R. Peake - Marching With Caesar - Conquest of Gaul

Arriving in Narbo at the beginning of Januarius, it was very late under normal conditions, but there were no plans for us in the immediate future, which of course we had no way of knowing. The beginnings of what would start out as a camp had been begun by the advance party and over the next weeks it was transformed into a small city, our tents replaced by wooden huts, still organized around our tent sections, except with wooden floors and a solid roof. The walls were made of planks that we whitewashed then filled in the cracks, making solid little structures that helped keep out the cold. The outer walls of the camp were initially also made of wood, but gradually they were replaced by walls of stone, although that was yet to come. Once the camp was finished and deemed to be suitable to be a permanent base, the lustration ceremonies were held, along with the renewal of our oath of loyalty to Rome. We were led to the camp by one of the Tribunes who would serve with us for this year as the senior Tribune, while a new batch of more boy wonders arrived from Rome. Thankfully the senior Tribune was not Doughboy, who had returned back to Rome to follow the cursus honorum ; he must have stumbled along the way because we never heard of him again. The Tribune that remained behind to serve as the Senior Tribune was the one that I took notice of earlier who had seemed to have his wits about him, and in the intervening time I learned his name, Gaius Trebonius. Now, it is a name I curse and hope that Cerberus is cracking his bones as he shrieks in agony and torment, because he was one of the slayers of the great man. However, I was happily ignorant then and was content enough to have one of the boy wonders who seemed to know what he was doing lead us, or more importantly accepted what he did not know and allowed the men who did to do what was necessary.

That was when the secret enemy first showed up, an enemy that we had been warned about by the veterans, except until we faced it we did not know exactly how vile a foe it is. In reality it is a combination of two different enemies, working together. They are the twins of despair known as boredom and illness. Once the camp is finished for winter and all the resulting tasks are complete, there is not a whole lot for an army to do, despite the Centurions doing their best to find things to keep us busy. Unfortunately, a substantial number of duties that are considered punishment duties, such as the cleaning of latrines, are reserved for Legionaries who fall afoul of the many rules and regulations needed to ensure the smooth running of the Legions. For those of us who stayed out of trouble, as hard is it might have been to do, that did not give us a lot to occupy our time. A good number of us, by virtue of skills we acquired before joining the Legion, had been given the status of immunes ; Vibius, for example, worked in the leather factory, making and repairing all the various bits of leather gear, like our harnesses and the tack for the livestock. I had the status of being the weapons instructor after the death of Vinicius, yet there is only so much training one can do in a given day. Therefore, a good number of the men filled their spare time with the pursuit of wine, women and gambling, each man putting the three vices in their own order. Fairly quickly I observed that those pastimes carried their own sets of risks, and more often than not, when a Legionary fell afoul of the regulations, it was a direct result of one or a combination of those three. In our tent section, there were two men who seemed to find themselves on the wrong side of the Pilus Prior’s vitus , or even worse punishment, on a regular basis. One received more official punishment, while the other’s tended to be more unofficial in nature, and more likely than not was at the hands not of the officers, but from his fellow soldiers.

Atilius was a type of soldier that I came to know well during my time in the Legions, and is a fairly common sort in the army, having an extreme fondness for wine and by extension, the joys of revelry and debauchery that tend to come with it. He possessed a talent for finding drink under the most unlikely circumstances and was quick to take advantage of his finds, although I never once saw him drunk when his lack of sobriety meant that it endangered himself, or more importantly one of his tentmates or the Century. However, once the rigors and dangers of a campaign were left behind, Atilius was one of the first over the wall in search of Bacchus. Compounding the problem for Atilius was that he possessed no skill, other than fighting, so he did not have the status of immunes , which would have occupied more of his time. He was the type to start out as a happy drunk, but as the night progressed some evil numen would inhabit his soul, and anyone participating in revels with him was guaranteed to find themselves in some sort of melee, particularly when there were men from another Legion around, or even worse, civilians. For reasons I never discovered, Atilius hated civilians, which was not a real problem when we were tramping about the countryside. But Narbo, for example, was a well-established town by this point, replete with all the hangers-on that can be found in every town in the Empire that has a Legion present. Pimps were a special problem for Atilius, although in the interest of accuracy, it would be more precise to say that Atilius posed a real problem for pimps. Early on during our time in Narbo I made the mistake of accompanying Atilius, Romulus, Remus and Vellusius on a night on the town. I will not go into detail other than to say I found myself shivering in a ditch that I later found out was used exclusively for the drainage of waste, as I attempted to avoid attentions of the provosts and a party of particularly angry associates of a man that Atilius had thrown headfirst through a wall. Now, I liked a good brawl as much, if not more than any man, particularly because I tended to win. However, I could see fairly quickly that my goal of raising myself up from my current status, both in the sense of promotion in the Legion and the even larger one of improving the lot of myself and my descendants, might be permanently damaged if I continued to attend Atilius’ romps. No more than a month had passed at Narbo before Atilius found himself confined to the camp, with a portion of his pay taken, not to mention the thrashing he was given by the Pilus Prior that left him with an especially prominent black eye. However, if any of us hoped that this would serve to warn him off the path he was taking, they were in vain. His second offense happened no more than a week later, when he was caught trying to sneak back into the camp shortly before dawn. Because this was his second offense, the punishment was more severe, and he was given ten lashes, fortunately not with the scourge but the regular lash, and put on latrine detail for a month. This did serve to curtail his activities for a couple of months, and when he finally regained the chance to go back out in town, he was more circumspect, for a while anyway. Regardless, Atilius was destined to never reach above the rank of Gregarius and was not even considered for duty as immunes because of his problems with wine and debauchery.

