2. The Grass Crown

by Colleen McCullough

  Sulla laid down his pen with a sigh. A very long letter, but something of a catharsis too. Worth the effort, even if it did mean scant sleep. He was aware to whom he was writing, never forgot it, yet he found himself able to say things on his paper that he could never have said to Publius Rutilius Rufus in person. Of course that was because Publius Rutilius Rufus was too far away to represent a threat of any kind. However, he hadn't mentioned his sudden elevation in the Senate by Lucius Julius Caesar. That was too new and too delicately poised to risk offending Fortune by talking about it as if it were an established fact. Mere accident had provoked it, of that Sulla was sure; disliking Gaius Marius, Lucius Caesar had looked for someone else to ask. By rights he should have asked Titus Didius or Publius Crassus, or some other triumphator. But his eye had lighted upon Sulla, and his mind decided Sulla would do. Of course he hadn't expected such a grasp of the situation, but when he got it, Lucius Caesar did a not unusual thing; he singled Sulla out as his in-House expert. To have to consult a Marius or a Crassus did the consul no good it made the consul look like a tyro having to ask the masters all the time. Whereas to ask a relative nobody like Sulla looked like consular genius. Lucius Caesar could claim to have "discovered" Sulla. And when he leaned upon Sulla, it appeared to be a kind of patronage. For the moment Sulla was content to have it so. As long as he behaved nicely and deferentially to Lucius Caesar, he would get the commands and the jobs he needed in order to eclipse Lucius Caesar. Who, as Sulla was rapidly discovering, had a streak of morbid pessimism in him, and was not as confidently competent as he had seemed in the beginning. When the two departed for Campania early in April, Sulla left the military decisions and dispositions to Lucius Caesar, while he threw himself with praiseworthy energy and enthusiasm into recruiting and training new legions. There were plenty among the centurions of the two veteran legions in Capua who had served under Sulla somewhere or other, and even more among the retired centurions who had re-enlisted to train troops. The word got around, and Sulla's reputation grew. Now all he needed was for Lucius Caesar to make a few mistakes, or else become so bogged down in one section of the coming campaign that he had no choice but to give Sulla a free rein. On one point, Sulla was absolutely set; when his chances came, he wouldn't be making any mistakes at all.

