The Grass Crown (63 page)

For the moment Sulla was content to have it so. As long as he behaved nicely and deferentially to Lucius Caesar, he would get the commands and the jobs he needed in order to eclipse Lucius Caesar. Who, as Sulla was rapidly discovering, had a streak of morbid pessimism in him, and was not as confidently competent as he had seemed in the beginning. When the two departed for Campania early in April, Sulla left the military decisions and dispositions to Lucius Caesar, while he threw himself with praiseworthy energy and enthusiasm into recruiting and training new legions. There were plenty among the centurions of the two veteran legions in Capua who had served under Sulla somewhere or other, and even more among the retired centurions who had re-enlisted to train troops. The word got around, and Sulla’s reputation grew. Now all he needed was for Lucius Caesar to make a few mistakes, or else become so bogged down in one section of the coming campaign that he had no choice but to give Sulla a free rein. On one point, Sulla was absolutely set; when his chances came, he wouldn’t be making any mistakes at all.

Better prepared than any of the other commanders, Pompey Strabo equipped two new legions from the people on his own vast estates in northern Picenum; with the centurions of the two veteran legions he had stolen helping him, he got his new troops into fair condition in fifty days. During the second week in April he set off from Cingulum with four legions—two veteran, two raw. A good proportion. Though his military career had not been particularly distinguished, he had the requisite experience for command, and had made himself a reputation as a very hard man.

An incident which happened when he was a thirty-year-old quaestor in Sardinia had unfortunately contributed much toward his contempt for and isolation from his fellow members of the Senate. Pompey Strabo had written from Sardinia to the Senate requesting that he be allowed to impeach his superior, the governor Titus Annius Albucius, and that he himself be empowered to prosecute Titus Albucius upon their return to Rome. Led by Scaurus, the Senate had responded with a scathing letter from the praetor Gaius Memmius, who had included in it a copy of Scaurus’s speech—in which he had called Pompey Strabo everything from a noxious mushroom to crass, bovine, ill-mannered, presumptuous, stupid, and under-bred. To Pompey Strabo, he had done the correct thing in demanding that he bring his superior to trial; to Scaurus and the other leaders of the House at that time, what Pompey Strabo had done was unpardonable. No one indicted his superior! But, having indicted his superior, no one pressed for the job of prosecuting him! Then Lucius Marcius Philippus had turned the absent Pompey Strabo into a laughingstock by suggesting that the Senate should substitute a different cross-eyed prosecutor for the trial Titus Albucius now had to face, and nominated Caesar Strabo.

There was a lot of the Celtic king in Pompey Strabo, in spite of the fact that he claimed to be completely Roman. His chief defense of his Romanness was his tribe, Clustumina, a moderately elderly rural tribe whose citizens lived in the eastern Tiber valley. But few of the Romans who mattered doubted for one moment that the Pompeii had been in Picenum far longer than the date of Roman conquest of the area. The tribe created for the new Picentine citizens was Velina, and most of the vassals who lived on Pompeian lands in northern Picenum and eastern Umbria were of the tribe Velina. The interpretation among those who mattered in Rome was that the Pompeii were Picentines and owned vassals long before Roman influence in that part of Italy, and had bought themselves membership in a better tribe than Velina. It was an area of Italy where Gauls had settled in large numbers after the failed invasion of central Italy and Rome by the first King Brennus three hundred years earlier. And as Pompeian looks were Celtic in the extreme, those who mattered in Rome deemed them Gauls.

Be that as it may, some seventy years ago a Pompeius had finally taken the inevitable journey down the Via Flaminia to Rome, and by unscrupulously bribing the electors, got himself voted in as consul twenty years later. At first this Pompeius—who was more closely related to Quintus Pompeius Rufus than to Pompey Strabo—had found himself at loggerheads with the great Metellus Macedonicus, but they had patched up their differences, and eventually shared the censorship. All of which meant that the Pompeii were on their Roman way.

