But, alas, the minute he turned his back on Syria, a few unpleasantly seditious incidents compelled him to turn around and go home again to chop off a few heads, dismember a few bodies, pull a few teeth, and probably tear out someone’s womb. And it was four years before sufficient heads, arms, legs, teeth, and wombs were plucked from their owners, and King Antiochus IV could start out a second time to conquer Egypt. This time, Syria in his absence remained very quiet and obedient, so King Antiochus IV invaded Egypt, captured Pelusium, marched down the Delta to Memphis, captured that, and began to march up the other side of the Delta toward Alexandria.
Having ruined the country and the army, the brothers Ptolemy and their sister-wife, Cleopatra II, had no choice but to appeal to Rome for help against King Antiochus IV, Rome being the best and greatest of all nations, and everyone’s hero. To the rescue of Egypt, the Senate and People of Rome (being in better accord in those days than we would believe possible now— or so the storybooks say) sent their noble brave consular Gaius Popillius Laenas. Now any other country would have given its hero a whole army, but the Senate and People of Rome gave Gaius Popillius Laenas only twelve lictors and two clerks. However, because it was a foreign mission, the lictors were allowed to wear the red tunics and put the axes in their bundles of rods, so Gaius Popillius Laenas was not quite unprotected. Off they sailed in a little ship, and came to Alexandria just as King Antiochus IV was marching up the Canopic arm of the Nilus toward the great city wherein cowered the Egyptians.
Clad in his purple-bordered toga and preceded by his twelve crimson-clad lictors, all bearing the axes in their bundles of rods, Gaius Popillius Laenas walked out of Alexandria through the Sun Gate, and kept on walking east. Now he was not a young man, so as he went he leaned upon a tall staff, his pace as placid as his face. Since only the brave and heroic and noble Romans built decent roads, he was soon walking along through thick dust. But was Gaius Popillius Laenas deterred? No! He just kept on walking, until near the huge hippodrome in which the Alexandrians liked to watch the horse races, he ran into a wall of Syrian soldiers, and had to stop.
King Antiochus IV of Syria came forward, and went to meet Gaius Popillius Laenas.
“Rome has no business in Egypt!” the King said, frowning awfully and direfully.
“Syria has no business in Egypt either,” said Gaius Popillius Laenas, smiling sweetly and serenely.
“Go back to Rome,” said the King.
“Go back to Syria,” said Gaius Popillius Laenas.
But neither of them moved a single inch.
“You are offending the Senate and People of Rome,” said Gaius Popillius Laenas after a while of staring into the King’s fierce face. “I have been ordered to make you return to Syria.”
The King laughed and laughed and laughed. “And how are you going to make me go home?” he asked. “Where is your army?”
“I have no need of an army, King Antiochus IV,” said Gaius Popillius Laenas. “Everything that Rome is, has been, and will be, is standing before you here and now. I am Rome, no less than Rome’s largest army. And in the name of Rome, I say to you a further time, go home!”
“No,” said King Antiochus IV.
So Gaius Popillius Laenas stepped forward, and moving sedately, he used the end of his staff to trace a circle in the dust all the way around the person of King Antiochus IV, who found himself standing inside Gaius Popillius Laenas’s circle.
“Before you step out of this circle, King Antiochus IV, I advise you to think again,” said Gaius Popillius Laenas. “And when you do step out of it—why, be facing east, and go home to Syria.”
The King said nothing. The King did not stir. Gaius Popillius Laenas said nothing. Gaius Popillius Laenas did not stir. Since Gaius Popillius Laenas was a Roman and did not need to hide his face, his sweet and serene countenance was on full display. But King Antiochus IV hid his face behind a curled and wired wig-beard, and even then could not conceal its thunder. Time went on. And then, still inside the circle, the mighty King of Syria turned on his heel to face east, and stepped out of the circle in an easterly direction, and marched back to Syria with all his soldiers.
Now on his way to Egypt, King Antiochus IV had invaded and conquered the isle of Cyprus, which belonged to Egypt. Egypt needed Cyprus, because Cyprus gave it timber for ships and buildings, and grain, and copper. So after he left the cheering Egyptians in Alexandria, Gaius Popillius Laenas sailed to Cyprus, where he found a Syrian army of occupation.