  Better prepared than any of the other commanders, Pompey Strabo equipped two new legions from the people on his own vast estates in northern Picenum; with the centurions of the two veteran legions he had stolen helping him, he got his new troops into fair condition in fifty days. During the second week in April he set off from Cingulum with four legions two veteran, two raw. A good proportion. Though his military career had not been particularly distinguished, he had the requisite experience for command, and had made himself a reputation as a very hard man. An incident which happened when he was a thirty-year-old quaestor in Sardinia had unfortunately contributed much toward his contempt for and isolation from his fellow members of the Senate. Pompey Strabo had written from Sardinia to the Senate requesting that he be allowed to impeach his superior, the governor Titus Annius Albucius, and that he himself be empowered to prosecute Titus Albucius upon their return to Rome. Led by Scaurus, the Senate had responded with a scathing letter from the praetor Gaius Memmius, who had included in it a copy of Scaurus's speech in which he had called Pompey Strabo everything from a noxious mushroom to crass, bovine, ill-mannered, presumptuous, stupid, and under-bred. To Pompey Strabo, he had done the correct thing in demanding that he bring his superior to trial; to Scaurus and the other leaders of the House at that time, what Pompey Strabo had done was unpardonable. No one indicted his superior! But, having indicted his superior, no one pressed for the job of prosecuting him! Then Lucius Marcius Philippus had turned the absent Pompey Strabo into a laughingstock by suggesting that the Senate should substitute a different cross-eyed prosecutor for the trial Titus Albucius now had to face, and nominated Caesar Strabo. There was a lot of the Celtic king in Pompey Strabo, in spite of the fact that he claimed to be completely Roman. His chief defense of his Romanness was his tribe, Clustumina, a moderately elderly rural tribe whose citizens lived in the eastern Tiber valley. But few of the Romans who mattered doubted for one moment that the Pompeii had been in Picenum far longer than the date of Roman conquest of the area. The tribe created for the new Picentine citizens was Velina, and most of the vassals who lived on Pompeian lands in northern Picenum and eastern Umbria were of the tribe Velina. The interpretation among those who mattered in Rome was that the Pompeii were Picentines and owned vassals long before Roman influence in that part of Italy, and had bought themselves membership in a better tribe than Velina. It was an area of Italy where Gauls had settled in large numbers after the failed invasion of central Italy and Rome by the first King Brennus three hundred years earlier. And as Pompeian looks were Celtic in the extreme, those who mattered in Rome deemed them Gauls. Be that as it may, some seventy years ago a Pompeius had finally taken the inevitable journey down the Via Flaminia to Rome, and by unscrupulously bribing the electors, got himself voted in as consul twenty years later. At first this Pompeius who was more closely related to Quintus Pompeius Rufus than to Pompey Strabo had found himself at loggerheads with the great Metellus Macedonicus, but they had patched up their differences, and eventually shared the censorship. All of which meant that the Pompeii were on their Roman way. The first Pompeius of Strabo's branch to make the trip south had been Pompey Strabo's father, who had procured himself a seat in the Senate and married none other than the sister of the famous Latin language satirist, Gaius Lucilius. The Lucilii were Campanians who had been Roman citizens for generations; they were quite rich, and had consuls in the family. A temporary shortage of cash had transformed Pompey Strabo's father into desirable husband material especially when Lucilia's abysmal unattractiveness was added to the Lucilian debit account. Unfortunately Strabo's father had died before he could attain a senior magistracy but not before Lucilia had produced her crosseyed little Gnaeus Pompeius, immediately cognominated Strabo. She had produced another boy, called Sextus, much younger than Pompey Strabo, and of much poorer quality. Thus it was Pompey Strabo who became the family's hope for great things. Strabo was not by nature a student, let alone a scholar; though he was educated in Rome by a series of excellent tutors, he achieved little in the way of learning. Presented with the great Greek ideas and ideals, the boy Pompey Strabo had dismissed them as idle waffle and complete impracticality. He liked the warlords and international meddlers who liberally dotted Roman history. As a contubernalis cadet serving under various commanders, Pompey Strabo had not been popular with his peers men like Lucius Caesar, Sextus Caesar, his middling cousin Pompeius Rufus, Cato Licinianus, Lucius Cornelius Cinna. They had used him as a butt because of his atrociously crossed eyes, certainly, but also because he had an innate uncouthness no amount of Roman polish ever managed to conceal. His early years in the army had been miserable, and his service as a tribune of the soldiers hardly less so. No one liked Pompey Strabo! All of this he was later to tell his own son, a violent partisan of his father's. That son (now aged fifteen) and a daughter, Pompeia, were the products of another Lucilian marriage; following the precedent set by his father, Pompey Strabo also espoused an ugly Lucilia, this one the daughter of the famous satirist's elder brother, Gaius Lucilius Hirrus. Luckily the Pompeian blood was capable of overcoming Lucilian homeliness, for neither Strabo nor his son was homely, save for Strabo's cross-eyes. Like generations of Pompeii before them, they were fair of face and coloring, blue-eyed, very snub of nose. In the Rufus branch of the family the hair ran to red; the Strabo branch ran to gold. When Strabo marched his four legions south through Picenum, he left his son behind in Rome with his mother, there to further his education. But the son was no intellectual either and very much shaped by his father into the bargain so he packed up his trunk and headed home to northern Picenum, there to mingle with the centurions left behind to keep on training Pompeian clients as legionaries, and subject himself to a rigorous pr
ogram of military training well before he could assume the toga of manhood. Unlike his father in this respect, Young Pompey was universally adored. He called himself plain Gnaeus Pompeius, no cognomen. None of that branch owned a cognomen save for Young Pompey's father, and Strabo was a name he could not adopt because he didn't have cross-eyes. Young Pompey's eyes were very large, very wide, very blue, and quite perfect. The eyes, said his doting mother, of a poet. While Young Pompey kicked his heels at home, Pompey Strabo continued his march south. Then as he was crossing the Tinna River near Falernum, he was ambushed by six legions of Picentes under Gaius Vidacilius, and was obliged to fight a waterlogged defensive action which gave him no room to maneuver. To make his predicament worse, Titus Lafrenius came up with two legions of Vestini and Publius Vettius Scato arrived with two legions of Marsi! Everyone Italian wanted to have a piece of the first action in the war. The battle was a credit to neither side. Enormously outnumbered, Pompey Strabo managed to extricate himself almost intact from the river and hustled his precious army to the coastal city of Firmum Picenum, where he shut himself up and prepared to withstand a long siege. By rights the Italians should have annihilated him, but they hadn't yet absorbed the lesson of the one unfailing Roman military characteristic speed. In that respect and it turned out to be the vital respect Pompey Strabo was the winner, even if the battle had to be awarded to the Italians. Vidacilius left Titus Lafrenius outside the walls of Firmum Picenum to keep the Romans inside and took himself off with Scato to do mischief elsewhere, while Pompey Strabo sent a message to Coelius in Italian Gaul asking for relief to be sent as soon as possible. His plight was not desperate; he had access to the sea, and to a small Roman Adriatic fleet no one had remembered was based there. Firmum Picenum was a Latin Rights colony, and loyal.