The other miscreant in our group did not run afoul of the Centurions, his crime being the type that goes unreported and never appears in his permanent record. By this time, gentle reader, it should not surprise you when I reveal the identity of this individual, and I recognize that at this point you may have suspicions that I am being somewhat unfair to the man. I assure you that if anything, I am being kind. Didius loved to gamble, but more than he loved to gamble, he loved to win, and was not one to scruple much over how he did it. His favorite game was dice, and his gravest crime was that he was too stupid and greedy to know that it did not take long for others to suspect that his winning streak might not be attributed to the many sacrifices he supposedly made to Fortuna as he claimed. Yet he did have a certain amount of skill, because for the greater part the most that he aroused was suspicion since nobody could quite catch him in the act of cheating, as it were. Until one day in early spring, when his run of “luck” expired, courtesy of an “accidental” jostling of his person just as he was making a throw, a bumping that caused the extra pair of dice he was hiding in his other hand to fall to the ground, followed down immediately by Didius himself. It was only because Romulus and Remus were there to intercede that he was not beaten to death; there are few crimes considered more heinous to Legionaries than cheating a fellow soldier, in any fashion, at just about anything. The only exception to that are attempts made to get out of any kind of extra duties of some sort; the ability to do so is universally admired by every soldier I have met, until you gain the vitus of course. Even then, I found I held a grudging admiration for the ingenuity that some of the men under my command displayed in their attempts to avoid shoveling manure or some such. And it was due to the fact that, as much as we may have despised Didius ourselves, he was one of our tent section that required Romulus and Remus to come to his rescue. Now one might think that, under the circumstances, a man who found himself rescued under such dire straits would express gratitude to his rescuers, and view himself as forever in their debt. Perhaps the fact that Didius expressed no such gratitude will be an indicator that when I speak of him, I am not judging him too harshly. Not only was Didius ungrateful, to hear him tell it the brothers had stopped Didius from exacting revenge for the unfair accusations made against him by thrashing the half-dozen or so men who had set upon him. The fact that his face was massively swollen, his nose now going in a different direction, with the rest of his body covered in greenish-purple bruises, was a contradiction if one were to listen to his words. Apparently, however, he was simply lulling his antagonists into a false sense of security by allowing them to appear to beat him senseless, and was just about to unleash his master stroke counter-attack when the brothers so rudely interrupted. It took the intercession of Calienus to keep the brothers from finishing the job that the other men had started, with both of them making a solemn oath, swearing on Jupiter’s stone that they would never come to his rescue again, no matter what the circumstances. For my part, I must admit that I took some vindictive pleasure in paying particular attention to some of his sorer spots during our weapons drill, in which he had to participate because of an awkward situation, at least for him. Didius could not exactly present himself for the sick and injured list, since the circumstances of his condition would prompt a series of questions that he really had no wish to answer. Despite his protestations of innocence in the matter, Didius was at least smart enough to know that on the face of it the evidence was not in his favor, so there was a relatively good chance that there would be some official punishment. Because the penalty for cheating a fellow Legionary at anything is extremely severe; it is not uncommon for men to be sentenced to death for particularly egregious offenses, Didius’ reticence was understandable. Much later in my career there was a case of a Tesseraurius who stole the money of the men he had been charged with banking and the punishment for him was the same as when a unit is decimated, except that nobody had mixed feelings about beating him to death. Therefore, Didius was forced to perform his normal duties, including giving me a chance to beat him senseless with a wooden sword, something I enjoyed immensely.