The first Pompeius of Strabo’s branch to make the trip south had been Pompey Strabo’s father, who had procured himself a seat in the Senate and married none other than the sister of the famous Latin language satirist, Gaius Lucilius. The Lucilii were Campanians who had been Roman citizens for generations; they were quite rich, and had consuls in the family. A temporary shortage of cash had transformed Pompey Strabo’s father into desirable husband material—especially when Lucilia’s abysmal unattractiveness was added to the Lucilian debit account. Unfortunately Strabo’s father had died before he could attain a senior magistracy—but not before Lucilia had produced her crosseyed little Gnaeus Pompeius, immediately cognominated Strabo. She had produced another boy, called Sextus, much younger than Pompey Strabo, and of much poorer quality. Thus it was Pompey Strabo who became the family’s hope for great things.

Strabo was not by nature a student, let alone a scholar; though he was educated in Rome by a series of excellent tutors, he achieved little in the way of learning. Presented with the great Greek ideas and ideals, the boy Pompey Strabo had dismissed them as idle waffle and complete impracticality. He liked the warlords and international meddlers who liberally dotted Roman history. As a contubernalis—cadet—serving under various commanders, Pompey Strabo had not been popular with his peers—men like Lucius Caesar, Sextus Caesar, his middling cousin Pompeius Rufus, Cato Licinianus, Lucius Cornelius Cinna. They had used him as a butt because of his atrociously crossed eyes, certainly, but also because he had an innate uncouthness no amount of Roman polish ever managed to conceal. His early years in the army had been miserable, and his service as a tribune of the soldiers hardly less so. No one liked Pompey Strabo!

All of this he was later to tell his own son, a violent partisan of his father’s. That son (now aged fifteen) and a daughter, Pompeia, were the products of another Lucilian marriage; following the precedent set by his father, Pompey Strabo also espoused an ugly Lucilia, this one the daughter of the famous satirist’s elder brother, Gaius Lucilius Hirrus. Luckily the Pompeian blood was capable of overcoming Lucilian homeliness, for neither Strabo nor his son was homely, save for Strabo’s cross-eyes. Like generations of Pompeii before them, they were fair of face and coloring, blue-eyed, very snub of nose. In the Rufus branch of the family the hair ran to red; the Strabo branch ran to gold.

When Strabo marched his four legions south through Picenum, he left his son behind in Rome with his mother, there to further his education. But the son was no intellectual either—and very much shaped by his father into the bargain—so he packed up his trunk and headed home to northern Picenum, there to mingle with the centurions left behind to keep on training Pompeian clients as legionaries, and subject himself to a rigorous program of military training well before he could assume the toga of manhood. Unlike his father in this respect, Young Pompey was universally adored. He called himself plain Gnaeus Pompeius, no cognomen. None of that branch owned a cognomen save for Young Pompey’s father, and Strabo was a name he could not adopt because he didn’t have cross-eyes. Young Pompey’s eyes were very large, very wide, very blue, and quite perfect. The eyes, said his doting mother, of a poet.

While Young Pompey kicked his heels at home, Pompey Strabo continued his march south. Then as he was crossing the Tinna River near Falernum, he was ambushed by six legions of Picentes under Gaius Vidacilius, and was obliged to fight a waterlogged defensive action which gave him no room to maneuver. To make his predicament worse, Titus Lafrenius came up with two legions of Vestini—and Publius Vettius Scato arrived with two legions of Marsi! Everyone Italian wanted to have a piece of the first action in the war.

The battle was a credit to neither side. Enormously outnumbered, Pompey Strabo managed to extricate himself almost intact from the river and hustled his precious army to the coastal city of Firmum Picenum, where he shut himself up and prepared to withstand a long siege. By rights the Italians should have annihilated him, but they hadn’t yet absorbed the lesson of the one unfailing Roman military characteristic—speed. In that respect—and it turned out to be the vital respect—Pompey Strabo was the winner, even if the battle had to be awarded to the Italians.

Vidacilius left Titus Lafrenius outside the walls of Firmum Picenum to keep the Romans inside and took himself off with Scato to do mischief elsewhere, while Pompey Strabo sent a message to Coelius in Italian Gaul asking for relief to be sent as soon as possible. His plight was not desperate; he had access to the sea, and to a small Roman Adriatic fleet no one had remembered was based there. Firmum Picenum was a Latin Rights colony, and loyal.

As soon as the Italians heard that Pompey Strabo was marching, honor was satisfied; Rome was the aggressor. Mutilus and Silo in the grand council now got all the support they wanted. While Silo remained in Italica and sent Vidacilius, Lafrenius, and Scato north to deal with Pompey Strabo, Gaius Papius Mutilus led six legions to Aesernia. No Latin outpost would mar the autonomy of Italia! Aesernia must fall.

