Colleen McCullough - 6. The October Horse - A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

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Zela had taken Caesar's breath away. A high, rocky outcrop, it stood in the middle of a fifty-mile basin of springtime wheat as green as the emeralds in that crown, surrounded on all sides by soaring lilac mountains still covered in snow halfway down their sides, with the Scylax River, a broad, steely blue stream, winding from one side of the plain to the other. The Cimmerian camp lay at the base of the outcrop, on top of which Pharnaces had put his command tents and harem; he had had a perfect view of the Roman snake as it had emerged from the northern pass, and sent his third crown. The ambassador returned after giving Caesar the fourth crown and delivered Caesar's message, but Pharnaces ignored it, convinced he was unbeatable. He watched Caesar put his legions and cavalry into a heavily fortified camp for the night, only a mile from his own lines. At dawn Pharnaces attacked en masse; like his father and Tigranes before him, he couldn't believe that a smallish force, no matter how well organized, could withstand a hundred thousand warriors charging at it. He did better than Pompey at Pharsalus; his troops lasted four hours before they disintegrated. Just as in the early days in Belgic Gaul, the Skythians stayed to fight to the death, deeming it an unendurable disgrace to abandon a field of defeat alive. "If Magnus's Anatolian foes were of this caliber," Caesar said to Calvinus, Pansa, Vinicianus and Cassius, "he doesn't deserve the epithet 'great.' It's no great task to beat them." "I suppose the Gauls were infinitely greater adversaries," said Cassius between his teeth. "Read my commentaries," Caesar said, smiling. "Bravery is not the issue. The Gauls owned two qualities today's adversaries don't have. First of all, they learned from their early mistakes. And secondly, they had an unquenchable patriotism that I had to work very hard to channel into avenues as useful to themselves as to Rome. But you did well, Cassius, led your legion like a true vir militaris. I'll have plenty of work for you in a few years, when I set out to deal with the Kingdom of the Parthians and bring our Eagles home. By then you'll have been consul, so you'll be one of my chief legates. I understand that you like waging war in dry places as well as on the sea." This should have thrilled Cassius, but it angered him. He speaks as if it is all in his personal gift. What glory can there be in that for me, his minion? The Great Man had wandered off to inspect the field, issue orders that mass graves be dug to bury the Skythians; there were too many to burn, even if Zela had owned any forests. Pharnaces himself had fled, gathered his war chest and his treasures to gallop off northward, leaving the women of his harem dead. When Caesar was told, his only concern was for the women. He donated the spoils to his legates, tribunes, centurions, legions and cavalry, declining to take the general's percentage; he had his crowns, they were enough. By the time the ceremony of dividing the spoils was over, the rankers found themselves ten thousand sesterces richer, and legates like Brutus and Cassius had amassed a hundred talents each. That was how much had lain around the Cimmerian camp, so who knew what Pharnaces had taken with him? Not that anybody received the money in his hand; it was an accounting exercise attended by elected representatives, for spoils were kept intact until they had been displayed in the general's triumph, after which the actual money was distributed.

Two days later the army marched for Pergamum, which greeted it with cheers and cascades of flowers. The threat of Pharnaces was no more, Asia Province could sleep peacefully. Though forty-two years had gone by, no one in Asia Province could forget the hundred thousand people Mithridates the Great had massacred when he invaded. "I'll be sending Asia Province a very good governor as soon as I return to Rome," Caesar told Archelaus, the son of Mithridates of Pergamum, in a private interview. "He'll come knowing what has to be done to set the province on its feet. The days of the tax farming publicani are over for good. Each district will collect its own taxes and pay them directly to Rome after the five-year moratorium on taxes is over. However, none of that is why I asked to see you." Caesar leaned forward, clasped his hands together on his desk. "I'll be writing to your father in Alexandria, yet Pergamum should know its fate now. I plan to shift the governor's seat to Ephesus Pergamum is too far north, too out of things. So all of Pergamum will become the Kingdom of Pergamum, and be ruled as a client-state by your father. It won't be as large a realm as the one the last Attalus bequeathed to Rome in his will, but it will be larger than it currently is. I'm adding western Galatia, to give Pergamum sufficient land for growing and grazing. My feeling is that the provinces of Rome are becoming too bureaucratically necessary to Rome, perpetuating additional expenses from layers of middlemen and superfluous paperwork. Whenever I find a good, capable family of local citizens fit to rule a client-state, I shall create that client-state. You will pay taxes and tributes to Rome, but Rome won't have the bother of collection." He cleared his throat. "There is a price. Namely, to hold Pergamum for Rome at all costs and against all foes. To remain not only Caesar's personal clients, but also the personal clients of Caesar's heir. To rule wisely and increase local prosperity for all your citizens, not merely the upper echelons." "I've always known that my father is a wise man, Caesar," said the young man, amazed at this incredible gift, "but the wisest thing he ever did was to aid you. We are oh, grateful is an inadequate word!" "I'm not after gratitude," Caesar said crisply. "I'm after a more precious thing loyalty."

