaped Sextus; it seemed that he visited every small group, paused for a chat and a laugh, told them how wonderful they were. And they would swell, grin, pretend that they were having a merry holiday. Then plod on. Ten miles a day. The water skins shrank; not two days into that forty-day stretch had elapsed before Cato introduced water rationing, even to the animals. But if an occasional cow or steer keeled over, it was slaughtered on the spot to become that night's meal for some of the men. The asses, it seemed as indefatigable as Cato, just kept walking; that the water skin element in their cargoes was losing weight helped them. Yet thirst is terrible. The days and nights both reverberated to the anguished moos of cattle, the maas of goats, the sad squealing of donkeys. Ten miles a day. Occasionally storm clouds in the distance would torment them, looming ever blacker, drawing closer; once or twice, the grey slanted curtain of falling rain. But never near the Ten Thousand.