by R. W. Peake
If I still had any congress with the gods, I would ascribe what happened to their blessing and protection, because now I have no doubt that the plan Vibius and I concocted would have not only been a spectacular failure, it would have made a bad situation worse. However, on the very day before the first attack on the olive trees that Vibius and I had planned, setting out that night, when Phocas returned from Astigi on some errands, he radiated an air of suppressed excitement. Whatever it was, he deemed it sufficient cause to rouse my father from what he called his afternoon nap, but was in fact his drunken stupor.
“Pluto’s cock, this better be good,” he growled as he staggered into the kitchen, collapsing at the table and in a gesture that I knew was automatic, reached for the amphora of wine that was always there.
As he filled his cup, I idly wondered how much of what our farm produced, little as it was, went into trade for wine, somehow understanding that I probably did not want to know the answer.
“I think you will forgive me, master,” Phocas assured him. And with his next statement, he proved to be as good as his word. “Plancus is dead.”
For a moment, none of us spoke; I had been standing in the doorway, and I suddenly felt the need to grab it in order to steady myself as I gaped at Phocas in amazement.
My father did not react immediately, just stared at Phocas vacantly before finally saying, “Dead? Plancus?”
Neither Phocas’ face nor manner betrayed any impatience, but I knew him well, and I could sense his irritation as he repeated to my father, “Yes, master. I am speaking of Aulus Plancus, our neighbor. He is dead.”
Before my father could say anything, I blurted out, “But how? When did it happen?”
For the first time, Phocas’ expression changed as a smile crossed his lips, and there was no mistaking the satisfaction in his voice as he supplied the information.
“It appears that he was gored and trampled to death.”
I stared at him incredulously, and I could feel my mouth hanging open as I gasped, “Gored? Not by…”
I did not finish; there was no need, but it was a peculiar feeling when I saw Phocas’ head nod up and down.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “Apparently, Hercules didn’t appreciate being taken to stud again. Plancus was trying to rope him and tie him to a wagon, and the bull charged him. When he tried to get away, he stumbled and fell, and before any of his slaves could stop him, the bull gored him and stepped on him several times. By the time they got Hercules drawn off, it was too late.”
There was a silence for several moments, then my father uttered something that I will never forget, if only because it was one of the only times he ever said anything worth remembering.
“Well,” he said as he raised his cup in a mock salute, “maybe there is some justice to be had for men like me.”
Then, without another word, he got up and stumbled back to his bedroom. I was not surprised to see he took the amphora with him. Then it was just Phocas, Gaia, and I, and I walked slowly to the table, taking a seat as I tried to grasp what this meant. I could sense Phocas’ gaze on me, but I was too absorbed at the moment to notice. Finally, I looked up at him, and he was regarding me with a peculiar expression.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked suspiciously.
“Well, there was one thing that someone mentioned when they were talking about Plancus’…accident,” he replied carefully. His mouth kept twitching, and if I did not know better, I would have sworn he was trying to suppress a laugh. “But according to the slaves, Hercules did this all the time, and Plancus was always too light on his feet to get caught by the bull. Except this time, they swore that his luck finally ran out because he had been favoring one leg for the past couple of weeks. Ever since his last trip to Astigi, apparently.”
I stared at Phocas for several long moments, then despite myself, I burst out laughing. Before more than one or two heartbeats had passed, Phocas joined in and before much longer, we were overcome with laughter.
As my father said, perhaps there is some justice in the world.
Chapter 1- Who Is Titus Pullus?
These are the words of Titus Pullus, formerly Legionary, Optio, Pilus Prior and Primus Pilus of Caesar's 10th Legion Equestris, now known as 10th Gemina, Primus Pilus of the 6th Ferrata, and Camp Prefect, as dictated to his faithful former slave, scribe, and friend, Diocles.
This is being written in my 61st year, three years after my retirement as Camp Prefect, in the tenth year of the reign of Augustus, and 489 years after the founding of the Roman Republic. I have more than 40 military decorations, including three gold torqs, three set of phalarae, two coronae civica, three coronae murales, and a corona vallaris. I have more than 20 battle scars on my body, all of them in the front, and my back is clean, never having been flogged in my 42 years in the Legions, nor turning my back to the enemy. Although my record is not as great as the revered Dentatus, I am well known in the Legions, and I have given the bulk of my life and blood to Rome.
My goal is straightforward; with these words, I plan to record all of the momentous events that I participated in as a member of Rome’s Legions, during a period that changed the very foundations of Rome itself.
When I was young, Rome was ruled by the Senatus et Populus Que Romanum, the Senate and People of Rome. Every year, two Consuls were elected from the Senate to run Rome for that year; now, only one man rules, the members of the Senate are his pets, and Rome has never been stronger or mightier than it is right now. The letters SPQR are now famous throughout all of the world, known and unknown.
Although it is no longer in my nature to express excessive pride that some have called hubris in the same way as I did in my youth, it is with some justification that I lay claim to playing a small role in expanding Rome’s fortunes. However, I do so in the name of my fellow Legionaries, those still living and those long or recently dead. For it was with our strong right arms and our sharp blades that such titanic changes were made possible; our legs that carried us as the agent of change to be used by a great man, a man who saw what needed to be done in order to ensure the future prosperity of the city and country he loved more than life itself. His work was unfinished when he was struck down, and it is the very same man known now as Augustus, whom, under a different name, that of his adopted father, picked up the ivory baton of imperium and carried it forward to complete what the great man started.
If, dear reader, you are looking for elegant and witty prose, know this now; I am a simple soldier, and have a simple soldier’s story to tell. Despite being literate and possessing a fair hand for simple letters and documents, I have no training or experience in these matters. That is why I am dictating this account to my former slave, scribe, and friend, Diocles, who is trying his best to keep up with me as I talk. My purpose is to offer an account of these great events, and a viewpoint of the great men of our day, as I saw them and lived through them. I make no claim to be an intimate of all of the First Men of Rome, yet I can say that most of them of whom I speak in this account knew me by name. I saw them at their finest, and some I saw at their lowest point, but most importantly, I saw them as they appeared to the eyes of their Legions.
Also in this account, I will endeavor to recall conversations and events as exactly as possible, and I must beg the reader’s forgiveness because of the coarseness and crudity of some of the conversations, because they are the words of soldiers and are not the manner of speech one would normally use in polite company. However, I have broken what is a promise to myself that I have kept for many years now and made a vow to Jupiter Optimus Maximus that I will recount as faithfully as I can all that transpired in those days. One might ask, how is it possible that I will be able to remember conversations that occurred thirty or forty years earlier? First, I have been blessed with the type of memory that seems to retain more than others, and second, even as events were transpiring, I had an idea that they were noteworthy. Perhaps I even had it in the back of my mind that I would one day
want to record the events of the day, although I had no idea how I could accomplish this. When I enlisted in the Legions, I was barely literate, able to write my name, and to read very simple instructions and the like, meaning the idea of writing this down would have been nonsense. However, I somehow always knew that one day, I would be in the position where I either had the ability myself, or I would be able to use someone to create this record. In fact, that was the great, burning ambition of my life, to elevate not only myself, but those who follow, bearing my name into the equestrian class, an ambition that has been fulfilled.
Now, as I look back on my life, I know that I am nearer to the end than to the beginning, and despite being in good health, only the gods know how much longer I will live. Therefore, I have decided to start this last mission of mine, and will devote almost all of my time to it. In truth, I have nothing much else to do; I am a wealthy man, and while I hold office here in Arelate, it is mainly a ceremonial post, leaving me free to come and go as I please, just as long as I am present to march at the head of the procession on festival days. Truth be told, I am bored. I know that I no longer have the strength of body to continue in the Legions, but my spirit is still as if I were a sixteen-year-old-lad, on the lookout for adventure and a way to improve my station in life. Such is the cruel humor of the gods; ability may wane, but desire never does.
And I am lonely; I miss my comrades, I miss the Legions and the life of the Legions. I will find myself staring at my lorica hamata, my galea, scutum, and gladius, and thinking, if only I could stop time. But I cannot, so there is no use in dwelling on it. Perhaps that is why those few comrades of mine who managed to survive as long as I have drink as much as they do. In particular, I miss my friends Vibius and Scribonius, but Vibius is dead more than ten years now and, while Scribonius is alive, he is far, far away and with his nose buried in a book, I am sure. Thinking of Vibius in particular only makes me more melancholy, both for his death and for all that transpired between us. When all is said and done, I am a warrior without a war to march to, and I fear that this fact alone, not any sickness of the body or just plain old age will finally send me to the afterlife.
Before I go, however, I have one last job to do, not dissimilar to some of the jobs I had to do in the Legions. It will take patience and endurance, but most importantly, it will require me to relive certain memories that I have not thought of in many, many years. Nevertheless, now I must turn my mind’s eye to the past, moving back over the years, and the miles, and the battles, to find the young man that I was, the young man who was looking for adventure and a way out of his life, along with his best friend.
I was born in the province of Baetica, what was known as Hispania Ulterior at that time, near the town of Astigi, south of the provincial capital of Corduba, in the year of the consulships of Publius Servilius Vatia and Appius Claudius Pulcher, on April 20th, as it is calculated under the calendar of the Great Man, Gaius Julius Caesar, my former commander. The only reason I know for sure is that my father would remind me on that day, for as long as I can remember, that this was the anniversary of the day I killed my mother.
You see, I was, and am a rather large man and I was born a large baby. Why this is so is a mystery, since my father was not large and, obviously, neither was my mother. Whatever the cause, my passage into the world was sufficiently traumatic for my poor mother that she bled to death. I suspect that this was the primary reason that my father hated me; I know that he hated me to be true because he told me so, even more than he told me that I killed my mother. I was the only boy; I have one sister still alive, Valeria, and it was Valeria who took care of me during my youth. Despite the fact that she is only five years older than I am, I viewed her then as more my mother than a sister. It was Valeria who would hide me from my father when he would be in the throes of one of his drunken rages, which grew in frequency with every passing year. And it is the children of Valeria, especially her son Gaius, who will inherit all that I have when I die, save the portions I am leaving for her maintenance, as well as the small stipend I am leaving for my slaves.
(Note by Diocles: My former master’s “small” stipend to his slaves was the sum of 2,000 sesterces, a not altogether small sum, but more importantly, to each slave save one they received documents of manumission, even those Gallic slaves he was awarded by Caesar for his role in the Gallic Campaign. The lone exception is the slave Simeon, who came into my master’s household late in his career, part of the paltry bounty that those men who survived Marcus Antonius’ disastrous campaign in Parthia received the next year when they invaded Armenia. Simeon represents a very bitter and disappointing period of time in my master’s life; besides, he is an excellent horseman and is responsible for the care of my master’s most prized possession, the horse, Ocelus.)
As far as my father is concerned, his name was Lucius, and he was a Roman citizen and settler in the province of Baetica, migrating from Campania as the third son of a Roman farmer who was not going to inherit any of his father’s land. This lack of inheritance was another source of bitterness for Lucius, who was a small, bitter man in every sense of the word. He viewed the world and all that was in it as his enemy, always suspicious that those he had dealings with were trying to cheat him in some way. I suspect that it was this quality, more than any injustice on the part of my grandfather that caused Lucius to be left out of any inheritance. It is more likely that my grandfather simply did not want Lucius to be anywhere in the area because of the foulness of his disposition. You may notice, gentle reader, that I refer to my father as Lucius; that is simply because I have no familial feelings towards him whatsoever. I suspect that if it were not for the combination of my size and strength, even as an infant and small boy, and the intercession by my sister Valeria, that I would never have lived long enough to relate this story. He viewed me as little more than one of his mules, and treated me as such as soon as I was old enough and strong enough to provide labor for his farm. It would probably not surprise you that Lucius was not a good farmer, and barely kept his three children and two slaves fed and clothed. In fact, if you, gentle reader, were to be magically transported to Lucius’ farm, you would be hard pressed to discern who among our sorry lot were the slaves, and who were the Roman citizens!
Our two slaves were a man and woman, married for all intents and purposes. Their names given to them were Phocas and Gaia, and they were born slaves, although they claimed that their people originally came from Thrace. They were not a couple when Lucius purchased them, but given their lot in life, and their somewhat limited options, they became married, at least in their eyes. It was from Phocas that I learned more about what it is to be a man than from Lucius. And Gaia loved me as much as if she were my mother, for Gaia was barren and never had children of her own. It was not until I was grown that I learned that she was barren only in the sense that she never had children; not because she was unable to do so, but because she and Phocas had made a vow to one of their gods that they would not have a child born as a slave in the same manner they had been. One of my regrets in life is that by the time I was in a position to offer them their freedom, it was too late for them to enjoy the fruits of having children, in more ways than one.
As far as the farm itself, it had originally been granted to a retiring Legionary who found he had no stomach for farming. My grandfather gave Lucius a stake to purchase the land, a couple of slaves, and the essentials needed for starting a farm. I suspect that one of the conditions for this gift was that Lucius move as far away from my grandfather and the rest of Lucius’ family as possible, which suited Lucius just as well. As farmland went, it was much better suited for what most of the other settlers in the area did, using the land for vineyards and olive groves, but Lucius had no knowledge of such affairs, and he was much too stubborn and thickheaded to learn. So, he scratched out an extremely modest living, albeit on the backs of Phocas and later me, as I grew old enough to pitch in. We tried to grow corn, enough to feed ourselves, with hopefully just enough as su
rplus to barter in exchange for the essentials we needed to get by. My earliest memories involve carrying rocks, something our land had in extreme abundance and which were used to build a stone fence, marking off the boundaries of our land. It was the only one of its kind in the area at the time, a fact of which Lucius was extremely proud, and was one of the local curiosities that brought people from the surrounding area to come and gawk. In point of fact, the reason they were gawking was that of all the farmers in the area, he was the only one stupid and stubborn enough to try and raise corn. He misused the land as it was meant to be, to raise olives and grapes, which was something that was completely lost on him. As he grew older, so did his pride in his fence, to the point that whenever he went into town, he would look for the slightest excuse to bring it up in conversation with other citizens, for which they began avoiding him as if he carried the plague.