From there it was north to Bithynia, the state along the southern shores of the Propontis, a vast lake forming a precursor to the mighty Euxine Sea, which filled it up through the straits of the Thracian Bosporus, upon which sat the ancient Greek city of Byzantium. The Propontis in its turn flowed south into the Aegean Sea through the straits of the Hellespont, thus linking the vast rivers of the Sarmatian and Skythian steppes with Our Sea. Nicomedia lay upon a long, calm inlet of the Propontis that had the trick of forming a mirror for the world above it, from the cloud-puffed sky in its depths to the perfectly reversed images of trees, hills, people, animals a place wherein the world seemed to go on as much below as above, like a miniature globe seen from its inside. To Caesar, it was one of the places he loved the most, for it was filled with heartwarming memories of an octogenarian king who wore a curled wig and elaborate face paint, kept an army of effeminate slaves to fulfill his every wish. No, they had never been lovers, the third King Nicomedes and Caesar! They had been something far better dear friends. And big, booming old Queen Oradaltis, whose dog, Sulla, had bitten her on her behind the day a twenty-year-old Caesar had arrived. Their only child, Nysa, had been kidnaped by Mithridates the Great and held for years. Lucullus had freed her, aged fifty, and sent her back to her mother; the old king was dead then. When Rome made Bithynia a province, Caesar had diddled the governor, Juncus, by transferring Oradaltis's funds to a bank in Byzantium and moving her to a nice mansion in a fishing village on the Euxine coast. There Oradaltis and Nysa had lived out their days very happily, fishing with hand-lines from the pier and taking walks with their new dog, named Lucullus. All dead now, of course. The palace he remembered so well had long been the governor's residence; its most priceless items had been removed by the first governor, Juncus, but the gilt and the purple marble were still in evidence. Juncus, Caesar reflected, had been the start of his determination to end gubernatorial peculations and looting. Well, Verres first, but he had not been a governor. Verres was in a class all his own, as Cicero proved. Men went out to govern provinces and make their fortunes at the expense of the provincials sold the citizenship, sold tax exemptions, confiscated fortunes, regulated the grain prices, took every work of art they could put their hands on, took bribes from the publicani and loaned their lictors, even their troops, to Roman moneylenders collecting debts. Juncus had done very well out of Bithynia, but some deity had taken offense at him or at his actions; he and his ill-gotten gains went to the bottom of Our Sea on the way home. Which does not put the statues and paintings back where they belong. Oh, Caesar, you are old! That was another time, and the many memories playing around these walls have the shape and content of lemures, creatures of the underworld let loose two nights a year. Too much has happened far too fast. What Sulla did lives on, and Caesar is its latest victim. No man can be happy who has marched on his own country. Caesar's kindnesses are conscious, done for Caesar's benefit, and Caesar no longer sees the world as a place wherein magical things can occur. Because they can't. Men and women ruin it with their impulses, desires, thoughtlessness, lack of intelligence, cupidity. A Cato and a Bibulus can bring down good government. And a Caesar can get very tired of trying to put good government back together again. The Caesar who dueled wits with that naughty old king was a different man from this Caesar, who has become cold, cynical, utterly weary. This man has no passions. This man just wants to get through each day with his image unimpaired. This man grows dangerously close to being tired of the act of living. How can one man put Rome back together again? Especially a man who has turned fifty-three? However, the days had to be gotten through, like it or not. One of Caesar's most promising protgs, Gaius Vibius Pansa, was appointed the governor of Bithynia; whereas, Caesar decided, for the moment Pontus should have its own governor rather than be ruled in tandem with Bithynia. He appointed another promising man, Marcus Coelius Vinicianus, governor of Pontus; it would be his task to repair the ravages of Pharnaces.