The Grass Crown (94 page)

As to the effeminate one, Ptolemy Alexander, he must be broken of this love for men. The Egyptians would clearly prefer him as their next king because he is legitimate. Therefore he will learn to like women if he likes his head on his shoulders. I leave it to you to enforce this edict.

Setting pen to paper was an ordeal for the King, who normally used scribes, but he wanted to write this letter himself; it took him many days to compose in full, and many burned drafts.

By the end of October the letter was on its way and the King of Pontus felt himself strong enough at last to attack Rhodus. He mounted his assault at night, and concentrated upon the land perimeter of the city because the Rhodian navy was berthed in the harbor. But no one in the Pontic command chain had the necessary knowledge or skill to storm a city as large and well fortified as Rhodus, so the attack was a dismal failure. Unfortunately the King lacked the patience to subject Rhodus to a long-term blockade—the only sure way to conquer it. Frontal assault it must be. But this time the Rhodian navy would be lured outside the harbor and sent chasing off after a decoy, as the main thrust of the Pontic attack would come from the water, spearheaded by a sambuca.

What thrilled the King most was that the idea of the sambuca was entirely his, and had been greeted in council by Pelopidas and his other generals as a brilliant ploy, sure to work. Flushed with happiness, Mithridates decided to build the sambuca himself—that is, to design it personally and supervise its construction.

He took two identical and immense “sixteeners” built in the same shipyard and lashed them together amidships; it was here that the King’s inadequacies as an engineer ill served his sambuca. What he should have done was to lash them together from their far sides, thus distributing the weight they would be called upon to carry evenly over the entire structure; instead, he lashed them together along their near sides, where they touched each other. Over the two ships he put a deck so large that parts of it overhung the water, but made no attempt to secure the deck to its substrate in any but the most superficial way. On top of this deck two towers went up in the midline, one situated above the gap between the two prows and one on top of the sterns, which were in closer proximity. Between the two towers a wide bridge was built so that it could be raised and lowered on a system of pulleys and winches from a resting position flat on the deck all the way up to the top of the towers. Inside each tower were huge treadmills operated by hundreds of slaves whose job it was to push the bridge from bottom to top. A tall fence of heavy planks was attached by hinges to one side of the bridge right along its length from prow tower to stern tower; while the bridge was being raised the fence formed a protection against missiles, and when the bridge attained its maximum altitude of just a little more than the immense seawall of Rhodus port, the fence could then be dropped onto the top of the seawall to form a gangplank.

The attack began on a calm day toward the end of November, two hours after the Rhodian navy was lured away to the north. The Pontic army assaulted the landward walls at their weakest points as the Pontic navy rowed into Rhodus harbor, its outer flank deployed to keep the Rhodian fleet on its periphery when the Rhodian fleet saw through the trick and returned. In the midst of the huge Pontic flotilla reared the mighty sambuca, towed by dozens of lighters and followed closely by transports loaded with troops.

Amid shrieks of alarm and frantic activity along the Rhodian battlements, with great dexterity the lightermen berthed the sambuca side-on to the vast seawall behind which lay the temple of Isis; the moment the maneuver was over, the troop transports crowded round it. Relatively unharmed by the frenzied hurling of stones and arrows and spears, the Pontic soldiers poured onto the sambuca, where they were packed densely onto the bridge, lying flat on the deck. Then the winch operators flogged their slaves to start walking the treadmills. Amid an horrific squealing and groaning, the bridge between the towers began to rise into the air bearing its load of soldiers. Hundreds of helmeted Rhodian heads popped up along the battlements to watch in mingled fascination and terror; Mithridates watched too, from his “sixteener” in the middle of the packed Pontic ships, waiting until the sambuca concentrated all Rhodian resistance to the temple of Isis section of the seawall. Once the sambuca was the center of attention, the other ships could draw up alongside the rest of the seawall and send troops up ladders with impunity. Pontic soldiers would be atop the fortifications all the way around the harbor.

It cannot fail! I’ve got them this time! thought the King to himself as he allowed his eyes to dwell lovingly upon his sambuca and its slowly rising bridge between the two towers. Soon the bridge would come level with the top of the seawall, magically the protective fence would drop on its hinges to form a gangway across which the soldiers would pour in among the Rhodian defenders. There were enough men aboard the bridge to hold the Rhodians at bay until the apparatus was lowered back to the deck to load another contingent and winch them to the top. There is no doubt about it, thought King Mithridates, I am the best at everything!

But as the center of gravity rose along with the sambuca bridge, the distribution of weight changed. The host ships lashed together began to split apart. Ropes snapped with little explosions, the towers began to totter, the deck to heave and buckle, the ascending bridge to sway like a dancer’s scarf. Then the two ships bearing all of this began to capsize toward the midline. Decking, towers, bridge, soldiers, sailors, artificers, and treadmill slaves fell into the water between the rolling vessels amid a cacophony of screams, grinding crunches, roars—and hysterical cheers from the jubilant Rhodians atop their walls—cheers soon changing into paroxysms of mocking laughter.

