Colleen McCullough - 1. First Man in Rome

His hand was beginning to cramp; Rutilius Rufus laid his reed pen down with a sigh, and sat massaging his fingers, staring frowningly into nothing. Presently his eyelids began to droop, and his head fell forward, and he dozed; when he woke with a jerk, his hand at least felt better, so he resumed his writing.

Oh, such a long, long letter! But no one else will give you an honest account of what has happened, and you must know it all. Quintus Caepio's letter had been directed to Scaurus Princeps Senatus rather than to me, and of course you know our beloved Marcus Aemilius Scaurus! He read the whole dreadful letter out to the House with every evidence of ghoulish enjoyment. In fact, he drooled. Oh, and did it put the cat among the pigeons! There were purple faces, flying fists, and a brawl between Gnaeus Mallius and Metellus Piggle-wiggle which I stopped by calling in the lictors from the Curia vestibule an action which Scaurus did not appreciate. Oh, what a day for Mars! A pity we couldn't bottle all that hot air and just blow the Germans away with the most poisonous weapon Rome can manufacture. The upshot of it was that there will indeed be a courier waiting for Quintus Caepio on the banks of the Rhodanus but the new orders will be exactly the same as the old ones. He is to subordinate himself to the legally elected consul of the year, Gnaeus Mallius Maximus. Such a pity the silly fool dowered himself with a cognomen like Maximus, isn't it? A bit like awarding yourself a Grass Crown after your men saved you, not the other way around. Not only is it the height of crassness to give yourself a pat on the back, but if you are not a Fabius, the cognomen Maximus is horribly presumptuous. Of course he maintains his great-grandmother was a Fabia Maxima, and his grandfather used it, but all I know is that his father never did. And I doubt the Fabia Maxima story very much. Anyway, here I am like a war-horse turned out to pasture, itching to be in Gnaeus Mallius's shoes, and burdened instead with earthshaking decisions like whether we can afford to give the State granaries a new coat of pitch inside this year, after paying to equip seven new Head Count legions. Would you believe that with the whole of Rome talking Germans, Germans, Germans, the House argued for eight days about that one? Drive a man insane, it would! I do have an idea, though, and I'm going to implement it. Come victory or defeat in Gaul, I'm going to implement it. With not one man left in all Italy whom I would call a centurion's bootlaces, I am going to recruit drill instructors and other training personnel from the gladiator schools. Capua is full of gladiator schools and the best ones at that so what could be more convenient, considering that Capua is also our base camp for all new troops? If Lucius Tiddlypuss can't hire enough gladiators to put on a good show at his granddad's funeral, hard luck! Rome's need is greater than Lucius Tiddlypuss's, say I! This plan also tells you that I am going to continue to recruit among the Head Count. I'll keep you informed, of course. How goes it in the land of the lotus-eaters, sirens, and enchanted isles? Not managed to put leg-irons on Jugurtha yet? It isn't far off, I'll bet. Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle is in a trifle of a dither these days, actually. He can't make up his mind whether to concentrate on you or on Gnaeus Mallius. Naturally he gave a magnificent speech supporting Quintus Servilius's elevation to commander-in-chief. It gave me inordinate pleasure to sink his case with a few well-placed shafts. Ye gods, Gaius Marius, how they do get me down! Trumpeting the feats of their wretched ancestors when what Rome needs right now is a living, breathing military genius! Hurry up and come home, will you? We need you, for I am not up to battling the whole of the Senate, I just am not.

There was a postscriptum:

There have been a couple of peculiar incidents in Campania, by the way. I don't like them, yet I fail to see why they happened, either. At the beginning of May there was a slave revolt at Nuceria oh, easily put down, and all it really meant was that thirty poor creatures from all over the world were executed. But then three days ago another revolt broke out, this time in a big holding camp outside Capua for low-grade male slaves waiting for buyers in need of a hundred wharf laborers or quarry fodder or treadmill plodders. Almost 250 slaves were involved this time. It was put down at once, as there were several cohorts of recruits in camp around Capua. About fifty of the insurgents perished in the fighting, and the rest were executed forthwith. But I don't like it, Gaius Marius. It's an omen. The gods are against us at the moment; I feel it in my bones.

And a second postscriptum:

Some sad news for you has this very moment come to hand. As my letter to you was already arranged through Marcus Granius of Puteoli to go on his fast packet sailing for Utica at the end of the week, I have volunteered to tell you what has happened. Your much-loved father-in-law, Gaius Julius Caesar, died this afternoon. As you know, he has been suffering from a malignancy in the throat for some time. And this afternoon he fell on his sword. He chose the best alternative, as I'm sure you will agree. No man should linger to be a burden to his loved ones, especially when it detracts from his dignity and integrity as a man. Is there one among us who prefers life to death when life means lying in one's own excrement, or being cleaned of that excrement by a slave? No, when a man cannot command either his bowels or his gorge, it is time to go. I think Gaius Julius would have chosen to go sooner, except that he worried about his younger son, who as I'm sure you know married recently. I went to see Gaius Julius only two days ago, and he managed to whisper through the thing choking him that all his doubts about the suitability of young Gaius Julius's marriage were now allayed, for the beautiful Aurelia the darling of my own heart, I admit was just the right wife for his boy. So it is ave atque vale, Gaius Julius Caesar.