The caliber of Lucius Caesar’s two junior legates became embarrassingly obvious at once; Scipio Asiagenes and Lucius Acilius disguised themselves as slaves and fled the city before the Samnites arrived. Their defection dismayed Aesernia not at all. Formidably fortified and very well provisioned, the city shut its gates and manned its walls with the five cohorts of recruits the junior legates had left behind, so anxious were they to escape. Mutilus saw at once that the siege would be a prolonged one, so he left Aesernia under heavy attack by two of his legions and moved on with the other four toward the Volturnus River, which bisected Campania east to west.

When the news came that the Samnites were marching, Lucius Caesar shifted himself from Capua to Nola, where Lucius Postumius’s five cohorts had tamed the town’s insurrection.

“Until I find out what Mutilus plans to do, I think it best to garrison Nola with both our veteran legions as well,” he said to Sulla as he prepared to leave Capua. “Keep up the work. We are frightfully outnumbered. As soon as you can, send some troops to Venafrum with Marcellus.”

“It’s already done,” said Sulla laconically. “Campania has always been the favorite place for veterans to settle after they retire, and they’re flocking to join. All they need is a helmet on the head, a mail-shirt, a sword by the side, and a shield. As fast as I can equip them and sort out the most experienced to serve as centurions, I’m sending them out to the places you want garrisoned. Publius Crassus and his two oldest sons went to Lucania yesterday with one legion of retired veterans.”

“You should tell me!” said Lucius Caesar a little peevishly.

“No, Lucius Julius, I should not,” said Sulla firmly, his calm unimpaired. “I am here to implement your plans. Once you tell me who is to go where with what, it’s my job to see your orders carried out. You don’t need to ask, any more than I need to tell.”

“Whom did I send to Beneventum, then?” Lucius Caesar asked, aware that his weaknesses were beginning to show; the demands of generaling were too vast.

But not too vast for Sulla, who didn’t permit his satisfaction to show. Sooner or later things would become too much for Lucius Caesar—and then it would be his turn. He let Lucius Caesar move to Nola, knowing it would be as temporary as it was futile. Sure enough, when word came of the investment of Aesernia, Lucius Caesar marched back to Capua, then decided his best move would be to march to the relief of Aesernia. But the central areas of Campania around the Volturnus were in open revolt, Samnite legions were everywhere, and it was rumored Mutilus had taken himself off in the direction of Beneventum.

Central Italy

Northern Campania was still safe, its allegiance more Roman; Lucius Caesar moved his two veteran legions through Teanum Sidicinum and Interamna in order to approach Aesernia across friendly ground. What he didn’t know was that Publius Vettius Scato of the Marsi had detached himself from the siege of Pompey Strabo in Firmum Picenum and marched around the western foreshores of Lake Fucinus, also heading for Aesernia. He came down the watershed of the Liris, skirted Sora, and met Lucius Caesar between Atina and Casinum.

Neither side had expected it. Both sides fell into accidental battle complicated by the gorge in which they encountered each other, and Lucius Caesar lost. He retreated back to Teanum Sidicinum, leaving two thousand precious veteran soldiers dead on the field and Scato pushing on unimpeded toward Aesernia. This time the Italians could claim a solid victory, and did.

Never wholly reconciled to Roman rule, the towns of southern Campania declared one after the other for Italia, including Nola and Venafrum. Marcus Claudius Marcellus extricated himself and his troops from Venafrum ahead of the approaching Samnite army; but instead of retreating to a safely Roman place like Capua, Marcellus and his men elected to go to Aesernia. They found the Italians completely surrounding it, Scato and his Marsi on one side, Samnites on the other. But Italian guard duty was lax, and Marcellus was quick to take advantage of it. All the Romans managed to get inside the town during the night. Aesernia now possessed a brave and capable commandant, and ten cohorts of Roman legionaries.

Licking his wounds in Teanum Sidicinum as sullenly as an old dog losing its first fight, a depressed and dismayed Lucius Julius Caesar was bombarded with one piece of bad news after another; Venafrum gone, Aesernia heavily invested, Nola holding two thousand Roman soldiers prisoner including the praetor Lucius Postumius, and Publius Crassus and his two sons driven inside Grumentum by the Lucani, now also in revolt, and very ably led by Marcus Lamponius. To cap everything else, Sulla’s intelligence was reporting that the Apuli and the Venusini were about to declare for Italia.

