Zama

by Dan Armstrong

  “Maybe Scipio will be successful and end the war.”

  “After all that’s gone on, Timon, it’s hard to be hopeful. But he may at least draw Hannibal out of Italy. That would be something.”

  “And I wouldn’t be so worried that he might find you here.”

  We walked on a little farther in silence. Neither of us wanted to admit how difficult another separation would be.

  “Are you all right living here, Mother?”

  She finally smiled. “Yes, I feel comfortable here. Marcus is a good man. Meda and Edeco have been exceptionally kind to me. I don’t foresee any problems—other than missing you. I know some people in Rome if I get too lonely.”

  “Don’t go into Rome.” I stopped walking to impress my point. “Don’t go to the Community of Miracles. You’re supposed to be dead.”

  “I know people there I can trust, Timon. It will be fine.”

  “I know that some of those people are your friends and have the highest opinion of you, but you’ve no reason to revisit people like Caelius or Quintus Ennius.”

  “Those people helped me when I needed it the most. I can’t just forget them.”

  “But you should. At least until the war is over. Promise me that.”

  “Promise me that you will come back.”

  “You know I can’t. Please, just stay out of Rome. It’s all I ask. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Then you can go wherever you want.”

  Neither of us spoke again until we had returned to the villa. Just outside the house, I embraced her. Tears rolled down my cheeks. I couldn’t say a word without sobbing. She had no tears, but squeezed me as tightly as she could. When we finally released each other, she brushed the tears from my cheeks and looked into my eyes. “Your maps could be the difference between victory or defeat. Make your father proud.”

  I nodded, wishing now that I had never promised to go to Africa. There was too high a probability that I would never return.

  Marcus came into the stable as I was preparing for the ride back to Ostia. Edeco would accompany me on another horse, so that he could return with Balius.

  “I’m not sure when I’ll see you again, Marcus,” I said, putting the bridle on Balius. “With a little luck, the war will be over the next time we meet.”

  Marcus looked at me with a confident grin. “I wish I were going with you. After two months as a tribune, I’ve concluded I’d rather be a soldier. Instead I have a year in Rome.”

  “What do you think, Marcus, will Scipio’s strategy work? Will he draw Hannibal back to Africa?”

  “He just might. The more difficult question is whether Scipio will be able to defeat Hannibal in his own backyard. Scipio may surprise us, but it’s impossible to predict. Did you know he’s acquired a good number of his volunteers from the Eighteenth legion? He wanted men with combat experience against Hannibal. Men who weren’t in awe of him.”

  “I hadn’t heard that. My work has been focused on provisions rather than soldiers. I wonder if I know any of them?”

  “I know none of the specifics. But I believe it’s several hundred men.”

  “We only had seven thousand volunteers at last count. That can’t be enough. I wonder what Scipio’s got planned for our time in Sicily.”

  “Raising more troops. He needs twenty thousand men at the very least. Thirty thousand would be better. Expect to be in Sicily for a while.”

  Edeco stood stoically outside the stable with the horses.

  I embraced Marcus. “Thank you for allowing my mother to stay here.”

  “You know it’s no trouble. May the gods be with you—and Scipio.”

  “With all of us,” I said, walking off to join Edeco.

  CHAPTER 33

  We sailed out of Ostia four days later with thirty new warships and fifty transports. The voyage took nine days. We followed the west coast of Italy south through the straits of Messana, then continued along the east coast of Sicily past Mount Etna to Syracuse. I had made the same trip, going the other way from Syracuse to Ostia, six years earlier. As I stood on the bow with the wind in my face, five tiers of oars pulling at the water, I felt myself fill with emotion when the outline of Syracuse’s massive walls appeared in the distance.

  We sailed along the edge of Trogyli Harbor where I first landed in Syracuse nine years before. I had been in chains, cargo on a slave ship at the age of thirteen. A flood of bittersweet memories welled up in me. I remembered being stripped of clothing then auctioned off like livestock. The experience still stood out as the most humiliating moment in my young life. Two years later, during the Festival of Artemis, I was drinking wine with Moira, a young Sicilian woman, gazing out at the harbor from the battlements, the stars and moon reflected off its surface like a sheet of glass, both of us lost to the innocence of young love.

  As we skirted the east wall of the city, about to enter the Great Harbor, I saw the tower where I had spent so much time with Archimedes. I recalled the long hours of letter copying, the experiments with rays of light, and the mornings in the tower basement, drinking kykeon with the kitchen staff. Hektor and Lavinia had been victims of the siege. I wondered if Agathe and Eurydice had survived. It all seemed ancient history to me now as we entered the harbor and the ships glided onto the beach to begin the process of unloading.

  We built a fortified camp in an elevated field just south of the city. Behind the camp was what remained of the Temple of Zeus. Arguably the largest and most impressive temple in Sicily, it had been entirely dismantled. Only the huge stone plinth marked the spot. Broken limestone blocks and rubble from the deconstruction lay scattered across the plinth or half-buried in the weeds around it.

