Athenian Steel: Roman Annihilation 423 BCE (The Hellennium)

by P. K. Lentz

  Styphon's men had seen the same sight and grunted in excitement and flashed toothy smiles between the bronze cheek pieces of their polished helmets.

  “How much gold do you think is in their temples?” one Theban asked, nodding at the twin acropoli.

  “Who cares?” Styphon said. “For now, it only matters how much blood is in their bodies.”

  V. Invasion

  Only once in his life before today had Gaius heard the sound of trumpets screaming over the tiled roofs of Rome from the Capitoline's peak. He had been young, and barbarians had come from the north to sack the city. This day, thirty-five years later, Gaius was roused in the night by that same sound, a sound which had only one meaning.

  Three decades ago, he had fled with his mother into the countryside while his father stayed behind to help mount a valiant but doomed defense. No longer was Gaius was too young to fight. Too old, perhaps, yet still his duty this night was clear. He must run toward the danger and not away. Before he had put his feet on the floor, his sleep-clouded mind still comprehending the terrible meaning of that shrill, insistent cry, Marina sat up beside him in bed and laid a hand on his arm. "What does it mean?"

  He turned and looked at her in the dim moonlight which bathed the figures of warriors and maids and animals which adorned the painted plaster walls of his bedchamber. Marina had shared that chamber with him for more than a year now, warming him on cold winter nights. Her body was always so warm. She was naked and cared not that the blankets lay crumpled at her waist.

  "Probably nothing, my lotus," Gaius lied, for he knew the alarm would never sound except in the direst of emergencies. "Gather the children and servants, stay together, and if a soldier comes, follow his instructions precisely. I must attend the Senate."

  Pulling her close, he kissed her supple lips and savored their taste as if he would never know it again. That she returned the kiss with a similar urgency said she understood that possibility as well as he. When they were both dressed, they shared another kiss, embraced and went into the children's rooms to find all but the youngest of his five awake. Gaius comforted them with smiles and hugs and urged them not to worry but just do whatever they were told and that he would see them again soon. Then, with the trumpets' wail still soaring high over the seven hills he ran out of his house, hide-sheathed sword gripped tightly in one sweaty hand, eagle-blazoned shield on his back, and the rest of his war gear in a heavy cloth sack flung over his shoulder.

  The darkened city streets were deserted but for men like him scrambling out with weapons and armor, if they had them, to find their legions and muster for duty while in the windows and door frames of the homes they left behind, women and children looked on with worry plain in their faces. The shouts which came up from every direction, competing with the wail of the distant horn, told Gaius only that everyone else was as clueless as he. It took him minutes of jogging, shield beating against his back, to reach the forum's Temple of Castor and Pollux, the meeting place of the Senate. He passed through its double doors of orange-painted oak and into the great hall beyond, where a double row of smooth stone columns marched two by two up to the carved double altar where the Twins were worshiped. Slaves darted in the dark space between wall and colonnade, lighting torches that threw orange light dancing in great swaths across the tiled floor and sent plumes of smoke to join that which wreathed the pillars' plain capitals before finding its way through vents into the night sky.

  Among the shadows up by the altar, dozens of senators already stood, and Gaius joined the steady flow of arrivals swelling their numbers. From the frenzied conversations taking place all around, their words echoing into the recesses of the high sloped roof, he managed to extract one meaningful word. Greeks.

  "Greeks? There must be some mistake!" one man kept shouting over and over again, and Gaius could hardly fault him for thinking so.

  A sharp whistle cut off discussion and drew all eyes forward and left to the column base which stood alongside the dais supporting a marble bust of Castor. The column base was used by the Senate as its speakers' podium, and suddenly atop it now appeared the youngest of the year's consular tribunes, a broad-shouldered youth named Manlius. He raised his right arm to command silence, and he received it, more or less.

  "There is no mistake!" he bellowed. "The Athenian fleet in Neapolis harbor which we all thought destined for Cumae is moving up the coast under oar. There can be no doubt: they are headed here. Any moment now they will reach Ostia, if they have not already."

