Up went another finger. “Fourthly, those men have put themselves in a position where, if they don’t do well, I can indeed strip them of their citizenship and flog them—which means that they have no choice but to fight like wildcats. And fifthly”—he had to use his thumb—”I don’t care how many thieves and murderers I have in my forces—provided they fight like wildcats.” Down went the hand, chopping through the defenseless air like a barbarian’s axe.
Metellus Pius opened his mouth, thought better of what he had been going to say, and wisely said nothing at all.
At the point where the road to Pompeii divided, one branch going to the Vesuvian Gate, the other to the Herculanean Gate, Sulla put his troops into a strongly fortified camp. By the time he was settled in behind his entrenchments and ramparts, his flotilla had arrived and was busy firing blazing bundles over the walls into the midst of Pompeian buildings faster than the oldest and most experienced centurion had ever seen; frightened faces looking down from the walls revealed that this was one kind of warfare nobody had counted on, and one which made everyone very uneasy. Fire was worst.
That the Samnites of Pompeii had sent frantic messages for help became clear the next day when a Samnite army larger than Sulla’s by a good ten thousand men arrived, and proceeded to halt not more than three hundred paces from the front of Sulla’s camp. A third of Sulla’s twenty thousand soldiers were absent on foraging excursions, and were now cut off from him. Looking his ugliest, Sulla stood on his ramparts with Metellus Pius and Titus Didius listening to the jeers and catcalls borne on the wind from the city’s walls—noises he did not appreciate any more than he did the advent of a Samnite army.
“Sound the call to arms,” he said to his legates.
Titus Didius was turning to leave when Metellus Pius reached out to grasp Didius by the arm, and detained him.
“Lucius Cornelius, we can’t go out to fight that lot!” the Piglet cried. “We’d be cut to pieces!”
“We can’t not go out and fight,” said Sulla, curtly enough to indicate his anger at being questioned. “That’s Lucius Cluentius out there, and he intends to stay. If I let him build a camp as strong as ours it will be Acerrae all over again. And I am not going to tie up four good legions in a place like this for months—nor do I need Pompeii’s showing the rest of these rebel seaports that Rome can’t take them back! And if that isn’t sufficient reason to attack right now, Quintus Caecilius, then consider the fact that when our foraging parties return, they’re going to trip over a Samnite army with no word of warning—and no chance to survive!”
Didius gave Metellus Pius a contemptuous look. “I’ll sound the call to arms,” he said, and wrenched his arm away.
Crowned with a helmet rather than his usual hat, Sulla climbed to the top of the camp forum tribunal to address the almost thirteen thousand men he had available.
“You all know what’s waiting for you!” he shouted. “A pack of Samnites who outnumber us by nearly three to one! But Sulla is tired of Rome’s being beaten by a pack of Samnites, and Sulla is tired of Samnites owning Roman towns! What good is it being a living Roman if Rome has to lie down before Samnites like a fawning bitch? Well, not this Roman! Not Sulla! If I have to go out and fight alone, I am going! Am I going alone? Am I? Or are you coming with me because you’re Romans too, and just as tired of Samnites as I am?”
The army answered him with a mighty cheer. He stood without moving, until they were done, for he was not done.
“They go!” he sang out, even louder. “Every last one of them must go! Pompeii is our town! The Samnites within its gates murdered a thousand Romans, and now those same Samnites are up there on Pompeii’s walls thinking themselves safe and sound, booing and hissing us because they think we’re too afraid to clean up a pack of dirty Samnites! Well, we’re going to show them they’re wrong! We’re going to take everything the Samnites can dish out until our foraging parties return, and when they do return, our war cries will guide them to the battle! Hear me? We hold the Samnites until our foragers return to fall on their rear like the Romans they are!”
There came a second mighty cheer, but Sulla was already off the tribunal, sword in hand; three ordered columns of soldiers moved at a run through the front and both side gates, Sulla leading the middle column himself.
So swift was the Roman deployment that Cluentius, not expecting a battle, barely had time to ready his troops for the Roman charge. A cool and daring commander, he stood his ground and remained among his own front ranks. Undermanned, the Roman assault began to falter when it failed to break the Samnite line. But Sulla, still leading, refused to move back an inch, and his men refused to leave him there alone. For an hour Romans and Samnites fought a hand-to-hand engagement without let, mercy, retreat. Of truly confrontational battles there had been few; both sides understood that the outcome of this one must inevitably affect the outcome of the war.
Too many good legionaries fell in that hour marking noon, but just as it seemed Sulla must order his troops to fall back or see them die where they stood, the Samnite line trembled, shook, began to fold in on itself. The Roman foraging parties had returned, and were attacking from the rear. Shrieking that Rome was invincible, Sulla led his men back into the fray with renewed vigor. Even so Cluentius gave ground slowly. For a further hour he managed to hold his army together. Then when he saw that all was lost, he rallied his troops and fought his way through the Romans in his rear to retreat on the double toward Nola.
Regarding itself as the talisman of Italian defiance in the south—and knowing Rome was aware it had starved Roman soldiers to death—Nola could not afford to jeopardize its safety. So when Cluentius and over twenty thousand Samnite’ soldiers reached its walls a scant mile ahead of the pursuing Sulla, they found themselves locked out. Leaning over those lofty, smooth, stoutly reinforced stone bastions, the city magistrates of Nola looked down on Lucius Cluentius and their fellow Samnites, and refused to open the gates. Finally, as the Roman front ranks approached the Samnite rear and prepared to charge, the gate below which Cluentius himself stood—not one of the city’s bigger gates—swung wide. But more than that one minor gate the magistrates would not open, plead though the floundering Samnite soldiers did.