  As one of ten scribes attached to the legion of volunteers who had come from Ostia, now named the Twenty-third, my work began early in the morning the day after our arrival. All that was on the transport ships had to be inventoried and stored. What we hadn’t brought with us would have to be obtained in Sicily. Scipio sent squadrons of men off in all directions, pressing the locals for supplies and volunteers.

  Scipio’s first order of business was the change of command. He met the current praetor, Gaius Servilius, at a large home within the city that he had converted into his headquarters. I wasn’t there, but I got a report the next day. Servilius, twenty years older than Scipio, had taken to gluttony during his year in Syracuse. He was grossly overweight. His paperwork was incomplete, and the problems of the local populace had been ignored. Fortunately for Servilius, Scipio didn’t understand how bad things were until the man had sailed for Rome.

  I accompanied Scipio into Syracuse a week later. Following the siege, Marcellus had stripped the city of its finest art and limestone. Six years later the place was just as he had left it—a battle zone. Refugees from the war wandered the streets. Lawlessness ruled after nightfall. The situation was so bad Scipio was forced to temporarily put off preparation for the invasion. He set up a court in the forum to listen to complaints against Servilius. Many of the Syracusans claimed they had been better off under Carthaginian rule.

  The hearings took a full week, during which time the locals quickly understood that Publius Scipio was not Gaius Servilius. Scipio’s greatest talent off the battlefield was handling people. His manner, his efficiency, and his common sense when it came to legal matters served to calm a city full of angry people. Foremost were property claims. Promises made by Marcellus and edicts made in Rome were often at odds. Two men, sometimes three, would make claims for the same piece of land. Scipio went through each complaint one at a time, showing patience and insight, when he might have used force.

  Along with these legal actions, he put two cohorts to work cleaning up the city. Other officers would have considered this a waste of time, a secondary concern compared to pursuing the war. But in much the same way that Scipio had gained the respect of the tribal leaders in Spain, he won over the people of Syracuse, and it wasn’t just the native Greeks. Word of his elevated sense of justice spread throughout Sicily during the f
irst month we were there. Suddenly the air of hostility that had filled Syracuse on our arrival had changed to one of friendship and common purpose. Communities all over the island began to make contributions to Scipio’s war effort. Rather than a waste of time, Scipio’s judicious approach saved him both time and money.

  As Marcus had said to me upon leaving, Scipio’s seven thousand volunteers were not nearly enough men to invade Africa. Scipio knew this better than anyone, and once he had settled things in the city, he focused on increasing the size of his army.

  Something that Scipio might have anticipated prior to leaving Rome was the presence of the survivors from the battles of Cannae and Herdonea, soldiers who years earlier had been exiled from Italy for cowardice and sent to Sicily. Marcellus had enlisted these men while besieging Syracuse. Although he was later reprimanded by the Senate for using them, they made a significant contribution to his success. Arguably these exiles represented some of the most experienced legionnaires in the Roman military. Scipio had been there at Cannae. He knew what had happened. He understood the rout that day was more the work of headstrong officers, not common soldiers. Scipio made recruiting these men one of his highest priorities. His trust in these men would make them some of our most loyal and dependable legionnaires.

  A legion of Cannae survivors, the Fifth, was stationed in Syracuse. Another, the Sixth, though not a full legion, was in Messana. Other survivors were scattered across the countryside in small clusters or as individuals who had taken up permanent residence in Sicily. Once Scipio put the word out, they came from all over the island. The legion in Syracuse enlisted as a unit immediately. The legion in Messana did the same two weeks later. Another thousand locals filtered into Syracuse over the next month. Six weeks into our stay in Sicily, our numbers were approaching twenty thousand.

  Raising a cavalry out of thin air was not as easy. It took money to own and care for a horse. Scipio used pure ingenuity to solve the problem. Early on in the process, he had chosen three hundred of the best men from his volunteers and put them aside. These men trained with the other troops, but were not given specific duties, weapons, or placement in a cohort.

  In the weeks after our arrival, Scipio put a call out to the wealthiest families in Sicily, asking for three hundred volunteers to form a contingent of cavalry to go to Africa with him. It was no secret that the duty would be difficult and dangerous. There was considerable reluctance among the families to part with their sons because of the risk. It took a few weeks, but three hundred young Sicilian noblemen, all skilled horsemen, did come to Syracuse on the appointed morning. Each man came with his own horse, tack, and military gear. I was there at a desk with two other clerks, signing them up as they arrived. Also present were the three hundred volunteers who had yet to be armed or assigned a duty.

  Scipio had the noblemen assemble on their horses in three lines, one hundred across. He sat on his beautiful, blond-maned roan and watched them move into formation. When the commotion settled, he rode down the line talking to the three hundred men as one.

  “I’ve called you all here this morning to assemble a cavalry. Thank you for coming. I do believe that the outcome of this war is as important to the people of Sicily as it is to the citizens of Rome. In many ways you are volunteering to fight on your own behalf as much as Rome’s. And it’s appreciated.

  “That said,” he continued, “I want to clarify that the campaign to Africa will be demanding. Judging from your youth and bearing, I might guess that some of you are not necessarily looking forward to going. You have lived a good life, and may not feel yourselves prepared for the kind of expedition we are about to make. If anyone is thinking these kind of thoughts, I would rather know now then at sometime later when I have to depend on you in battle. So please, speak out. Let me know what you’re thinking.”

