The First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

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:

  As your supreme commander in the field, I repeat my order to transfer yourself and your army across the river without an hour’s delay. Please regard this, my second such order, as my last. Should you persist in defying me, I shall institute legal proceedings against you in Rome. The charge will be high treason, and your own high-flown actions will have convicted you.

  Caepio responded with an equally litigious reply:

  I do not admit that you are the supreme commander in the field. By all means institute treason proceedings against me. I will certainly be instituting treason proceedings against you. Since we both know who will win, I demand that you turn the supreme command over to me forthwith.

  Mallius Maximus replied with even greater hauteur. And so it went until midway through September, when six senators arrived from Rome, utterly exhausted by the speed and discomfort of their trip. Rutilius Rufus, the consul in Rome, had pushed successfully to send this embassage, but Scaurus and Metellus Numidicus had managed to pull the embassage’s teeth by refusing to allow the inclusion of any senator of consular status or real political clout. The most senior of the six senators was a mere praetor of moderately noble background, none other than Rutilius Rufus’s brother-in-law, Marcus Aurelius Cotta. Scant hours after the embassage arrived at Mallius Maximus’s camp, Cotta at least understood the gravity of the situation.

  So Cotta went to work with great energy and a passion normally alien to him, concentrating upon Caepio. Who remained obdurate. A visit to the cavalry camp thirty miles to the north sent him back to the fray with redoubled determination, for the legate Aurelius had led him under cover to a high hill, from which he was able to see the leading edge of the German advance.

  Cotta looked, and turned white. “You ought to be inside Gnaeus Mallius’s camp,” he said.

  “If a fight was what we wanted, yes,” said Aurelius, his calm unimpaired, for he had been looking at the German advance for days, and had grown used to the sight. “Gnaeus Mallius thinks we can repeat earlier successes, which have always been diplomatic. When the Germans have fought, it’s only been because we pushed them to it. I have absolutely no intention of starting anything—and that will mean, I’m sure, that they won’t start anything either. I have a team of competent interpreters here, and I’ve been indoctrinating them for days as to what I want to say when the Germans send their chiefs to parley, as I’m sure they will, once they realize that there’s a Roman army of huge size waiting for them.”

  “But surely they know that now!” said Cotta.

  “I doubt it,” said Aurelius, unperturbed. “They don’t move in a military fashion, you know. If they’ve heard of scouts, they certainly haven’t bothered to employ them so far. They just—roll on! Taking, it seems to Gnaeus Mallius and me, whatever comes to them when it comes.”

  Cotta turned his horse. “I must get back to Gnaeus Mallius as soon as possible, cousin. Somehow we’ve got to get that stiff-necked imbecile Caepio across the river, or we may as well not even have his army in the vicinity.”

  “I agree,” said Aurelius. “However, Marcus Aurelius of the Cottae, if feasible I would like you to return to me here the moment I send you word that a German delegation has arrived to parley. With your five colleagues! The Germans will be impressed that the Senate has sent six representatives all the way from Rome to treat with them.” He smiled wryly. “We certainly won’t let them know that the Senate has sent six representatives all the way from Rome to treat with our own fools of generals!”

  *

  The stiff-necked imbecile Quintus Servilius Caepio was—rather inexplicably—in a much better mood and more prone to listen to Cotta when he had himself rowed across the Rhodanus the next day.

  “Why the sudden lightheartedness, Quintus Servilius?” asked Cotta, puzzled.

  “I’ve just had a letter from Smyrna,” said Caepio. “A letter I should have had months ago.” But instead of going on to explain what any letter from Smyrna might contain to make him so much happier, Caepio got down to business. “All right,” he said, “I’ll come across to the east bank tomorrow.” He pointed to his map with an ivory wand topped by a gold eagle he had taken to carrying to indicate the high degree of his imperium; he still had not consented to see Mallius Maximus in person. “Here is where I’ll cross.”

  ‘ ‘Wouldn’t it be more prudent to cross south of Arausio?’’ asked Cotta dubiously.

  “Certainly not!” said Caepio. “If I cross to the north, I’ll be closer to the Germans.”

  True to his word, Caepio struck camp at dawn the next day, and marched north to a ford twenty miles above Mallius Maximus’s fortress, a scant ten miles south of the place where Aurelius was encamped with his cavalry.

  Cotta and his five senatorial companions rode north too, intending to be in Aurelius’s camp when the German chieftains arrived to treat. En route they encountered Caepio on the east bank, most of his army across the river. But the sight that met their eyes struck fresh dismay i
nto their hearts, for all too obviously Caepio was preparing to dig a heavily fortified camp right where he was.

  “Oh, Quintus Servilius, Quintus Servilius, you can’t stay here!” cried Cotta as they sat their horses on a knoll above the new campsite, where scurrying figures dug trenches and piled excavated earth up into ramparts.