“I never want to hear the name of Rhodes mentioned again!” said the King as his mighty galley bore him back to Halicarnassus. “It’s too close to winter to continue this petty campaign against a pack of idiots and fools. My armies marching into Macedonia and my fleets along the coast of Greece need my closer attention. I also want every engineer who had anything to do with the design of that ridiculous sambuca dead—no, not dead! Tongues out, eyes out, hands off, balls off, and begging bowls!”

So furious was the King at this humiliation that he visited Lycia with an army and attempted to besiege Patara. But when he felled a grove of trees sacred to Latona, the mother of Apollo and Artemis came to him in a dream and warned him to stop. Next day the King handed over the investment to his underlings—the hapless Pelopidas was placed in command—and took his fascinating albino bride Monima to Hierapolis. There, cavorting and frolicking in the hot mineral pools amid petrified crystal waterfalls tumbling down the cliffs, he succeeded in forgetting all about the laughter of Rhodes—and Chian ships which gave him the fright of his life.

Aurelia

The news of the massacre of Asia Province’s Roman and Latin and Italian residents reached Rome ahead of the news that Mithridates had invaded the province—and reached Rome in record time. Just nine days after the last day of Quinctilis, the Princeps Senatus Lucius Valerius Flaccus was convening the House in the temple of Bellona outside the pomerium because this was to do with a foreign war. To those present he read out a letter from Publius Rutilius Rufus in Smyrna.

I am sending this by a specially commissioned fast ship to Corinth, and onward to Brundisium by another just as fast, trusting that the rebellion in Greece does not prevent its passage. The courier has been instructed to ride from Brundisium to Rome at the gallop, night and day. The large sum of money this is costing has been given to me by my friend Miltiades, the ethnarch of Smyrna, who begs only that the Senate and People of Rome remember his service to them when, as must happen, Asia Province belongs to Rome again.

It may be that you do not know as yet of the invasion of King Mithridates of Pontus, who now rules both Bithynia and our Roman Asian province. Manius Aquillius is dead under the most hideous circumstances, and Gaius Cassius is fled I know not where. A quarter of a million Pontic soldiers are west of the Taurus, the Aegean is completely covered by Pontic fleets, and Greece has allied itself with Pontus against Rome. I very much fear that Macedonia is totally isolated.

But that is not the worst of it. On the last day of Quinctilis, every Roman and Latin and Italian in the Asia Province, Bithynia, Pisidia, and Phrygia was massacred by order of King Mithridates of Pontus. Their slaves were also massacred. The number of dead, I believe, is something like eighty thousand citizens and seventy thousand slaves—one hundred and fifty thousand altogether. That I did not suffer the same fate is due to my non-citizen status, though I believe the King issued a warning that I—by name!—was not to be touched. A nice sop to the hound of Hades. What can the sparing of my old life do to offset the brutal hacking into pieces of Roman women and little babies? They were torn from altars still crying on the gods and their bodies lie rotting unburied, again by order of the King of Pontus. This barbarian monstrosity now fancies himself the king of the world, and is boasting that he will be on Italian soil before the year is out.

No one is left east of Italy to gainsay his boast save our people in Macedonia. But I despair of Macedonia. Though I have not been able to confirm it, there is news that King Mithridates has mounted a land expedition against Thessalonica which has already penetrated west of Philippi without a shred of opposition. I know more about activities in Greece, where a Pontic agent named Aristion has snatched all power in Athens and persuaded most of Greece to declare for Mithridates. The isles of the Aegean are in Pontic hands, the fleets are gigantic. When Delos fell, another twenty thousand of our people were put to death.

Please, I beg of you, regard my letter as deliberately brief and understated, and do what you can to prevent this frightful barbarian Mithridates crowning himself the King of Rome. It is that serious.

“Oh, we don’t need this!” said Lucius Caesar to his brother Catulus Caesar.

“We may not need it, but we’ve got it,” said Gaius Marius, eyes sparkling. “A war against Mithridates! I knew it had to come. Surprising, really, that it’s been so long.”

“Lucius Cornelius is on his way to Rome,” said the other censor, Publius Licinius Crassus. “I’ll breathe easier then.”

“Why?” demanded Marius fiercely. “We shouldn’t have summoned him! Let him finish the Italian war.”

“He is the senior consul,” said Catulus Caesar. “The Senate cannot make far-reaching decisions without his presence in the chair.”

“Tchah!” said Marius, and lumbered away.

“What’s the matter with him?” asked Flaccus Princeps Senatus.

