2. The Grass Crown

by Colleen McCullough

  When the King arrived at the place Pelopidas had chosen for his landing on Rhodes, he found that very few soldier transports had turned up. He was therefore not able to assault the city of Rhodus until, as Pelopidas said, " we can organize the shipping of another army, Great King. The Rhodian admiral Damagoras attacked our transports on two different occasions, and has sent over half of them to the bottom of the sea. Of those which survived, some came on to join us here, but most turned back to Halicarnassus. The next time we will have to surround the transports with war galleys instead of leaving them to follow at their own pace and without any protection." Of course this news could not please the King, but as he had arrived safely himself, had done well on Cos, and was indifferent to the fate of his Pontic soldiers, he accepted the fact that he must wait for reinforcements, and occupied himself in writing to his regent in Pontus, Young Mithridates, regarding the young heirs to the throne of Egypt.

  They all seem well educated, but they are completely ignorant of the importance of Pontus in the world, my son, and that will have to be rectified. My daughters by Antiochis, Cleopatra Tryphaena and Berenice Nyssa, are to be betrothed at once to the two younger fellows. Cleopatra Tryphaena will go to Ptolemy Philadelphus, Berenice Nyssa to Ptolemy No Other Name. The marriages can take place when each girl becomes fifteen. As to the effeminate one, Ptolemy Alexander, he must be broken of this love for men. The Egyptians would clearly prefer him as their next king because he is legitimate. Therefore he will learn to like women if he likes his head on his shoulders. I leave it to you to enforce this edict.

  Setting pen to paper was an ordeal for the King, who normally used scribes, but he wanted to write this letter himself; it took him many days to compose in full, and many burned drafts. By the end of October the letter was on its way and the King of Pontus felt himself strong enough at last to attack Rhodus. He mounted his assault at night, and concentrated upon the land perimeter of the city because the Rhodian navy was berthed in the harbor. But no one in the Pontic command chain had the necessary knowledge or skill to storm a city as large and well fortified as Rhodus, so the attack was a dismal failure. Unfortunately the King lacked the patience to subject Rhodus to a long-term blockade the only sure way to conquer it. Frontal assault it must be. But this time the Rhodian navy would be lured outside the harbor and sent chasing off after a decoy, as the main thrust of the Pontic attack would come from the water, spearheaded by a sambuca. What thrilled the King most was that the idea of the sambuca was entirely his, and had been greeted in council by Pelopidas and his other generals as a brilliant ploy, sure to work. Flushed with happiness, Mithridates decided to build the sambuca himself that is, to design it personally and supervise its construction. He took two identical and immense "sixteeners" built in the same shipyard and lashed them together amidships; it was here that the King's inadequacies as an engineer ill served his sambuca. What he should have done was to lash them together from their far sides, thus distributing the weight they would be called upon to carry evenly over the entire structure; instead, he lashed them together along their near sides, where they touched each other. Over the two ships he put a deck so large that parts of it overhung the water, but made no attempt to secure the deck to its substrate in any but the most superficial way. On top of this deck two towers went up in the midline, one situated above the gap between the two prows and one on top of the sterns, which were in closer proximity. Between the two towers a wide bridge was built so that it could be raised and lowered on a system of pulleys and winches from a resting position flat on the deck all the way up to the top of the towers. Inside each tower were huge treadmills operated by hundreds of slaves whose job it was to push the bridge from bottom to top. A tall fence of heavy planks was attached by hinges to one side of the bridge right along its length from prow tower to stern tower; while the bridge was being raised the fence formed a protection against missiles, and when the bridge attained its maximum altitude of just a little more than the immense seawall of Rhodus port, the fence could then be dropped onto the top of the seawall to form a gangplank. The attack began on a calm day toward the end of November, two hours after the Rhodian navy was lured away to the north. The Pontic army assaulted the landward walls at their weakest points as the Pontic navy rowed into Rhodus harbor, its outer flank deployed to keep the Rhodian fleet on its periphery when the Rhodian fleet saw through the trick and returned. In the midst of the huge Pontic flotilla reared the mighty sambuca, towed by dozens of lighters and followed closely by transports loaded with troops. Amid shrieks of alarm and frantic activity along the Rhodian battlements, with great dexterity the lightermen berthed the sambuca side-on to the vast seawall behind which lay the temple of Isis; the moment the maneuver was over, the troop transports crowded round it. Relatively unharmed by the frenzied hurling of stones and arrows and spears, the Pontic soldiers poured onto the sambuca, where they were packed densely onto the bridge, lying flat on the deck. Then the winch operators flogged their slaves to start walking the treadmills. Amid an horrific squealing and groaning, the bridge between the towers began to rise into the air bearing its load of soldiers. Hundreds of helmeted Rhodian heads popped up along the battlements to watch in mingled fascination and terror; Mithridates watched too, from his "sixteener" in the middle of the packed Pontic ships, waiting until the sambuca concentrated all Rhodian resistance to the temple of Isis section of the seawall. Once the sambuca was the center of attention, the other ships could draw up alongside the rest of the seawall and send troops up ladders with impunity. Pontic soldiers would be atop the fortifications all the way around the harbor. It cannot fail! I've got them this time! thought the King to himself as he allowed his eyes to dwell lovingly upon his sambuca and its slowly rising bridge between the two towers. Soon the bridge would come level with the top of the seawall, magically the protective fence would drop on its hinges to form a gangway across which the soldiers would pour in among the Rhodian defenders. There were enough men aboard the bridge to hold the Rhodians at bay until the apparatus was lowered back to the deck to load another contingent and winch them to the top. There is no doubt about it, thought King Mithridates, I am the best at everything! But as the center of gravity rose along with the sambuca bridge, the distribution of weight changed. The host ships lashed together began to split apart. Ropes snapped with little explosions, the towers began to totter, the deck to heave and buckle, the ascending bridge to sway like a dancer's scarf. Then the two ships bearing all of this began to capsize toward the midline. Decking, towers, bridge, soldiers, sailors, artificers, and treadmill slaves fell into the water between the rolling vessels amid a cacophony of screams, grinding crunches, roars and hysterical cheers from the jubilant Rhodians atop their walls cheers soon changing into paroxysms of mocking laughter. "I never want to hear the name of Rhodes mentioned again!" said the King as his mighty galley bore him back to Halicarnassus. "It's too close to winter to continue this petty campaign against a pack of idiots and fools. My armies marching into Macedonia and my fleets along the coast of Greece need my closer attention. I also want every engineer who had anything to do with the design of that ridiculous sambuca dead no, not dead! Tongues out, eyes out, hands off, balls off, and begging bowls!" So furious was the King at this humiliation that he visited Lycia with an army and attempted to besiege Patara. But when he felled a grove of trees sacred to Latona, the mother of Apollo and Artemis came to him in a dream and warned him to stop. Next day the King handed over the investment to his underlings the hapless Pelopidas was placed in command and took his fascinating albino bride Monima to Hierapolis. There, cavorting and frolicking in the hot mineral pools amid petrified crystal waterfalls tumbling down the cliffs, he succeeded in forgetting all about the laughter of Rhodes and Chian ships which gave him the fright of his life.