  “Why not?” asked Caepio, raising his brows.

  “Because twenty miles to the south of you is a camp already made—and made large enough to accommodate your legions as well as the ten at present inside it! There is where you belong, Quintus Servilius! Not here, too far away from Aurelius to the north of you and Gnaeus Mallius to the south of you to be of any help to either—or they to you! Please, Quintus Servilius, I beg of you! Pitch an ordinary marching camp here tonight, then head south to Gnaeus Mallius in the morning,” said Cotta, putting every ounce of urgency he could into his plea.

  “I said I’d cross the river,” Caepio announced, “but I did not give any sort of undertaking as to what I’d do when I did cross the river! I have seven legions, all trained to the top of their bent, and all experienced soldiers. Not only that, but they’re men of property—true Roman soldiers! Do you seriously think that I would consent to share a camp with the rabble of Rome and the Latin countryside—sharecroppers and laborers, men who can’t read or write? Marcus Cotta, I would sooner be dead!”

  “You might well be,” said Cotta dryly.

  “Not my army, and not me,” said Caepio, adamant. “I’m twenty miles to the north of Gnaeus Mallius and his loathsome rabble. Which means that I shall encounter the Germans first. And I shall beat them, Marcus Cotta! A solid million barbarians couldn’t defeat seven legions of true Roman soldiers! Let that—that tradesman Mallius have one iota of the credit? No! Quintus Servilius Caepio will hold his second triumph through the streets of Rome as the sole victor! Mallius will have to stand there looking on.”

  Leaning forward in his saddle, Cotta put his hand out and grasped Caepio’s arm. “Quintus Servilius,” he said, more earnestly and seriously than he had ever spoken in his entire life, “I beg of you, join forces with Gnaeus Mallius! Which means more to you, Rome victorious or Rome’s nobility victorious? Does it matter who wins, so long as Rome wins? This isn’t a little border war against a few Scordisci, nor is it a minor campaign against the Lusitani! We are going to need the best and biggest army we’ve ever fielded, and your contribution to that army is vital! Gnaeus Mallius’s men haven’t had the time or the training under arms that your men have. Your presence among them will steady them, give them an example to follow. For I say to you very sternly, there will be a battle! I feel it in my bones. No matter how the Germans have behaved in the past, this time is going to be different. They’ve tasted our blood and liked it, they’ve felt our mettle and found it weak. Rome is at stake, Quintus Servilius, not Rome’s nobility! But if you persist in remaining isolated from the other army, I tell you straight, the future of Rome’s nobility will indeed be at stake. In your hands you hold the future of Rome and your own kind. Do the right thing by both, please! March tomorrow to Gnaeus Mallius’s camp, and ally yourself with him.”

  Caepio dug his horse in the ribs and moved away, wrenching free of Cotta’s grip. “No,” he said. “I stay here.”

  So Cotta and his five companions rode on north to the cavalry camp, while Caepio produced a smaller but identical copy of Mallius Maximus’s camp, right on the edge of the river.

  The senators found themselves only just in time, for the German treating party rode into Aurelius’s camp slightly after dawn of the next day. There were fifty of them, aged somewhere between forty and sixty, thought the awestruck Cotta, who had never seen men so large—not one of them looked to be under six feet in height, and most were six inches taller than that. They rode enormous horses, shaggy-coated and unkempt to Roman eyes, with big hooves skirted in long hair, and manes falling over their mild eyes; none was encumbered by a saddle, but all were bridled.

  “Their horses are like war elephants,” said Cotta.

  “Only a few,” Aurelius answered comfortably. “Most ride ordinary Gallic horses—these men take their pick, I suppose.”

  “Look at the young one!” Cotta exclaimed, watching a fellow no older than thirty slide down from his mount’s back and stand, his pose superbly confident, gazing about him as if he found nothing he saw remarkable.

  “Achilles,” said Aurelius, undismayed.

  “I thought the Germans went naked save for a cloak,” Cotta said, taking in the sight of leather breeches.

  “They do in Germania, so they say, but from what we’ve seen of these Germans so far, they’re trousered like the Gauls.”

  Trousered they were, but none wore a shirt in this fine hot weather. Many sported square gold pectorals which sat on their chests from nipple to nipple, and all carried the empty scabbards of long-swords on shoulder baldrics. They wore much gold—the pectorals, their helmet ornaments, sword scabbards, belts, baldrics, buckles, bracelets, and necklaces—though none wore a Celtic neck torc. Cotta found the helmets fascinating: rimless and pot-shaped, some were symmetrically adorned above the ears with magnificent horns or wings or hollow tubes holding bunches of stiffly upright feathers, while others were fashioned to resemble serpents or dragon heads or hideous birds or pards with gaping jaws.

