Colleen McCullough - 3. Fortune's Favorites

PART VI from SEPTEMBER 77 B.C. until WINTER 72 71 B.C.

There was no one with whom Pompey could share the news when Philippus's letter arrived in Mutina, and no one when the Senate's decree came through on the Ides of Sextilis. He was still trying to persuade Varro that the expedition to Spain would be as interesting as it was beneficial to an up and coming author of natural and man made phenomena, but Varro's responses to his many missives were lukewarm. Varro's children had arrived at an age he found delightful and he had no wish to absent himself from Rome for what might be a long time. The new proconsul who had never been consul was very well prepared, and knew exactly how he intended to proceed. First, he wrote to the Senate and informed it that he would take three of the four legions which had belonged to Catulus and then to Mamercus, and three legions made up of his own veterans. However, he said, the kind of war Metellus Pius was waging in Further Spain did not seem to be an attacking one, and the emphasis had shifted from the Further to the Nearer province since Metellus Pius's early days; therefore he requested that the Senate instruct Metellus Pius to give up one of his seven legions to Pompey. That worthy's brother in law, Gaius Memmius, was now a tribune of the soldiers with Metellus Pius, but the following year would see him old enough to stand for quaestor; would it be possible that Gaius Memmius be allowed to stand for quaestor in absentia, and then join Pompey's staff as quaestor for Nearer Spain? The Senate's assent (it was now clay in Philippus's hands) came back before Pompey quit Mutina, bolstering his conviction that whatever he wanted would be given to him. Now the father of a son almost two years old and a daughter born earlier in this year, Pompey had left Mucia Tertia at his stronghold in Picenum and issued firm orders that she was not to visit Rome in his absence. He expected a long campaign and could see no virtue in exposing his beautiful and enigmatic wife to temptation. Though he had already raised a thousand horse troopers from among his old cavalry units, it was Pompey's intention to add to their number by recruiting in Gaul across the Alps, one good reason why he preferred to go to Spain by the land route. He was also a poor sailor, dreaded the sea, and did not trust it as a way of reaching his new province, though the winter winds favored it. Every map had been studied, every trader and frequenter of the land route to Spain had been interviewed. The Via Domitia was, however, fraught with difficulties: as Pompey now knew. After Marcus Perperna Veiento had crossed with the remnants of Lepidus's army from Sardinia to Liguria and headed off in the direction of Spain, he had taken great delight in working as much mischief for Rome along the way as he could. The result was that all the principal tribes of Gaul across the Alps were in revolt Helvii, Vocontii, Salluvii, Volcae Arecomici. The worst aspect of tribal unrest in the further Gallic province lay in the delays Pompey would suffer as he fought his way to Spain through territory full of hostile and formidably warlike peoples. Of eventual success he had no doubt, but he desperately wanted to arrive in Nearer Spain before this coming winter cracked down; if he was to make sure that he and not Metellus Pius won the war against Sertorius, he could not afford to spend a whole year getting to Spain, and that seemed a likely prospect given the unrest in Gaul across the Alps. All the passes through the Alps were in the custody of one or another of the tribes at present in revolt; the headhunting Salluvii controlled the lofty ranges of the Alpes Maritimae closest to the sea, the Vocontii occupied the valley of the Druentia River and the Mons Genava Pass, the Helvii guarded the middle reaches of the Rhodanus Valley, and the Volcae Arecomici lay athwart the Via Domitia to Spain below the central massif of the Cebenna. It would add laurels to his brow if he suppressed all these barbarian insurrections, of course but not laurels of high enough quality. They lay in the purlieu of Sertorius. Therefore how to avoid a long and costly transit of Gaul across the Alps? The answer had occurred to Pompey before he marched from Mutina in the first part of September: he would avoid the usual roads by blazing a new one. The largest of the northern tributaries which fed into the Padus River was the Duria Major, which came down rushing and roaring from the highest alps of all, those towering between the bowl of western Italian Gaul and the lakes and rivers feeding eastern Gallia Comata Lake Lemanna, the upper Rhodanus River, and the mighty Rhenus River which divided the lands of the Gauls from the lands of the Germans. The beautiful cleft carved out of the mountains by the Duria Major was always known as the Vale of the Salassi because it was inhabited by a Gallic tribe called the Salassi; when a generation ago gold had been found in the stream as an alluvium and Roman prospectors had begun to cull it, the Salassi had so strenuously resisted this Roman intrusion that no one any longer tried to retrieve the gold much further up the Vale than the town of Eporedia. But at the very top of the Vale of the Salassi there were said to be two passes across the Alpes Penninae. One was a literal goat track which led over the very highest mountains and down to a settlement of the tribe Veragri called Octodurum, and then followed the source stream of the Rhodanus until it entered the eastern end of Lake Lemanna; because of its ten thousand foot altitude this pass was only open during summer and early autumn, and was too treacherous to permit the passage of an army. The second pass lay at an altitude of about seven thousand feet and was wide enough to accommodate wagons, though its road was not paved or Roman surveyed; it led to the northern sources of the Isara River and the lands of the Allobroges, then to the Rhodanus about halfway down its course to the Middle Sea. The German Cimbri had fled through this pass after their defeat by Gaius Marius and Catulus Caesar at Vercellae, though their progress had been slow and most of them had been killed by the Allobroges and the Ambarri further west. During the first interview Pompey conducted with a group of tamed Salassi, he abandoned any thought of the higher pass; but the lower one interested him mightily. A path wide enough for wagons no matter how rough or perilous it might prove to be meant that he could traverse it with his legions and, he hoped, his cavalry. The season was about a month behind the calendar, so he would cross the Alpes Graiae in high summer if he got going by early September, and the chances of snow even at seven thousand feet were minimal. He decided not to cart any baggage by wagon, trusting that he would be able to find his heavier provisions and equipment around Narbo in the far Gallic province, and thus commandeered every mule he could find to serve as a pack animal. "We're going to move fast, no matter how difficult the terrain," he told his assembled army at dawn on the day he marched. "The less warning the Allobroges have of our advent, the better our chances of not becoming bogged down in a war I'd much rather not fight. Nothing must be allowed to prevent us reaching the Pyrenees before the lowest pass into Spain is closed! Gaul across the Alps morally belongs to the Domitii Ahenobarbi and as far as I'm concerned, they can keep it! We want to be in Nearer Spain by winter. And be in Nearer Spain by winter we will be!" The army crossed the lower of the two passes at the top of the Vale of the Salassi at the end of September and encountered surprisingly little opposition from either the route itself or the people who lived along it. When Pompey descended into the Isara valley and the lands of the fierce Allobroges, he caught them so much by surprise that they brandished their spears in the direction of his dust and never succeeded in catching up with him. It was not until he reached the Rhodanus itself that he chanced upon organized opposition. This came from the Helvii, who lived on the great river's western bank and in part of the Cebenna massif behind. But they proved easy meat for Pompey, who defeated several contingents of Helvii warriors sent against him, then demanded and took hostages against future good behavior. The Vocontii and Salluvii courageous enough to venture down onto the Rhodanus plains met the same fate, as did the Volcae Arecomici after Pompey's army had crossed the causeway through the marshes between Arelate and Nemausus. Past the last danger, Pompey then bundled up his cache of several hundred child hostages and sent them to Massilia for custody. Before winter he had crossed the Pyrenees and found himself an excellent campsite among the civilized Indigetes around the township of Emporiae. Pompey was into Nearer Spain, but barely. The proconsul who had never been a senator let alone a consul sat down to write to the Senate of his adventures since leaving Italian Gaul, with heavy emphasis upon his own courage and daring in blazing a new way across the Alps, and upon the ease with which he had defeated Gallic opposition. Missing the finishing touches Varro had always applied to his bald and fairly limited prose, Pompey then wrote to the other proconsul, Metellus Pius the Piglet in Further Spain.