“Go home,” he said to it.
And home it went.
Gaius Popillius Laenas went home himself to Rome, where he said, very sweetly and serenely and simply, that he had sent King Antiochus IV home to Syria, and saved Egypt and Cyprus from a cruel fate. I wish I could end my little story by assuring you that the Ptolemies and their sister, Cleopatra II, lived—and ruled— happily ever after, but they didn’t. They just went on fighting among themselves, and murdering a few close relatives, and ruining the country.
What in the name of all the gods, I can hear you asking, am I telling children’s stories for? Simple, my dear Gaius Marius. How many times at your mother’s knee did you get told the story of Gaius Popillius Laenas and the circle around the King of Syria’s feet? Well, maybe in Arpinum mothers don’t tell that one. But in Rome, it’s standard issue. From highest to lowest, every Roman child gets told the story of Gaius Popillius Laenas and the circle around the feet of the King of Syria.
So how, I ask you, could the great-grandson of the hero of Alexandria proceed into exile without risking his all by standing trial? To proceed into exile voluntarily is to admit guilt—and I for one consider that our Gaius Popillius Laenas did the sensible thing at Burdigala. The upshot of it was that our Popillius Laenas remained and stood trial.
The tribune of the plebs Gaius Coelius Caldus (acting on behalf of a senatorial clique which shall be nameless—but you are allowed to guess—a clique determined to transfer the blame for Burdigala elsewhere than on Lucius Cassius’s shoulders, naturally) vowed that he would see Laenas condemned. However, since the only special treason court we have is limited to those dealing with Jugurtha, the trial had to take place in the Centuriate Assembly. Glaringly public, what with each Century’s spokesman shouting out his Century’s verdict for all the world to hear. “CONDEMNO!” “ABSOLVO!” Who, after hearing the story of Gaius Popillius Laenas and the circle around the King of Syria’s feet at his mother’s knee, would dare to shout, “CONDEMNO!”?
But did that stop Caldus? Certainly not. He introduced a bill in the Plebeian Assembly which extended the secret ballot of elections to cover treason trials as well. That way, the Centuries called upon to vote could be sure that each man’s opinion wasn’t known. The bill passed; all seemed in good train.
And as the month of December started, Gaius Popillius Laenas was tried in the Centuriate Assembly on a charge of treason. The ballot was a secret one, just as Caldus wanted. But all a few of us did was slip among the gargantuan jury, and whisper, “Once upon a time there was a noble, brave consular named Gaius Popillius Laenas... “ and that was the end of it.
When they counted the votes, they all said, “ABSOLVO.”
So, you might say, if justice was done, it was entirely thanks to the nursery.
THE
FIFTH YEAR
106 B.C.
IN THE CONSULSHIP OF
QUINTUS SERVILIUS CAEPIO
AND
GAIUS ATILIUS SERRANUS
1
When Quintus Servilius Caepio was given a mandate to march against the Volcae Tectosages of Gaul and their German guests—now happily resettled near Tolosa—he was fully aware he was going to get that mandate. It happened on the first day of the New Year, during the meeting of the Senate in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus after the inauguration ceremony. And Quintus Servilius Caepio, making his maiden speech as the new senior consul, announced to the packed assemblage that he would not avail himself of the new kind of Roman army.
Of course there were senators present who did not cheer; Gaius Marius did not exist alone amid a totally inimical Senate. A good number of the backbenchers were sufficiently enlightened to see the logic behind Marius’s stand against entrenched opinion, and even among the Famous Families there were some independent-thinking men. But the clique of conservatives who sat in the front row of the House around the person of Scaurus Princeps Senatus were the men who dictated senatorial policy; when they cheered, the House cheered, and when they voted a certain way, the House voted a similar way.
To this clique did Quintus Servilius Caepio belong, and it was the active lobbying of this clique that prodded the Conscript Fathers to authorize an army eight full legions strong for the use of Quintus Servilius Caepio in teaching the Germans that they were not welcome in the lands of the Middle Sea, and the Volcae Tectosages of Tolosa that it did not pay to welcome Germans.
About four thousand of Lucius Cassius’s troops had come back fit to serve, but all save a few of the noncombatants in Cassius’s army had perished along with the actual troops, and the cavalry who survived had scattered to their homelands, taking their horses and their noncombatants with them. Thus Quintus Servilius Caepio was faced with the task of finding 41,000 infantrymen, plus 12,000 free non-combatants, plus 8,000 slave noncombatants, plus 5,000 cavalry troopers and 5,000 noncombatant cavalry servants. All this in an Italy denuded of men with the property qualifications, be they Roman, Latin, or Italian in origin.
Caepio’s recruitment techniques were appalling. Not that he himself participated in them, or even bothered to acquaint himself with how the men were going to be found; he paid a staff and set his quaestor in charge, while he himself turned his hand to other things, things more worthy of a consul. The levies were enforced ruthlessly. Men were pressed into service not only without their consent, but as victims of kidnap, and veterans were hauled willy-nilly from their homes. A mature-looking fourteen-year-old son of a pressed smallholding farmer was also pressed, as was his youthful-looking sixty-year-old grandfather. And if such a family could not produce the money to arm and equip its pressed’ members, someone was on hand to write down the price of the gear, and take the smallholding as payment; Quintus Servilius Caepio and his backers acquired a large amount of land. When, even so, neither Roman nor Latin citizens could provide anything like enough men, the Italian Allies were hounded remorselessly.
But in the end Caepio got his forty-one thousand infantrymen and his twelve thousand noncombatant freemen the traditional way, which meant that the State didn’t have to pay for their arms, armor, or equipment; and the preponderance of Italian Allied auxiliary legions put the financial burdens of upkeep upon the Italian Allied nations rather than Rome. As a result, the Senate offered Caepio a vote of thanks, and was delighted to open its purse wide enough to hire horse troopers from Thrace and the two Gauls. While Caepio looked even more self-important than usual, Rome’s conservative elements spoke of him in laudatory terms wherever and whenever they could find ears to listen.
The other things to which Caepio personally attended while his press-gangs roamed throughout the Italian peninsula were all to do with returning power to the Senate; one way or another, the Senate had been suffering since the time of Tiberius Gracchus, almost thirty years before. First Tiberius Gracchus, then Fulvius Flaccus, then Gaius Gracchus, and after them a mixture of New Men and reforming noblemen had steadily whittled away at senatorial participation in the major law courts and the making of laws.
If it hadn’t been for Gaius Marius’s recent assaults upon senatorial privilege, possibly Caepio would have been less imbued with zeal to put the state of affairs right, and less determined. But Marius had stirred up the senatorial hornets’ nest, and the result during the first weeks of Caepio’s consulship was a dismaying setback for the Plebs and the knights who controlled the Plebs.
A patrician, Caepio summoned the Assembly of the People, from which he was not disbarred, and forced through a bill that removed the extortion court from the knights, who had received it from Gaius Gracchus; once more the juries in the extortion court were to be filled solely from the Senate, which could confidently be expected to protect its own. It was a bitter battle in the Assembly of the People, with the handsome Gaius Memmius leading a strong group of senators opposed to Caepio’s act. But Caepio won.
And, having won, in late March the senior consul led eight legions and a big force of cavalry in the direction of Tolosa, his mind filled with dreams, not so much of glory as of a more private form of self-gratification. For Quintus Servilius Caepio was a true Servilius Caepio, which meant that the opportunity to increase his fortune from a term as governor was more alluring by far than mere military fortune. He had been a praetor-governor in Further Spain, when Scipio Nasica had declined the job on the grounds that he was not to be trusted, and he had done very well for himself. Now that he was a consul-governor, he expected to do even better.
If it was routinely possible to send troops from Italy to Spain by water, then Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus would not have needed to open up the land route along the coast of Gaul-across-the-Alps; as it was, the prevailing winds and sea currents made water transportation too risky. So Caepio’s legions, like Lucius Cassius’s the year before, were obliged to walk the thousand-plus miles from Campania to Narbo. Not that the legions minded the walk; every last one of them hated and feared the sea, and dreaded the thought of a hundred miles of sailing far more than the reality of a thousand miles of walking. For one thing, their muscles were laid on from infancy in the right way to facilitate swift and endless walking, and walking was the most comfortable form of locomotion.