  All were clean-shaven and wore their uniformly flaxen hair long, either braided or hanging loose, and they had little if any chest hair. Skins not as pink as Celtic skins, Cotta noted—more a pale gold. None was freckled; none had red hair. Their eyes were light blue, and held no grey or green. Even the oldest among them had kept himself in magnificent trim, flat-bellied and warriorlike, no evidence of self-indulgence; though the Romans were not to know it, the Germans killed men who let themselves go to seed.

  The parley went on through Aurelius’s interpreters, who were mostly Aedui and Ambarri, though two or three of them were Germans captured by Carbo in Noricum before he was defeated. What they wanted, the German thanes explained, was a peaceful right-of-way through Gaul-across-the-Alps, for they were going to Spain. Aurelius himself conducted the first phase of the talks, clad in full military-parade armor—a torso-shaped silver cuirass, scarlet-plumed Attic helmet of silver, and the double kilt of stiff leather straps called pteryges over a crimson tunic. As a consular he wore a purple cloak lashed to the shoulders of his cuirass, and a crimson girdle ritually knotted and looped around his cuirass just above the waist was the badge of his general’s rank.

  Cotta watched spellbound, now more afraid than he had ever dreamed he could be, even in the depths of despair. For he knew he was looking at Rome’s doom. In months to come they haunted his sleep, those German thanes, so remorselessly that he stumbled red-eyed and thick-witted through his days, and even after sheer custom reduced their capacity to keep him wakeful, he would find himself sitting bolt upright in his bed, mouth agape, because they rode their gigantic horses into some less important nightmare. Intelligence reported their numbers at well over three quarters of a million, and that meant at least three hundred thousand gargantuan warriors. Like most men of his eminence, Cotta had seen his share of barbarian warriors, Scordisci and Iapudes, Salassi and Carpetani; but never had he seen men like the Germans. Everyone had deemed the Gauls giants. But they were as ordinary men alongside the Germans.

  And, worst terror of all, they spelled Rome’s doom because Rome did not take them seriously enough to heal the discord between the Orders; how could Rome hope to defeat them when two Roman generals refused to work with each other, and called each other snob and upstart, and damned each other’s very soldiers? If Caepio and Mallius Maximus would only work as a team, Rome would field close to one hundred thousand men, and that was an acceptable ratio if morale was high and training complete and leadership competent.

  Oh, Cotta thought, his bowels churning, I have seen the shape of Rome’s fate! For we cannot survive this blond horde. Not when we cannot survive ourselves.

  Finally Aurelius brok
e off the talk, and each side stepped back to confer.

  “Well, we’ve learned something,” said Aurelius to Cotta and the other five senators. “They don’t call themselves Germans. In fact, they think of themselves as three separate peoples whom they call the Cimbri, the Teutones, and a rather polyglot third group made up of a number of smaller peoples who have joined up with the Cimbri and the Teutones during their wanderings — the Marcomanni, Cherusci, and Tigurini — who, according to my German interpreter, are more Celt than German in origins.”

  “Wanderings?” asked Cotta. “How long have they wandered?”

  “They don’t seem to know themselves, but for many years, at least. Perhaps a generation. The young sprig who looks like a barbarian Achilles was a small child when his tribe, the Cimbri, left its homeland.”

  “Do they have a king?” asked Cotta.

  “No, a council of tribal chieftains, the largest part of which you are currently looking at. However, that same young sprig who looks like a barbarian Achilles is moving up in the council very fast, and his adherents are beginning to call him a king. His name is Boiorix, and he’s by far the most truculent among them. He’s not really interested in all this begging for our permission to move south—he believes might is right, and he’s all for abandoning talks with us in favor of just going south no matter what.”

  “Dangerously young to be calling himself a king. I agree, he’s trouble,” said Cotta. “And who is that man over there?” He unobtrusively indicated a man of about forty who wore a glittering gold pectoral, and several pounds more of gold besides.

  “That’s Teutobod of the Teutones, the chief of their chiefs. He too is beginning to like being called a king, it seems. As with Boiorix, he thinks might is right, and they should simply keep on going south without worrying about whether Rome agrees or not. I don’t like it, cousin. Both my German interpreters from Carbo’s day tell me that the mood is very different than it was then—they’ve gathered confidence in themselves, and contempt for us.” Aurelius chewed at his lip. “You see, they have been living among the Aedui and the Ambarri for long enough now to have learned a lot about Rome. And what they’ve heard has lulled their fears. Not only that, but so far—if you exclude that first engagement of Lucius Cassius’s, and who finds exclusion difficult, considering the sequel?—they have won every encounter with us. Now Boiorix and Teutobod are telling them they have absolutely no reason to fear us just because we’re better armed and better trained. We are like children’s bogeys, all imagination and air. Boiorix and Teutobod want war. With Rome a thing of the past, they can wander where they choose, settle where they like.”