  Someone shouted angrily, "What of our navy?"

  Raising his hand to discourage further speaking out of turn, Manlius answered. "Order has been sent to our ships at Ostia. They are to leave port with skeleton crews, if they are able."

  "To fight or flee?" The demand came from the same senator who had interrupted before. He was an old man, as most in the chamber were, but from his place in the crowd Gaius could not put a name to him.

  "It is too late to stop them at sea!" Manlius snarled. "We will meet their landing."

  "Which will be where?" someone else chimed in, to the tribune's visibly growing exasperation. Gaius guessed Manlius was already bitter at having been charged with babysitting the Senate whilst the three more senior tribunes tended directly to the city's defense.

  "We will meet them here, of course!" Manlius snapped.

  "Not at Ostia? Then we are calling the port lost already? No!"

  Throwing his hands up in defeat, Manlius leaped down from the podium. Immediately a cacophony of voices arose to fill the temple chamber. Over it Gaius heard a familiar voice from just behind him.

  "Brother," it said, and a hand clamped on his shoulder.

  Turning, Gaius saw the grave face of his elder brother Marcus, framed by the beard he had chosen to wear since youth, in defiance of fashion. Now his beard was grey and thus more acceptable, but even when it had been brown it had not stopped him being elected to numerous public offices which he had executed with honor.

  "Marcus," Gaius said, and gave his brother a swift embrace. "Have you sent your family to the countryside? Tell me, for I would do the same."

  Gaius said 'family' out of respect, but in reality that word for Marcus meant just one daughter, Iulia, a girl on the verge of womanhood. Marcus's two grown sons had died at war with Veii.

  "I have," Marcus said. "The landing will take place not five hundred paces from this spot. The gods may grant us victory, but it shall not come without Roman blood shed within sight of our temples."

  The words gave Gaius his first real taste of panic that night, for he trusted Marcus's judgment above that of any other man in most matters, not least of which was war.

  Marcus must have seen the worry written on the square face that so resembled his own. "Send a man to your house to evacuate your family," he said. "Then let us leave these nattering fools to their shouting while we climb the Capitoline and see what we can see."

  VI. The Battle for Roma

  “What can be their aim?” Gaius asked of his elder brother Marcus. The two stood atop the Capitoline dressed in full war gear, helmets and shields lying at their feet on the high limestone podium of Jupiter's temple. They gazed west at the invaders worming their way up the placid Tiber, and so too did Jupiter himself watch from the terracotta chariot perched on the apex of his temple's roof. The father god had stood idly by as the Greek war fleet shrugged off stones and javelins and smashed through half a dozen fireships pushed into its path. Now, as dawn stained the heavens regal violet and gentle orange, the god watched the invading triremes maneuver into position to land and disgorge their bronze-helmed marines just a quarter mile from the forum which was Rome's beating heart.

  “Like any army, they come for conquest, or slaughter, or plunder,” Marcus said philosophically. “Only the gods and the Greeks know at present. Soon enough, we shall learn.”

  South of the brothers' rocky perch lay the field of hard-packed dirt which had been a swamp in their great grandfather's day, before it had been dr
ained by the digging of the city's sewers. Now it was a cattle market, and upon its flat surface some two and a half thousand Romans had drawn up to form a human barrier between river and city, a plug of flesh and bronze shoved into the flat-bottomed valley separating the two sacred hills, Palatine and Capitoline. The valley was the only direct route between the winding Tiber and Rome, but until this day no enemy army had used it. In retrospect it would have been better to suffer the lack of sewers if that meant the field soon to be contested would have been today an impassable mire.

  Barring that, a wall might have been built. The Etruscan yoke had long been thrown off, but from carelessness or arrogance, generations of leaders of the Republic had neglected the rebuilding of the city walls that their old masters had demolished. Gaius could not but include himself in that shameful succession. Now Jupiter was punishing them, for instead of sucking mud or stout stone, the only obstacle in the invaders' path, apart from the legions of Rome, was a wooden stockade fence relocated from the cattle pens and bolstered with upturned fruit carts, tables, chairs, and whatever else could be ripped from the marketplace or nearby homes and carried to the battlefield.