•        •        •

But all that was as nothing compared to the plight of Publius Rutilius Lupus just east of Rome. It had started when Gaius Perperna arrived with one legion of raw recruits instead of two legions of veterans during the intercalated February; after that, things went from bad to worse. While Marius threw himself into the work of enlisting and arming men and Caepio did the same, Lupus engaged himself in a battle of the pen with the Senate in Rome. There were elements of insurrection within his own forces and even within the ranks of his own legates, scribbled Lupus furiously, and what was the Senate going to do about it? How could he be expected to conduct a war when his own people were inimical? Did Rome or did Rome not want Alba Fucentia protected? And how could he do that when he had not one experienced legionary? And when was something going to be done to recall Pompey Strabo? And when was someone going to move that Pompey Strabo be prosecuted for treason? And when was the Senate going to get his two legions of veterans back from Pompey Strabo? And when was he going to be relieved of that intolerable insect, Gaius Marius?

Lupus and Marius were encamped on the Via Valeria outside Carseoli in a very well-fortified way—thanks to Marius, who simply went ahead and got the recruits digging—to strengthen their muscles, he said innocently whenever Lupus complained that the men were digging when they ought to be drilling. Caepio lay behind them, also on the Via Valeria, outside the town of Varia. In one respect Lupus was not wrong; no one would see anyone else’s point of view. Caepio kept himself absolutely away from Carseoli and his general because, he said, he couldn’t bear the acrimonious atmosphere in the command tent. And Marius—who had a fair idea that his general would march against the Marsi as soon as he counted enough soldiers in the parades—never let up carping. The troops were hopelessly inexperienced, he said, they would need the full hundred days of training before they could cope with any sort of battle, a lot of the equipment was substandard, Lupus had better settle down and accept things for what they were instead of dwelling endlessly upon Pompey Strabo and the stolen veteran legions.

But if Lucius Caesar was indecisive, Lupus was downright incompetent. His military experience was minimal, and he belonged to that school of armchair general who believed that the moment an enemy set eyes upon a Roman legion, the fight was over—in Rome’s favor. He also despised Italians, considering every last one of them a bucolic knave. As far as he was concerned, the moment Marius had gathered and armed four legions, they could move. However, he reckoned without Marius. Marius clung doggedly to his standpoint: that the soldiers must be kept out of action until they were properly trained. On the one occasion when he issued a direct order to Marius to march for Alba Fucentia, Marius flatly refused. And when Marius refused, so did the more junior legates.

Off went more letters to Rome, now accusing his legates of mutiny rather than insubordination. It was Gaius Marius at the bottom of it, always Gaius Marius.

Thus it was that Lupus made no move until the end of May, when he called a council and instructed Gaius Perperna to take the Capuan legion of recruits and the next-best legion, and advance through the western pass along the Via Valeria into the lands of the Marsi. His objective was Alba Fucentia, which he was to relieve should the Marsi have besieged it, or else garrison it against a Marsic attack. Once again Marius objected, but this time he was overridden; the recruits, said Lupus with truth, had had their training period. Perperna and his two legions set off up the Via Valeria.

The western pass was a rocky gorge lying at four thousand feet, and the snows of winter had not yet entirely melted. The troops muttered and complained of the cold, so Perperna failed to post as many lookouts on the high points as he should have, more concerned to keep everyone happy than everyone alive. Publius Praesenteius attacked his column just as it became completely enclosed by the ravine, leading four legions of Paeligni hungry for a victory. They had their victory, as complete as it was sweet. Four thousand of Perperna’s soldiers lay dead in the pass to yield up their arms and armor to Praesenteius; the Paeligni also got the armor of the six thousand men who survived, as they had abandoned it in order to run away faster. Perperna himself was among the fastest runners.

In Carseoli, Lupus stripped Perperna of his rank and sent him to Rome in disgrace.

“That’s stupidity, Lupus,” said Marius, who had long given up according the general the courtesy of Publius Rutilius; it hurt to speak that beloved name to someone so unworthy of it. “You can’t blame it all on Perperna, he’s an amateur. The fault is yours, and nobody else’s. I told you—the men weren’t ready. And they ought to have been led by someone who understands green troops—me.”