At the very end of June the consul Gnaeus Mallius Maximus left on the long march north and west, his two sons on his personal staff, and all twenty-four of the elected tribunes of the soldiers for that year distributed among seven of his ten legions. Sextus Julius Caesar, Marcus Livius Drusus, and Quintus Servilius Caepio Junior marched with him, as did Quintus Sertorius, taken on as a junior military tribune. Of the three Italian Allied legions, the one sent by the Marsi was the best trained and most soldierly legion of all ten; it was commanded by a twenty-five-year-old Marsic nobleman's son named Quintus Poppaedius Silo under supervision by a Roman legate, of course. Because Mallius Maximus insisted upon lugging enough State-purchased grain to feed his entire force for two months, his baggage train was huge and his progress painfully slow; by the end of the first sixteen days he hadn't even reached the Adriatic at Fanum Fortunae. Talking very hard and passionately, the legate Aurelius then managed to persuade him to leave his baggage train in the escort of one legion, and push on with his nine others, his cavalry, and light baggage only. It had proven very difficult to convince Mallius Maximus that his troops were not going to starve before they got to the Rhodanus, and that sooner or later the heavy baggage would arrive safely. Having a much shorter march over level ground, Quintus Servilius Caepio reached the huge river Rhodanus ahead of Mallius Maximus. He took only seven of his eight legions with him the eighth he shipped to Nearer Spain and no cavalry, having disbanded it the previous year as an unnecessary expense. Despite his orders and the urging of legates, Caepio had refused to move from Narbo until an expected overseas communication from Smyrna came. Nor was he in a good mood; when he could be deflected from complaining about the disgraceful tardiness of this contact between Smyrna and Narbo, he complained about the in-sensitivity of the Senate in thinking that he would yield supreme command of the Grand Army to a mushroom like Mallius Maximus. But in the end, he was obliged to march without his letter, leaving explicit instructions behind in Narbo that it was to be forwarded as soon as it came. Even so, Caepio still beat Mallius Maximus to their target destination comfortably. At Nemausus, a small trading town on the western outskirts of the vast salt marshes around the delta of the Rhodanus, he was met by the Senate's courier, who gave him the Senate's new orders. It had never occurred to Caepio that his letter would fail to move the Conscript Fathers, especially when none other than Scaurus read it out to the House. So when he opened the cylinder and scanned the Senate's brief reply, he was outraged. Impossible! Intolerable! He, a patrician Servilius, tugging his forelock at the whim of Mallius Maximus the New Man? Never! Roman intelligence reported that the Germans were now on their way south, rolling along through the lands of the Celtic Allobroges, inveterate Roman-haters caught in a cleft stick; Rome was the enemy they knew, the Germans the enemy they didn't know. And the Druidic confraternity had been telling every tribe in Gaul for two years now that there wasn't room for the Germans to settle anywhere in Gaul. Certainly the Allobroges were not about to yield enough of their lands to make a new homeland for a people far more numerous than they were themselves. And they were close enough to the Aedui and the Ambarri to know well what a shambles the Germans had made out of the lands of these intimidated tribes. So the Allobroges retreated into the towering foothills of their beloved Alps, and concentrated upon harrying the Germans as much as they could. The Germans breached the Roman province of Gaul-across-the-Alps to the north of the trading post of Vienne late in June, and surged on, unopposed. The whole mass, over three quarters of a million strong, traveled down the eastern bank of the mighty river, for its plains were wider and safer, less exposed to the fierce highland tribes of central Gaul and the Cebenna. Learning of this, Caepio deliberately turned off the Via Domitia at Nemausus, and instead of crossing the delta marshes on the long causeway Ahenobarbus had built, he marched his army northward on the western bank, thus keeping the river between himself and the path of the Germans. It was the middle of the month Sextilis. From Nemausus he had sent a courier hotfoot to Rome with another letter for Scaurus, declaring that he would not take orders from Mallius Maximus, and that was final. After this stand, the only route he could take with honor was west of the river. On the eastern bank of the Rhodanus, some forty miles north of the place where the Via Domitia crossed the river on a long causeway terminating near Arelate, was a Roman trading town of some importance; its name was Arausio. And on the western bank ten miles north of Arausio, Caepio put his army of forty thousand foot soldiers and fifteen thousand noncombatants into a strong camp. And waited for Mallius Maximus to appear on the opposite bank and waited for the Senate to reply to his latest letter. Mallius Maximus arrived ahead of the Senate's reply, at the end of Sextilis. He put his fifty-five thousand infantry and his thirty thousand noncombatants into a heavily fortified camp right on the edge of the river five miles north of Arausio, thus making the river serve as part of his defenses as well as his water source. The ground just to the north of the camp was ideal for a battle, thought Mallius Maximus, envisioning the river as his greatest protection. This was his first mistake. His second mistake was to detach his five thousand cavalry from his camp, and send them to act as his advance guard thirty miles further north. And his third mistake was to appoint his most able legate, Aurelius, to command the horse, thereby depriving himself of Aurelius's counsel. All the mistakes were part of Mallius Maximus's grand strategy; he intended to use Aurelius and the cavalry as a brake on the German advance not by offering battle, but by offering the Germans their first sight of Roman resistance. For Mallius Maximus wanted to treat, not fight, hoping to turn the Germans peacefully back into central Gaul, well away from southward progress through the Roman province. All the earlier battles fought between the Germans and Rome had been forced on the Germans by Rome, and only after the Germans had indicated they were willing to turn back peacefully from Roman territory. So Mallius Maximus had high hopes for his grand strategy, and they were not without foundation. However, his first task was to get Caepio from the west bank of the river to the east bank. Still smarting from the insulting, insensitive letter from Caepio that Scaurus had read out in the House, Mallius Maximus dictated a curt and undisguised direct order to Caepio: get yourself and your army across the river and inside my camp at once. He gave it to a team of oarsmen in a boat, thus ensuring quick delivery. Caepio used the same boat to send Mallius Maximus his answer. Which said with equal curtness that he, a patrician Servilius, would not take orders from any pretentious mushroom of a tradesman, and would stay right where he was, on the western bank. Said Mallius Maximus's next directive: