The Death of Marcellus

by Dan Armstrong

  But the citizens had protested. They had already been squeezed by the Oppian law, and many of these same men had seen their farms overrun by Hannibal with no resistance from the Roman military. The cost of the war—financial, human, and emotional—was weighing on the populace. Even with a war that threatened the very existence of Rome, the people could take no more. Knowing the war effort could not continue without the support of the citizens, Laevinus proposed an alternative on the floor of the Senate.

  “We Romans have always considered our magistrates and the members of the Senate superior to other citizens,” he said in opening. “In these dire times, if we really are superior men, then we must take the lead in addressing the state’s financial needs. If we want Rome to have a navy and expect our citizens to provide the crews, then it is our obligation to subsidize their rations and pay. I suggest that each of us, each senator, bring to the treasury tomorrow all of our gold, silver, and bronze coins, leaving only a ring for his wife and his children, an ounce of gold for his daughter’s dowry, and five thousand asses for himself.

  “Furthermore, after discussing this with my co-consul, I want this to be done voluntarily. There will be no decree, no edict ordering anyone to make a donation. Only if it is voluntary will the public see that we are not above the same sacrifices we ask of them.”

  The Senate responded enthusiastically to Laevinus’ call to duty. The next morning senators were lined up at the treasury making their deposits. By the end of the day, the necessary funds for the wheat, the soldiers, and the oarsmen had been amassed.

  With these issues settled, the co-consuls had one last responsibility before leaving Rome to begin their military campaigns. They were required to preside over the Latin Fair. The fair celebrated the formation of the Latin Federation and took place five miles outside of Rome on Mount Alban on the first day of May.

  Although some of the cities in the Federation now supported Carthage, the four-day event was well attended and was a huge success. After seven months in Rome, I had begun to wonder if Romans did anything but celebrate holidays, eat, and go to war.

  CHAPTER 24

  I would be leaving on my first military campaign within the week. I knew that the duty was hazardous and that even as a scribe my life would at times be in jeopardy. I decided to take a trip out to my mother’s burial site just in case I never got the chance again and to reconfirm what I so desperately wanted to deny. I had remembered that my mother once said that when she died she wanted a lyre string placed in her urn with her ashes. I doubted anyone but my father and I knew this, so I bought a string at an instrument maker’s shop in Rome to leave at the tomb as an offering to my mother.

  Early in the morning, the day after the Latin Fair, I rode Balius out Via Tusculana to the tomb of the Aemilii. This visit was much different than the first. I knew where I was going and what I would find when I got there.

  I dismounted at the temple-shaped tomb. It was one of the most elaborate and nicely made tombs of all those on Via Tusculana. No one else was there, though someone had left several vases of flowers on the front portico within the last day or two.

  The interior of the tomb was dark except for a parallelogram of bright sunlight that was projected through the entryway. The sun was low enough in the sky to illuminate the three bottom shelves of urns on the wall opposite the doorway. My mother’s urn was on the second shelf and was one of about forty that were in the patch of sunlight.

  The urns for the Aemilii were of different shapes and sizes, some quite ornate. The urns for their slaves were simple rectangular boxes carved from stone and sealed with flat lids. When I had been there the first time, the discovery had been so traumatic I had not inspected the urn beyond the name and the inscription. On this occasion, I lifted it from the shelf, thinking I would tie the lyre string around the box. I noticed that the urn had a thick covering of dust, and that the urns on the shelf below had much less, suggesting they had been placed there more recently. None of them were dated and the chronology was unclear, but it seemed unlikely my mother could have died more than a year or two earlier. When I returned to Rome after the campaign, I would see what more I could learn about her death and when it had happened.