“Mind your own business!” snapped Lupus. “And try to remember that your chief business is to say yes to me!”

“I wouldn’t say yes to you, Lupus, if you presented me with your bare arse,” said Marius, eyebrows matted together across the bridge of his nose, and looking doubly fierce because of them. “You are a totally incompetent idiot!”

“I shall send you back to Rome!” cried Lupus.

“You couldn’t send your grandmother ten paces down the road,” said Marius scornfully. “Four thousand men dead who might one day have turned into decent soldiers, and six thousand naked survivors who ought to be scourged! Don’t blame Gaius Perperna, blame no one but yourself!” He shook his head, slapped his flaccid left cheek. “Oh, I feel as if someone’s sent me back twenty years! You’re doing the same as all the rest of the senatorial fools, killing good men!”

Lupus drew himself up to his full height, which was not very imposing. “I am not only the consul, I am the commander-in-chief in this theater of war,” he said haughtily. “In exactly eight days—today, I remind you, are the Kalends of June—you and I will march for Nersae and approach the lands of the Marsi from the north. We will proceed in two columns, each of two legions, and cross the Velinus separately. There are only two bridges between here and Reate, and neither is wide enough to take eight men abreast. Which is why we will proceed in two columns. Otherwise it will take too long to cross. I will use the bridge closer to Carseoli, you will use the one closer to Cliterna. We will reunite on the Himella beyond Nersae and join the Via Valeria just before Antinum. Is that understood, Marius?”

“It’s understood,” said Marius. “It’s stupid! But it’s understood. What you don’t seem to realize, Lupus, is that there are very likely to be Italian legions west of the Marsic lands.”

“There are no Italian legions west of Marsic lands,” said Lupus. “The Paeligni who ambushed Perperna have gone east again.”

Marius shrugged. “Have it your own way. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

They moved out eight days later, Lupus taking the lead with his two legions, Marius following on until it came time to continue north alone, leaving Lupus with a shorter march to his bridge across the swift and icy Velinus, swollen with melted snows. The moment Lupus’s column was out of sight, Marius led his troops into a nearby forest and ordered them to make smokeless camp.

“We’re following the Velinus toward Reate, and on the far side of it are formidable heights,” he said to his senior legate, Aulus Plotius. “If I were a canny Italian planning to beat Rome in a war—and I’d had a taste of our abysmal mettle—I’d have my longest-sighted men sitting on top of that ridge watching for troop movements on this side of the river. The Italians must know Lupus has been squatting at Carseoli for months, so why shouldn’t they be expecting him to move, and watching out for him? They annihilated his last little effort. They’re watching for his next, mark my words. So we are going to stay here in this nice thick wood until dark, then we’ll march as best we can until daylight, when we’ll hide in another nice thick wood. I am not going to expose my men until they’re tramping across that bridge on the double.”

Plotius of course was young, but more than old enough to have seen service as a junior tribune against the Cimbri in Italian Gaul; he had been attached to Catulus Caesar, but—as everybody did who served in that campaign—he knew where the real credit lay. And as he listened to Marius, he was profoundly glad that it had been his luck to be seconded to Marius’s column, rather than to Lupus’s. Before they had left Carseoli he had jokingly commiserated with Lupus’s legate, Marcus Valerius Messala, who had also wanted to march with Marius.

Gaius Marius finally reached his bridge on the twelfth day of June, having proceeded at a painfully slow pace because the nights were moonless and the terrain roadless save for a meandering track he had preferred not to follow. He made his dispositions carefully, and in the secure knowledge that no one watched from the heights or the far side—he had had them scoured. The two legions were cheerful and willing to do anything Marius wanted them to do; they were exactly the same sort of men who had marched with Perperna through the western pass grumbling about the cold and unhappy to be there, they came from the same towns in the same lands. Yet these soldiers felt confident, fit for anything including battle, and obeyed their instructions to the letter as they commenced pouring across the little bridge. It is because, thought Aulus Plotius, they are Marius’s men—even if that means they must also be Marius’s mules. For, as always, Marius was marching light. Lupus, on the other hand, had insisted upon a proper baggage train.