Colleen McCullough - 5. Caesar

By the beginning of June, Pompey had put his army into camp near the town of Beroea, some forty miles from Thessalonica, the capital of Macedonia, and moved into the governor's palace in that great and heavily fortified city together with his entourage of consulars and senators. Things were going better. Apart from the five legions he had brought with him from Brundisium, he now had one legion of Roman veterans settled in Crete and Macedonia, the Cilician legion (very under-strength), and two legions the chastened Lentulus Crus had managed to raise in Asia Province. Forces were beginning to dribble in from King Deiotarus of Galatia, some infantry and several thousand cavalry; the debt-crippled King Ariobarzanes of Cappadocia (who owed Pompey even more than he owed Brutus) sent a legion of foot and a thousand horse; the petty kingdoms of Commagene, Sophene, Osrhoene and Gordyene contributed light-armed troops; Aulus Plautius the governor of Bithynia-Pontus had found several thousand volunteers; and various other tetrarchies and confederations were also sending soldiers. Even money was beginning to appear in sufficient quantity to ensure that Pompey could feed what promised to be an army containing thirty-eight thousand Roman foot, fifteen thousand other foot soldiers, three thousand archers, a thousand slingers, and seven thousand horse troopers. Metellus Scipio had written to say that he had two full-strength legions of surprisingly excellent troops ready to move, though he would have to march them overland due to a shortage of transport vessels. Then in Quinctilis came a delightful surprise. Bibulus's admirals Marcus Octavius and Scribonius Libo had captured fifteen cohorts of troops on the island of Curicta together with Gaius Antonius, their commander. Since the troops were all prepared to swear allegiance to Pompey, his army was even bigger. That sea battle in which Octavius and Libo destroyed Dolabella's forty ships was the first of many victories for Pompey's navy, swelling rapidly. And very ably commanded, as it turned out, by the inexperienced Bibulus, who learned ruthlessly and developed a talent for his job. Bibulus divided his navy into five large flotillas, only one of which was still theoretical by the time that September came. One flotilla, commanded by Laelius and Valerius Triarius, consisted of the one hundred very good ships levied from Asia Province; Gaius Cassius came back from Syria with seventy ships to inherit command of them; Marcus Octavius and Libo controlled fifty ships from Greece and Liburnia; and Gaius Marcellus Major and Gaius Coponius took charge of the twenty superb triremes Rhodes had donated to the distressingly persistent Cato, who refused to leave without them. Anything to get rid of Cato! cried the Rhodians. The fifth flotilla was to consist of whatever ships young Gnaeus Pompey managed to extract from Egypt.

4

Full of himself because his father had given him this hugely important job, Gnaeus Pompey set out by sea for Alexandria, determined that he would excel. Twenty-nine this year, had Caesar not intruded he would have entered the Senate as quaestor next year. A fact which didn't worry him. Gnaeus Pompey never for one moment doubted that his father had the ability and the strength to squash that presumptuous Julian beetle to pulp. Unfortunately he had not been quite old enough to serve in the East during Pompey's campaigns there; his cadetship had been spent in Spain during a disappointingly peaceful time. He had, of course, done the obligatory tour of Greece and Asia Province after he finished his military service, but he had never managed to reach either Syria or Egypt. He disliked Metellus Scipio only one degree less than he disliked his stepmother, Cornelia Metella, thus his decision to sail to Egypt along the African coast rather than go overland through Syria. An insufferable pair of snobs was Gnaeus Pompey's verdict about Metellus Scipio and his daughter. Luckily his little brother Sextus, born thirteen years later, got on very well with his stepmother, though, like all Pompey the Great's three children, he had mourned the passing of Julia bitterly. She had made everyone in the family so happy. Whereas Cornelia Metella, Gnaeus Pompey suspected, didn't even manage to make his status-conscious father happy. Why he was thinking these things as he leaned on his ship's poop rail watching the dreary desert of Catabathmos slide by, he didn't know, save that time dragged and thoughts winged their own airy passage. He missed his young wife, Scribonia, dreamed of her by day as well as night. Oh, that ghastly marriage to Claudilla! Yet one more evidence of his father's insecurity, his determination to obtain none but the highest wives and husbands for all his family. A drab, sat-upon girl too young for marriage, so utterly devoid of the kind of stimulus Gnaeus Pompey had needed. And what ructions when he had set eyes on Libo's daughter, announced that he was divorcing Claudilla and marrying this exquisite little Latin partridge with the glossy feathers and plump contours his mind and body craved! Pompey had thrown one of his best tantrums. In vain. His oldest son stuck to his resolve with true Pompeian tenacity, and had his way. With the result that Appius Claudius Censor had to be given the sinecure of governing Greece for the government in exile. Where, if rumor was right, he had gone even more peculiar, spent his time probing the geometry of pylons and muttering about fields of force, invisible fingers of power, and similar claptrap. Alexandria burst on Gnaeus Pompey like Aphrodite upon the world. More numerous even than Antioch or Rome, its three million people inhabited what was arguably Alexander the Great's most perfect gift to posterity. His empire had perished within a single generation, but Alexandria went on forever. Though so flat that its biggest hill, the dreamy garden of the Panaeum, was a man-made mound two hundred feet high, it seemed to Gnaeus Pompey's dazzled eyes more something constructed by the Gods than by clumsy, mortal men. Part blinding white, part a rainbow of colors, liberally dewed with trees carefully chosen for slenderness or roundness, Alexandria upon the farthest shore of Our Sea was magnificent. And the Pharos, the great lighthouse of Pharos Island! Far taller than any other building Gnaeus Pompey had ever seen, a three-tiered hexagon faced with shimmering white marble, the Pharos was a wonder of the world. The sea around it was the color of an aquamarine, sandy-bottomed and crystal clear, for the great sewers which underlay Alexandria emptied into the waters west of the city, ensuring that their contents were carried away. What air! Balmy, caressing. See the Heptastadion, the causeway connecting Pharos Island with the mainland, marching for almost a mile in white majesty! Two arches pierced its center, each arch spacious enough to permit the passage of a big ship between the Eunostus and the Great Harbors. There directly before him reared the great palace complex, joined at its far end to a crag climbing out of the sea that used to be a fortress and now cupped a shell-like amphitheater within its hollow. This, Gnaeus Pompey realized, was a real palace. The only one in the world. So vast that it paled the heights of Pergamum into insignificance. At first glance its many hundreds of pillars looked severely Doric, save that they owned a more ponderous girth, were far taller and were vividly painted with tiers of pictures, each one the height of a column drum; yet proper pediments sat atop them, with proper metopes, everything a truly Greek building of importance should have. Except that the Greeks built on the ground. Like the Romans, the Alexandrians had elevated their palace complex upon a stone plateau thirty steps high. Oh, and the palms! Some graceful fans, some horny and stumpy, some with fronds like feathers. In an ecstatic daze, Gnaeus Pompey saw his ship tied up at the royal wharf, supervised the disposition of his other ships, donned the purple-bordered toga his propraetor's imperium entitled him to wear, and set off behind six crimson-clad lictors bearing the axes in their fasces to seek palace accommodation and an audience with the seventh Queen Cleopatra of Egypt.