The journey from Campania to Narbo took Caepio’s legions a little over seventy days, which meant they averaged less than fifteen miles a day—a slow pace, hampered as they were not only by a large baggage train, but by the many private animals and vehicles and slaves the old-style propertied Roman soldier knew himself entitled to carry with him to ensure his own comfort.
In Narbo, a little seaport Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus had reorganized to serve the needs of Rome, the army rested just long enough to recover from its march, yet not long enough to soften up again. In early summer Narbo was a delightful place, its pellucid waters alive with shrimp, little lobsters, big crabs, and swimmy fish of all kinds. And in the mud at the bottom of the saltwater pools around the mouths of the Atax and the Ruscino were not only oysters, but dug-mullets. Of all the fish the legions of Rome had catalogued worldwide, dug-mullets were considered the most delicious. Round and flat like plates, with both eyes on one side of their silly thin heads, they lurked under the mud, had to be dug out, and then were speared as they floundered about trying to dig themselves back into the mud.
The legionary didn’t get sore feet. He was too used to walking, and his thick-soled, ankle-supporting sandals had hobnails to raise him still further off the ground, absorb some of the shock, and keep pebbles out. However, it was wonderful to swim in the sea around Narbo, easing aching muscles, and those few soldiers who had managed to escape so far being taught to swim were here discovered, and the omission rectified. The local girls were no different from girls all over the world—crazy for men in uniform—and for the space of sixteen days Narbo hummed with irate fathers, vengeful brothers, giggling girls, lecherous legionaries, and tavern brawls, keeping the provost marshals busy and the military tribunes in a foul temper.
Then Caepio packed his men up and moved them out along the excellent road Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus had built between the coast and the city of Tolosa. Where the river Atax bent at right angles as it flowed from the Pyrenees away to the south, the grim fortress of Carcasso frowned from its heights; from this point the legions marched over the hills dividing the headwaters of the huge Garumna River from the short streams emptying into the Middle Sea, and so came down at last to the lush alluvi
al plains of Tolosa.
Caepio’s luck was amazing, as usual; for the Germans had quarreled bitterly with their hosts, the Volcae Tectosages, and been ordered by King Copillus of Tolosa to leave the area. Thus Caepio found that the only enemies his eight legions had to deal with were the hapless Volcae Tectosages, who took one look at the steel-shirted ranks coming down from the hills like an endless snake, and decided discretion was by far the better part of valor. King Copillus and his warriors departed for the mouth of the Garumna, there to alert the various tribes of the region and wait to see if Caepio was as foolish a general as Lucius Cassius had been last year. Left in the care of old men, Tolosa itself surrendered at once. Caepio purred.
Why did he purr? Because Caepio knew about the Gold of Tolosa. And now he would find it without even having to fight a battle. Lucky Quintus Servilius Caepio!
*
A hundred and seventy years before, the Volcae Tectosages had joined a migration of the Gauls led by the second of the two famous Celtic kings called Brennus. This second Brennus had overrun Macedonia, poured down into Thessaly, turned the Greek defense at the pass of Thermopylae, and penetrated into central Greece and Epirus. He had sacked and looted the three richest temples in the world— Dodona in Epirus, Olympian Zeus, and the great sanctuary of Apollo and the Pythoness at Delphi.
Then the Greeks fought back, the Gauls retreated north with their plunder, Brennus died as the result of a wound, and his master plan fell apart. In Macedonia his leaderless tribes decided to cross the Hellespont into Asia Minor; there they founded the Gallic outpost nation called Galatia. But perhaps half of the Volcae Tectosages wanted to go home to Tolosa rather than cross the Hellespont; at a grand council, all the tribes agreed that these homesick Volcae Tectosages should be entrusted with the riches of half a hundred pillaged temples, including the riches of Dodona, Olympia, and Delphi. It was just that, a trust. The homebound Volcae Tectosages would hold the wealth of that whole migration in Tolosa against the day when all the tribes would return to Gaul, and claim it.
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