“What do you think, Lucius Valerius? He’s an old war-horse snuffing the scent of just the right kind of war—a foreign one,” said Catulus Caesar.

“But surely he can’t think he’s going to it,” said Publius Crassus the censor. “He’s too old and sick!”

“Of course he thinks he’s going,” said Catulus Caesar.

The war in Italy was over. Though the Marsi never did formally surrender, among all the peoples who had taken up arms against Rome they were the most devastated; hardly a Marsian male was left alive. In February, Quintus Poppaedius Silo fled to Samnium, and joined Mutilus within Aesernia. Mutilus he found so severely wounded that he was incapable ever again of leading an army. He was paralyzed from the waist down.

“I must pass the leadership of Samnium on to you, Quintus Poppaedius,” Mutilus said.

“No!” cried Silo. “I don’t have your way with troops—especially Samnite troops—nor do I have your skill as a general.”

“There’s no one else. My Samnites have elected to follow you.”

“Do the Samnites really want to continue the war?”

“Yes,” said Mutilus. “But in the name of Samnium, not Italia.”

“I can understand that. But surely there is one Samnite left to lead them!”

“Not one, Quintus Poppaedius. It has to be you.”

“Very well, then,” said Silo, sighing.

What neither of them discussed was the ruin of their hopes for independent Italia. Nor did they discuss what both of them knew—that if Italia was finished, Samnium could not possibly win.

In May the last rebel army sallied out of Aesernia under the command of Quintus Poppaedius Silo. It numbered thirty thousand infantry and a thousand horse, and was further augmented by a force of twenty thousand manumitted slaves. Most of the infantry had been wounded in one battle or another and fetched up in Aesernia because it was the only secure place left to go; Silo had brought the cavalry with him and managed to get through the Roman lines around the city. All of which made this sally inevitable; Aesernia could not long continue to feed so many mouths.

As every marching man knew, it was a last-ditch stand; no one really expected to win. The most they could hope for was to make every death count. But then when Silo’s soldiers took Bovianum and killed the Roman garrison there, they began to feel better. Perhaps there was a chance after all? Metellus Pius and his army were sitting before Venusia on the Via Appia, so to Venusia they would go.

And there outside Venusia the last battle of the war took place, a curious rounding out of the events which had started with the death of Marcus Livius Drusus. For on the field of Venusia there met in single combat the two men who had loved Drusus best—his friend Silo and his brother Mamercus. While the Samnites died in thousands, no match for the fit and experienced Romans, Silo and Mamercus slogged hand to hand until Silo fell. Mamercus stood looking down at the Marsian with tears in his eyes, sword raised. He hesitated.

“Finish me, Mamercus!” gasped Quintus Poppaedius Silo. “You owe me that for killing Caepio. I will walk in no triumph held by the Piglet!”

“For killing Caepio,” said Mamercus, and finished him. Then wept desolately for Drusus, Silo, and the bitterness of victory.

“It’s done,” said Metellus Pius the Piglet to Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who had come to Venusia the moment he heard of the battle. “Venusia capitulated yesterday.”

“No, it is not done,” said Sulla grimly. “It won’t be done until Aesernia and Nola submit.”

“Have you considered,” ventured the Piglet rather timidly, “that if we were to lift the sieges at Aesernia and Nola, life in those two places would go back to normal and everyone would probably pretend nothing had ever happened?”

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Sulla, “which is why we will not lift the siege at either place. Why should they get away with it? Pompey Strabo didn’t let Asculum Picentum get away with it. No, Piglet, Aesernia and Nola stay the way they are. For all eternity if necessary.”

“I hear Scato is dead, and the Paeligni surrendered.”

“Correct, except that you have it the wrong way round,” said Sulla with a grin. “Pompey Strabo accepted the surrender of the Paeligni. Scato fell on his sword rather than be a part of it.”

“So it really is the end!” said Metellus Pius in wonder.

“Not until Aesernia and Nola submit.”

•        •        •

The news of the massacre of the Romans and Latins and Italians of Asia Province reached Sulla in Capua, which town he had made his base, thus releasing Catulus Caesar to go back to Rome for a well-deserved rest; he had besides inherited Catulus Caesar’s secretary, the prodigy Marcus Tullius Cicero, and found Cicero so efficient that Catulus Caesar wasn’t necessary.

Cicero found Sulla as terrifying as he had found Pompey Strabo, though for different reasons. And missed Catulus Caesar acutely.

“Lucius Cornelius, will it be possible for me to have my discharge toward the end of the year?” Cicero asked. “Though I will have served in time not quite two years, I have added up my campaigns, and will have served in ten.”

“I’ll see,” said Sulla, who felt about Cicero as a person much as Pompey Strabo had felt. “For the moment I can’t spare you. No one else knows as much about the place as you, now that Quintus Lutatius has gone to Rome to rest.”