  As I brushed the dust off of the urn, I realized that the seal had deteriorated and that the lid was loose. On the off chance that someone had fulfilled her wish to include a lyre string with her ashes, I opened the urn. There was no string. With tears running from my eyes, I put the string I had with me inside and replaced the lid. I ran my finger over her name—Arathia A.—and the inscription—Music was her gift—and returned the urn to the shelf. I said a prayer to gods I didn’t believe in, then took the long ride back to the farm. I was going off to war.

  PART II

  THE FIRST CAMPAIGN

  “Romans conducted their wars in a simple noble manner, employing neither night attacks nor ambushes, disapproving of any kind of deceit or fraud, and considering nothing but direct and open attacks legitimate for them.”

  -Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire

  CHAPTER 25

  Three days after the Latin Fair, Laevinus and Marcellus went to the Temple of Jupiter at dawn for one last public ceremony. Each consul sacrificed an ox, seeking the God of Light’s approval to leave Rome with his troops. The inspection of the entrails of both animals revealed no abnormalities.

  Laevinus left Rome that afternoon for Ostia. The next morning he shipped out with fifty quinqueremes and fifty transports, headed south along the Italian coast through the straights of Messana to Syracuse.

  Marcellus assembled his two legions, the Eighteenth and the Twentieth, on Mars Field the same day Laevinus shipped out. I was there as a scribe for the second cohort, one of two cohorts under Marcus’ first command as a tribune. Although nothing about Marcellus’ demeanor appeared to change, he had to be relieved. His civic duties were behind him, and he could finally apply himself fully to the war.

  For me, going off to war held dread and uncertainty, but also excitement. Although I had spent a lot of time with Marcus and his father in the past year, I would not truly know these men until I had been to war with them.

  The entire populace came out to cheer our departure. Leaving Rome to go to war was nearly as celebrated as a victorious return. Every Roman soldier dreams of marching out of Mars Field in full armor to the roar of his fellow citizens. Crying mothers and sisters, wives and daughters, blaring trumpets, burning incense, the very soul of Rome came to life with the steady cadence of marching soldiers.

  Marcellus led the procession riding his huge white charger, flanked by his two legates, Lucius Furius Purpurio commanding the Eighteenth legion and Titus Veturius Pollio commanding the Twentieth. Asellus rode behind them with three hundred cavalry, followed by ten thousand foot soldiers. Another three hundred equestrians protected the column’s rear.

  I marched at the front of my cohort, in the first maniple, located near the center of the five-mile column of soldiers. I wore the same red tunic as the soldiers, but carried no weapons and had the goatskin cap of a freedman instead of a helmet on my head. On my back were my rations, two blankets, and a wooden box containing my drawing equipment. Somehow I felt as proud as the soldiers. For the first time since Hannibal had descended from the Alps, Marcellus was in a position to achieve what he believed to be his destiny, and I was to play a part in it. When the people along the road cheered, I imagined it was for me.

  We headed south on Via Latina, an easy march on a road paved with stone. Midafternoon Marcellus sent a tribune and three centurions ahead to look for a campsite, ideally flat and open, close to water, and near a source of wood.

  When we reached the site, it was marked with five flags, one designating the location of the praetorium, the officers’ headquarters, and one at each corner of the camp, in this case a third of a mile by a third of a mile square. Marcellus gave the order and the entire army set to building a fully fortified camp for the night.

  Each soldier had a specif
ic task and went right to it. Statorius, the centurion for our maniple, a maniple of hastati, began issuing orders as soon as the column came to a halt. We started by digging a trench, six feet wide and six feet deep, on all four sides of the camp. The dirt was piled in a mound along the inside of the trench, then fortified with log posts driven into the mound side by side to form a wall. Each of the twenty cohorts was responsible for building a specific length of the ramparts, meaning our cohort would dig approximately one-twentieth of the ditch around the camp and erect its palisades. Two-story towers were built at each corner, and a gate was placed in the center of each wall. With ten thousand men working together, the camp came together with incredible speed.