  IX (88-87 B.C.)

  The news of the massacre of Asia Province’s Roman and Latin and Italian residents reached Rome ahead of the news that Mithridates had invaded the province and reached Rome in r
ecord time. Just nine days after the last day of Quinctilis, the Princeps Senatus Lucius Valerius Flaccus was convening the House in the temple of Bellona outside the pomerium because this was to do with a foreign war. To those present he read out a letter from Publius Rutilius Rufus in Smyrna.

  I am sending this by a specially commissioned fast ship to Corinth, and onward to Brundisium by another just as fast, trusting that the rebellion in Greece does not prevent its passage. The courier has been instructed to ride from Brundisium to Rome at the gallop, night and day. The large sum of money this is costing has been given to me by my friend Miltiades, the ethnarch of Smyrna, who begs only that the Senate and People of Rome remember his service to them when, as must happen, Asia Province belongs to Rome again. It may be that you do not know as yet of the invasion of King Mithridates of Pontus, who now rules both Bithynia and our Roman Asian province. Manius Aquillius is dead under the most hideous circumstances, and Gaius Cassius is fled I know not where. A quarter of a million Pontic soldiers are west of the Taurus, the Aegean is completely covered by Pontic fleets, and Greece has allied itself with Pontus against Rome. I very much fear that Macedonia is totally isolated. But that is not the worst of it. On the last day of Quinctilis, every Roman and Latin and Italian in the Asia Province, Bithynia, Pisidia, and Phrygia was massacred by order of King Mithridates of Pontus. Their slaves were also massacred. The number of dead, I believe, is something like eighty thousand citizens and seventy thousand slaves one hundred and fifty thousand altogether. That I did not suffer the same fate is due to my non-citizen status, though I believe the King issued a warning that I by name! was not to be touched. A nice sop to the hound of Hades. What can the sparing of my old life do to offset the brutal hacking into pieces of Roman women and little babies? They were torn from altars still crying on the gods and their bodies lie rotting unburied, again by order of the King of Pontus. This barbarian monstrosity now fancies himself the king of the world, and is boasting that he will be on Italian soil before the year is out. No one is left east of Italy to gainsay his boast save our people in Macedonia. But I despair of Macedonia. Though I have not been able to confirm it, there is news that King Mithridates has mounted a land expedition against Thessalonica which has already penetrated west of Philippi without a shred of opposition. I know more about activities in Greece, where a Pontic agent named Aristion has snatched all power in Athens and persuaded most of Greece to declare for Mithridates. The isles of the Aegean are in Pontic hands, the fleets are gigantic. When Delos fell, another twenty thousand of our people were put to death. Please, I beg of you, regard my letter as deliberately brief and understated, and do what you can to prevent this frightful barbarian Mithridates crowning himself the King of Rome. It is that serious.

  "Oh, we don't need this!" said Lucius Caesar to his brother Catulus Caesar. "We may not need it, but we've got it," said Gaius Marius, eyes sparkling. "A war against Mithridates! I knew it had to come. Surprising, really, that it's been so long." "Lucius Cornelius is on his way to Rome," said the other censor, Publius Licinius Crassus. "I'll breathe easier then." "Why?" demanded Marius fiercely. "We shouldn't have summoned him! Let him finish the Italian war." "He is the senior consul," said Catulus Caesar. "The Senate cannot make far-reaching decisions without his presence in the chair." "Tchah!" said Marius, and lumbered away. "What's the matter with him?" asked Flaccus Princeps Senatus. "What do you think, Lucius Valerius? He's an old war-horse snuffing the scent of just the right kind of war a foreign one," said Catulus Caesar. "But surely he can't think he's going to it," said Publius Crassus the censor. "He's too old and sick!" "Of course he thinks he's going," said Catulus Caesar.