But there never is a rest, thought Sulla, galloping to Rome in a four-mule gig. No sooner do we put one conflagration out than another bursts into flames. And this will make the war against Italy look like two twigs smoldering.

Every senior senator converged upon Rome for the Senate hearing on Asia Province, even Pompey Strabo; perhaps a hundred and fifty men gathered in the temple of Bellona outside the pomerium on the Campus Martius.

“Well, we know Manius Aquillius is dead. Presumably that means his two fellow commissioners are dead,” said Sulla to the House in conversational tones. “However, it seems Gaius Cassius escaped, though we’ve heard nothing from him. What I can’t understand is why we’ve heard not one squeak from Quintus Oppius in Cilicia. Presumably Cilicia too is lost. It is a sad business when Rome has to depend upon a civilian exile for news like this.”

“I imagine it means Mithridates struck like lightning,” said Catulus Caesar, brow furrowed.

“Or else,” said Marius shrewdly, “there’s been funny business going on between all our official representatives.”

That provoked no replies, but a great deal of thought; some certain loyalty united the body at all times, but it was not possible to mix as consistently as members of the Senate did without everyone’s knowing what everyone else was really like. And everyone knew what Gaius Cassius and the three commissioners were really like.

“Then Quintus Oppius at least should have been in contact,” said Sulla, echoing everyone else’s thoughts. “He’s a man of great honor, he wouldn’t let Rome go in ignorance a moment longer than he could help. I think we must presume Cilicia too is lost.”

“We’ll have to get word to Publius Rutilius somehow, and ask for more information,” said Marius.

“I imagine that if any of our people survived, they’ll start to reach Rome by the end of Sextilis,” said Sulla. “We’ll get more information then.”

“I interpret Publius Rutilius’s letter as meaning no one at all survived,” said Sulpicius from the tribunician bench. He groaned, clenched his fists. “Mithridates made absolutely no distinction between an Italian and a Roman!”

“Mithridates is a barbarian,” said Catulus Caesar.

But that answer was too pat for Sulpicius, who had seemed for many moments to have turned to stone when Flaccus Princeps Senatus had read Rutilius Rufus’s letter out two days before.

“He made no distinction,” Sulpicius said again. “Why he made no distinction is beside the point! Irrelevant! The Italians of Asia Province paid the same price as the Romans and the Latins of Asia Province. They’re just as dead. Their women and children and slaves are just as dead. He made no distinction!”

“Oh, pull your head in, Sulpicius!” cried Pompey Strabo, who wanted to get down to business. “You’re becoming a wheel in a rut.”

“I will have order,” said Sulla pleasantly. “We are not here in Bellona to investigate reasons or distinctions. We’re here to decide what to do.”

“War!” said Pompey Strabo instantly.

“Is that how everyone feels, or only some?” asked Sulla.

The House cried out unanimously for war.

“We have sufficient legions in the field,” said Metellus Pius, “and they’re properly equipped. At least in that respect we’re better prepared than we usually are. We can ship twenty legions to the east tomorrow.”

“We can’t, you know,” said Sulla levelly. “In fact, I doubt if we can ship one legion, let alone twenty.”

The House fell silent.

“Conscript Fathers, where are we to find the money? With the war against Italy over, we have no choice except to disband our legions. Because we can’t afford to pay them a moment longer! While Rome was imperiled within Italy, every man of Roman or Latin ancestry was obliged to take the field. We can say that the same holds true for a foreign war, especially as Asia Province is already swallowed by the aggressor and eighty thousand of our people are dead. But the fact remains that at this moment the Homeland is not directly under threat. And the men in our armies are tired. They’ve been paid at last—but it took everything we own to pay them. Which means they must be demobilized, sent home. Because we do not have even the prospect of enough money to pay them for another campaign!”

Sulla’s words sank into the silence, intensified it.

Then Catulus Caesar sighed. “Let us put considerations of money to one side for a moment,” he said. “More important by far is the fact that we have to stop Mithridates!”

“Quintus Lutatius, you haven’t listened!” cried Sulla. “There is no money for a campaign!”

Catulus Caesar assumed his haughtiest look, and said, “I move that Lucius Cornelius Sulla be given the command against Mithridates. Once the matter of command is attended to, we can attend to money.”

“And I give notice that I will move that Lucius Cornelius Sulla not be given the command against Mithridates!” roared Gaius Marius. “Let Lucius Cornelius Sulla remain in Rome to worry about money! Money! As if it is time to worry about money when Rome faces certain extinction! The money will be found. It always is. And King Mithridates has plenty of it, so it’s he will wind up paying in the long run. Conscript Fathers, we cannot give the command in this campaign to a man who worries about money! You must give this campaign to me!”