  Despite being a scribe, I also took part in this duty. I was a few years younger than the other men in my maniple and considerably skinnier. I had little practice digging, so Statorius immediately singled me out for lagging. He walked our portion of the ditch with a vine-stick in his right hand. When he wasn’t snapping it on his thigh, he would use this whip-like stick to get a soldier’s attention.

  Statorius had decided on our first meeting many months before to denigrate me for being Greek. This grew into a genuine dislike when he understood that I was under the protective wing of Marcus, and intensified when he saw that I was also the weakest man in his maniple. He snapped his vine-stick at me much more than necessary, not always striking me, but reminding me that I was dragging. By the end of that first day, I had become the target of jokes from the other men in our maniple, who began referring to me as Statorius’ boy or the Greek.

  By the time the ramparts were completed, the tribunes had marked out the camp’s streets and numbered the tent rows by maniple, cohort, rank, and duty. A centurion’s tent was pitched at the head of each row, and the standard for each maniple stood in the ground before it. Two rows of larger tents ran across the front of the camp and were set aside for the officers. They were separated from the other tents by a road called Via Principalis. A hospital, a commissary, a kitchen, a corral for the horses, a pen for livestock, and a blacksmith’s forge all had specific locations in the camp.

  A wide strip of open ground, called the intervallum, circuited the camp within the ramparts. This was for protection from missiles thrown into the camp and allowed a space for the soldiers to assemble prior to leaving. No matter when or where the camp was built, the plan was always the same so that a soldier was never at a loss to find his tent or headquarters. The result was a highly defensible and utilitarian walled city with named streets and tent residences, which we assembled each night and dismantled each morning whenever we were on the move.

  Each cohort maintained and guarded the portion of the ramparts they had built. Watches lasted three hours, and a new password for entering the camp was made every day. These camps were so well-built and so efficiently defended that rarely did an army of any kind try to rout a Roman army out of its camp.

  I didn’t meet the members of my eight-man tent unit until the first day of the campaign when it was time to pitch our tent. I would live with the same seven men the entire campaign. Because of my showing with a shovel that afternoon, I was greeted with a caustic remark by the sub-centurion Marius Baebius, who was part of our unit.

  “How fortunate. We’ve drawn the Greek,” he sneered as four of us, Livius, Troglius, Spurius, and I, unfolded the rectangle of leather that would become our tent. “The rest of you will have to help pull his weight.” Marius was Statorius’ second in command, ten years older than anyone else in our unit, and far more experienced in combat. Battle scars made his face look as though he had used it for a buckler, gaining him the nickname Pulcher, meaning “the beautiful one.”

  Three others in our unit, Gnaeus, Seppius, and Decius, knelt on the ground sorting out the stakes and ropes.

  Decius looked up from his work. “I thought the Greek was Statorius’ boy.” This drew a few chuckles. “What’s he doing in our tent?”

  “He’s a scribe. Statorius said to treat him with care,” answered Pulcher. His nose had been broken probably fifty times. It was flattened to his face and added an irritating nasal quality to everything he said. “He teaches the consul’s son how to draw in the sand and seems to have some kind of special status.” Pulcher spat these last words out with clear distaste. A scribe held the rank of a foot-soldier, the lowest in the army.

  “Oh, you mean he’s one of those educated Greeks?” teased Decius. “Maybe he can teach us how to put up a tent?”

  This got just about everyone laughing, because at that moment I was holding my corner of the leather rectangle so that it was twisted. Only Troglius, the youngest in the group other than me, didn’t laugh. His eyes seemed to look in two different directions, giving him the appearance of the village idiot. He had huge shoulders and long powerful arms. His bowed legs gave a straddle to his walk. He held his corner of the tent without a word and cast one eye in my direction, waiting for me to get it right.

  I untwisted my corner, and we laid the leather flat on the ground. Pulcher ordered me to pass a rope beneath it.