  Many of the young men looked around at their compatriots, but no one spoke out.

  “Are you sure?” continued Scipio, riding slowly down the line of horses, looking into the faces of the riders. “Anyone? Better now than later.”

  One man advanced his horse two steps from the line. “Consul, if I’m really free to choose, I would prefer not to be here.”

  Scipio nodded as though he thoroughly understood. “Because you have spoken openly and have not concealed your feelings, I will find a substitute for you.” The young man could not help smiling at this welcome news. “But,” continued Scipio, “you will have to give him your horse and your equipment, and also take the time to train him to ride.”

  When the young nobleman gladly agreed, Scipio called for one of the three hundred volunteers who were standing in formation nearby. The two men, the Sicilian and the Latin volunteer, were paired and the training began.

  Scipio faced the remaining two hundred and ninety-nine young noblemen and asked once again if there were any among them who had second thoughts about what lay ahead. Five men came forward, followed by ten more, all accepting Scipio’s terms—to equip and train one of the volunteers. Before we could complete the paper work on these fifteen men, all the others had made the same decision. A month later, Scipio had a cavalry of three hundred riders, all equipped and trained at no cost to Rome or himself.

  CHAPTER 34

  During the first six weeks in Syracuse I saw very little of Scipio and spoke to him even less. Although I had been enlisted as a mapmaker, while in Syracuse I was but one of a squadron of scribes who spent almost all of our time cataloguing supplies and men, trying to verify that we would be ready for the voyage to Africa by the end of the summer. It was nearly July, and at least in terms of our numbers, Scipio had more recruiting to do.

  One afternoon I had the tedious job of transcribing the original list of volunteers who had traveled with us from Ostia. The men had signed their names and described their previous duties in the military so they could be assigned to the most appropriate maniple and cohort. The handwriting was not the best. Many of the names were impossible to read. More often than not the descriptions of the men’s duties were left blank because so few of them could write anything more than their names.

  I came upon one name that was especially poorly written and followed by a word that I concluded was “hastatus” and the number eighteen. I immediately wondered if this man had served in the Eighteenth legion at the same time I had. I spent quite a bit of time trying to make sense of the name that was scrawled on the piece of papyrus. It was just a single word that I was certain began with the Latin letter “T.”

  When I couldn’t figure out a name, I would assign the man a number and hope that eventually we could connect each number with a name. I was about to assign a number to this entry when I realized that the scribbled name was Troglius or something very close. I noted that he had been assigned to the first maniple in the fifth cohort of the Twenty-third legion.

  When my work was completed that day, I wound through the camp looking for the first maniple in the fifth cohort. I found the standard stuck in the ground before a long row of tents, then walked down that row looking for Troglius.

  I didn’t find him on my first try, but I returned to the row of tents later that night during the evening meal. Five tents down the line, I saw Troglius sitting at a campfire with his tent mates, eating the standard fare of wheat gruel and flat bread.

  Although I had seen him a year earlier in Nero’s camp in Venusia, he made no sign of recognition when I approached the little circle of soldiers. A few of the soldiers looked up at me—a Greek in the tunic of a scribe. One spoke out roughly. “What are you looking at scribe? Don’t they feed you Greeks?”

  Before I could answer, Troglius interrupted. “That’s my friend, Timon.” Though no one in the tent unit had yet to see Troglius on the battlefield, it was clear by their reaction that he had already made a positive impression on them.

  “Then give the man a bowl if he’s hungry,” said one of the other soldiers.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I’ve eaten. I was looking for Troglius. We served together in the E
ighteenth a couple of years back. I just learned that he was one of the volunteers. I wanted to let him know I was here in Sicily also.”

  Troglius was a curious kind of friend. You didn’t just sit down next to him and begin a discussion. If what you said did not pertain exactly to what he was doing—eating a meal, sharpening his gladius, whatever it might be, he had little to say, if anything at all. Often the effect was like talking to yourself. Still I felt close to this man, who had never once asked me about my life or my personal interests, yet who had protected me on several occasions from bullying soldiers during my time in the Eighteenth. Though Troglius might not have much to say, this huge, awkward man, with eyes that seemed to look in different directions, had a good heart and made for a loyal, if quiet, friend. He also owned the reputation of being one of Rome’s best men in combat.

  After the meal, he and I walked through the camp. I told him that Scipio had enlisted me as a mapmaker, and that I had been on one of the warships during the voyage from Ostia. I reflected on the day Marcellus was ambushed, his funeral, and finding my mother, though I made no mention of her connection to Hannibal.

  Troglius showed little interest in what I said and had even less to say about himself. I wasn’t offended. It was who he was, and in spite of that, I enjoyed his company and the opportunity to talk to someone I knew.

  “Why did you volunteer for duty with Scipio?” I asked him, hoping for some insight into this man of such a simple nature.

  We walked down an entire row of tents before he answered. “I wanted to go to Africa.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Troglius shrugged, then muttered, “It’s the best way to win the war.”