  The men manning that makeshift palisade were hastati, spearmen in panoplies of bronze or leather with convex oval shields of crimson emblazoned with the Roman eagle in gold. Their number might have been double were it not for the Samnite onslaught which had begun in the south and east with the first fair weather and hardly let up since. The savages had seized a handful of Latin towns and razed others. All the cities belonged to Rome's close allies whose appeals for help could not be ignored, and as a result almost half of Rome's ready legions currently were on the frontiers in a show of strength.

  The defenders' numbers would have been greater, too, had the call to arms not come so suddenly. Rome's armies were comprised of farmers and landlords and horse breeders who slept beneath their own widely scattered roofs. Just an hour's more warning would have been sufficient to gather in every able-bodied man from the countryside, but as it was, only those who lived in the city or its immediate environs had learned of the danger in time to reach the cattle market with their war gear on their backs. The call had gone out, of course, and country-dwellers were still arriving every minute, but plenty more would not make it in time to help repel the Greek landing. And once the enemy made it into the city, it would be too late. All would be lost.

  Arrayed in front of the spearmen was a ragged line of velites, skirmishers with slings and stones or sheafs of iron-tipped javelins. They were clad in woolen armor or none at all, for while in the ranks of the hastati patrician and plebeian stood shoulder to shoulder, velites were exclusively the latter, men too poor to afford better gear. Their task was to thin the Greeks' front ranks with a shower of missiles prior to the clash of shields and then retreat behind the shield wall and continue hurling missiles over the heads of the hastati.

  Next among Rome's defenders were her archers, sagittarii, who were massed in a staggered rank two deep not far from where Gaius and his brother stood on the peak of the Capitoline, far above the battlefield, where they could rain death on the Greeks with impunity.

  Lastly there was one surprise awaiting the Greeks, if the gods willed it. At the base of the Capitoline's western slope, in a depression where it was hoped they would not be seen until it was too late, there waited four hundred lighter-armed plebeian hastati with short swords and small round shields. Though Gaius was not privy to the plans laid by the tribunes, the intention evidently was for this hidden force to sweep south around the hill after the clash of shields. In the worst case, the Greek left flank would turn to face the new threat, relieving the Roman right, while in the best, the enemy would be taken by surprise and either broken or encircled.

  “We should be down there,” Gaius said.

  His brother replied, “Let those younger men do what must be done without two old men getting in the way.”

  Gaius silently conceded the point, even if he did not quite quite share the confidence implied by his brother's words. It was not clear that Marcus felt confidence either, and how could he when all around them preparations were being made for disaster? The Capitoline peak on which they stood had ever been Rome's last refuge in times of crisis, and now it was being stocked for a siege with all the food that slaves and citizens alike could carry. The thought of surrendering the bulk of the city to invaders for however long it took the legions on the frontier to arrive and save it, if they could, brought tears to Gaius's eyes. What did the Greeks want? They were not enemies now, and had never been. It hardly seemed possible that this army had come so far to sack the city and leave, so it must have larger ambitions. But what?

  With the battle not yet won or lost, now was perhaps not the time to worry about motive. Nor was it the time for gloom and resignation; it was time for the optimism that Marcus had less than convincingly expressed.

  Down on the shimmering Tiber, the Greeks' black galleys had lined up two ships deep with their prows facing the shore, a formation which made their numbers easy to count. Eighteen in each rank, for a total of thirty-six ships. Their hulls were packed with marines, so figuring forty troops per hull, the army which had come to invade Rome consisted of some fifteen hundred men-at-arms. The tally came as somewhat of a relief, for it meant the Greeks were outnumbered nearly two to one.

  “They have miscalculated,” Gaius observed.

  Marcus returned, “I pray so, brother. I pray so.”

  The triremes hung still on the river for a frozen, silent moment, and then came the sound of a horn, low and deep, and the Greek oarsmen heaved and drove their painted prows forward. In just three strokes the hulls were scraping mud, then gangplanks were thrown down and warriors in bronze with great round shields of every color poured out screaming onto the river bank facing the cattle market.