  I crawled under the huge piece of leather towing the rope along with me. Halfway through someone gave me a shove with his foot and I went over sideways. When I struggled back to my hands and knees, still beneath the leather, I was kicked over again. And again. When at last I crawled out, beaten and gasping for air, the unit greeted me with another humiliating round of laughter. Only Troglius didn’t join in.

  Once the tent was up, Gnaeus and Seppius built a campfire and we prepared our meal as a unit, as did every tent. Each soldier carried a sack of unmilled wheat as part of his supplies. Gnaeus took two handfuls from each of us, then cooked a big pot of gruel. Pulcher carried a small quern for grinding the wheat. I was assigned the task of milling enough to make flat bread. Bread and gruel, that was our meal pretty much every day, morning and night.

  Though we carried our own rations, an army of ten thousand men functioned like a moving city. We needed water, forage for the animals, and continual replenishment of the grain stores. When on the move, an army of our size was like a cloud of locusts, descending on the land and stripping it clean in a matter of days.

  CHAPTER 26

  We followed Via Latina for the first few days of our trek, stopping briefly outside Aesernia on the third day to add a legion of allied troops. We did the same thing the next day in Fregellae. Levied troops were required of all members of the Latin Federation, as was an annual tribute to Rome in gold or silver. For every Roman legion in the field, there was an accompanying allied legion. With nearly five thousand men in each legion, our contingent of four legions now totaled twenty thousand soldiers.

  When the war first began, the Roman army had marched without order. Foot soldiers, pack horses, ox draw carts, and men on horseback stretched out for miles in a haphazard mix. This lax manner of travel didn’t last long. Hannibal, whose army marched in a very specific alignment, learned to pick off parts of the Roman baggage train or groups of straggling soldiers. Whereas Roman tradition assumed that all battles consisted of parallel lines of men marching directly at each other, Hannibal abided by no such restrictions. As Marcellus had pointed out, war was different for the Carthaginian. Ambushes, traps, hidden troops, diplomatic lies, anything that brought advantage was included in Hannibal’s bag of tricks.

  Fabius had been the first to demand a change in the way the Roman army marched. Marcellus now emphasized it. The column of men proceeded as though Hannibal could be around the next corner or hidden in the adjacent forest. Scouts on horseback rode a mile ahead of the column, periodically sending reports back to the officers. Scouts also patrolled both sides of the column, wary of any kind of ambush from the flanks. Others trailed behind so that every side of the train maintained some form of advanced alarm.

  Our commanding officers and half the cavalry made up the van. A cohort of extraordinarii—a mix of elite principes and velites—marched behind them, prepared to protect the officers in the event of an attack. Next cam
e the allied soldiers from Aesernia, led by a Roman prefect, in this case, Papus Laetorius. They marched four abreast by cohort, followed by their baggage. Behind them were the Eighteenth and Twentieth Roman legions, each with its baggage, also marching four abreast by cohort and in battle order—hastati, principes, triarii. The allied legion from Fregellae came next, led by its prefect, Pacuvius Calavius. The remaining velites and the other half of our cavalry formed the rear.

  This marching order allowed the army to shift into battle formation with a single command. Each section of the train would swing to one side or the other. The baggage would similarly swing out of the ranks, and if necessary provide temporary fortification. All of this had been Fabius’ work following the horrible defeat at Lake Trasimene when Flaminius had marched in disorder along the edge of the lake, vulnerable to Hannibal’s ambush.

  Shortly after we added the second of the allied legions, five horsemen came up Via Latina from the south toward our column. They were intercepted by the scouts before reaching the van. After requesting to see our general, they were stripped of their swords and taken to Marcellus, who had ridden down the line, as he often did, to appraise the marching order.

  The riders had come from Salapia, a critical seaport on Italy’s Adriatic coastline, almost directly east from Capua. Salapia had been in Carthaginian control since the third year of the war and along with Tarentum was at the top of the list of Carthaginian controlled cities that the Roman Senate had targeted for recapture that year.