  Mere yards from Gaius, the Roman archers whose arms quivered from having held their bowstrings taut for long minutes, unleashed their first volley. The arrows soared out into space and curved down toward the earth where they hammered the decks of the triremes and the water's edge. Most of the Greeks already had shields overhead, and a few of the brightly painted discs suddenly sported fletched protrusions, but to his satisfaction Gaius did witness one hoplite tumble from a gangplank into the sodden earth below. Up and down the river's edge, behind the swiftly coalescing enemy line, several more soldiers sprawled, some still and others writhing, with arrows embedded in their flesh.

  The Greeks had brought archers of their own, who instead of disembarking with the hoplites remained on several of the trireme decks where they sheltered behind wooden bulwarks and nets of thick rope. They launched a volley in a high arc over the heads of the main Greek force, and the shafts fell in a scattered rain over the hastati, who raised their shields. No Romans fell, thank the gods. A horn sounded, and under the arcing arrows the velites raced forward and released a hail of javelins and stones at the assembling hoplites. Most of the missiles landed short, a few went long to splash in the river or bounce off prows, while a handful struck enemy shields but failed to do harm.

  “Merenda must be commanding,” Marcus observed bitterly. “They should attack now before the Greeks have finished forming. Perhaps he thinks they will turn and sail away.”

  Gaius briefly assumed his brother's mantle of optimism. “He will attack them on the palisade.”

  More arrows flew from the Capitoline. With each draw, the bowmen's aim became truer, and each of their volleys sent up scattered groans from the hoplite ranks. Greek arrows continued to fall on the hastati, too, dropping at least three men whose places were swiftly taken by comrades to the rear. The velites hurled at will now, until from behind them a steady drumbeat went up. The skirmishers took this as their signal to withdraw, and the hastati in their even rows began a slow march forward. They were a clattering tide of crimson and gold bristling with spear shafts the deadly blades of which gleamed pink in the dawn's light, and the sight of them caused Gaius's breath, as it would that
of any Roman, to catch in his breast.

  Watching the orderly Roman advance, Gaius almost failed to note what was occurring in the Greek lines. When he did look over, he was first puzzled, then horrified.

  Rather than forming a solid line, the hoplites clustered in about twenty smaller enclaves near the shoreline. Each such enclave sheltered ten or so unarmored men who wielded pieces of timber in the shape of crosses which they presently leveled between their guardians' shields in the direction of the oncoming enemy. There arose a whooshing sound like that of a hundred men dragging sword blades across iron poles and then, from the Roman line, came screams of agony.

  Hastati fell in droves, and embedded deep in the body of each was a javelin-sized missile. Some of the victims had been holding their shields aloft to defend against arcing arrows, not knowing of the fresh danger to the fore and so had been skewered without damage to their shields. But it hardly mattered. Others shields faced front, and the thick bolts tore through them as if they were sheets of parchment. Nor were bronze breastplates any defense. Fresh corpses littering the dirt caused the living behind them to stumble, and wide gaps suddenly opened in the advancing Roman line.

  “What are those?” Gaius asked beneath his breath. He expected no answer and got none.

  While arrows flew from both sides to little effect, the wielders of the javelin launchers, safe behind their hoplite walls, pointed their weapons earthward and made a curious bowing motion. Before the gaps had even closed in the Roman line, another deadly barrage flew, cutting down as many hastati again as before. The defenders' line fell into disarray, but to their credit the men did not break and run but continued to advance and close ranks as best they could, as the insistent drum beat on.

  On the Greek side, a horn sounded, and the hoplite enclaves joined up with one another to form a line four ranks deep which began at last to advance on the palisade. Their late start was a slight problem for the hastati, who appeared to have begun their own advance assuming the Greeks would come forward with haste after landing in order to avoid fighting with the river immediately at their backs. Deep water was as deadly to a heavily armored man as a row of spears, or deadlier perhaps, for it made his own protection his enemy. But the Greeks had held back instead, and now it was uncertain which side would reach the momentum-breaking palisade first.