Before Pompeii it had been a battle. Before Nola it was a rout. Stunned at Nolan treachery, panic-stricken because it found itself enclosed by the out-thrust corners of Nola’s northern section of walls, the Samnite army went down to utter defeat, and died almost to the last man. Sulla himself killed Cluentius, who refused to seek shelter within Nola when only a handful of his men could do the same.
It was the greatest day of Sulla’s life. Fifty-one years of age, a general in complete charge of a theater of war at last, he had won his first great battle as commander-in-chief. And what a victory! Covered so copiously in the blood of other men that he dripped it, his sword glued by gore to his right hand, reeking of sweat and death, Lucius Cornelius Sulla surveyed the field, snatched the helmet from his head and threw it into the air with a scream of sheer jubilation. In his ears was a gigantic noise drowning out the howls and moans of dying Samnites, a noise inexorably swelling, revealing itself as a chant:
“Im-per-a-tor! Im-per-a-tor! Im-per-a-tor!”
Over and over and over his soldiers roared it, the final accolade, the ultimate triumph, the victor hailed imperator on the field. Or so he thought, grinning broadly with sword above his head, his sweat-soaked thatch of brilliant hair drying in the dying sun, his heart so full he could not have said a word in return, had there been a word to say. I, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that a man as able as I am can learn what isn’t in his bones—and win the hardest battle of this or any other war! Oh, Gaius Marius, just wait! Crippled hulk that you are, don’t die until I can get back to Rome and show you how wrong your judgment was! I am your equal! And in the years to come I will surpass you. My name will tower over yours. As it should do. For I am a patrician Cornelius and you no more than a rustic fr
om the Latin hills.
But there was work to be done, and he was a patrician Roman. To him came Titus Didius and Metellus Pius, curiously subdued, their bright eyes looking upon him with awe, with a shining adoration Sulla had only seen before in the eyes of Julilla and Dalmatica as they had gazed at him. But these are men, Lucius Cornelius Sulla! Men of worth and repute—Didius the victor over Spain, Metellus Pius the heir of a great and noble house. Women were unimportant fools. Men mattered. Especially men like Titus Didius and Metellus Pius. Never in all the years I served Gaius Marius did I see any man look at him with so much adoration! Today I have won more than a mere victory. Today I have won the vindication of my life, today I have justified Stichus, Nicopolis, Clitumna, Hercules Atlas, Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle. Today I have proven that every life I have taken in order to stand here on the field at Nola was a lesser life than my own. Today I begin to understand the Nabopolassar from Chaldaea—I am the greatest man in the world, from Oceanus Atlanticus all the way to the River Indus!
“We work through the night,” he said crisply to Didius and Metellus Pius, “so that by dawn the Samnite corpses are stripped and heaped together, and our own dead prepared for the pyre. I know it’s been an exhausting day, but it isn’t over yet. Until it is over, no one can rest. Quintus Caecilius, find a few reasonably fit men and ride back to Pompeii as fast as you can. Bring back bread and wine enough for . everyone here, and bring up the noncombatants and set them to finding wood, oil. We have a veritable mountain of bodies to burn.”
“But there are no horses, Lucius Cornelius!” said the Piglet faintly. “We marched to Nola! Twenty miles in four hours!”
“Then find horses,” said Sulla, manner at its coldest. “I want you back here by dawn.” He turned to Didius. “Titus Didius, go among the men and find out who should be decorated for deeds in the field. As soon as we burn our dead and the enemy dead we return to Pompeii, but I want one legion from Capua posted here before the walls of Nola. And have the heralds announce to the inhabitants of Nola that Lucius Cornelius Sulla has made a vow to Mars and Bellona—that Nola will look down to see Roman troops sitting before it until it surrenders, be that a month of days from now, or a month of months from now, or a month of years from now.”
Before Didius or Metellus Pius could depart, the tribune of the soldiers Lucius Licinius Lucullus appeared at the head of a deputation of centurions; eight senior men, primi pili and pili priores. They walked gravely, solemnly, like priests in a sacred procession or consuls going to their inauguration on New Year’s Day.
“Lucius Cornelius Sulla, your army wishes to give you a token of its gratitude and thanks. Without you, the army would have been defeated, and its soldiers dead. You fought in the front rank and showed the rest of us the way. You never flagged on the march to Nola. To you and you alone is due this greatest victory by far of the whole war. You have saved more than your army. You have saved Rome. Lucius Cornelius, we honor you,” said Lucullus, stepping back to make way for the centurions.
The man in their midst, most senior centurion of them all, lifted both arms and held them out to Sulla. In his hands lay a very drab and tattered circlet made of grass runners plucked from the field of battle and braided together haphazardly, roots and earth and blades and blood. Corona graminea. Corona obsidionalis. The Grass Crown. And Sulla stretched out his own arms instinctively, then dropped them, utterly ignorant as to what the ritual should be. Did he take it and put it on his own head, or did the primus pilus Marcus Canuleius crown him with it on behalf of the army?
He stood then without moving while Canuleius, a tall man, raised the Grass Crown in both hands and placed it upon that red-gold head.
No further word was spoken. Titus Didius, Metellus Pius, Lucullus and the centurions saluted Sulla reverently, gave him shy smiles, and got themselves away. He was left alone to face the setting sun, the Grass Crown so insubstantial he scarcely felt its weight, the tears pouring down his bloodstained face, and no room inside himself for anything beyond an exaltation he wondered if he had steel enough to live through. For what was on its other side? What could life possibly offer him now? And he remembered his dead son. Before he had had time to truly relish the infinite extent of that joy it was vanished. All he had left was a grief so profound he fell to his knees and wept desolately.
Someone helped him to his feet, wiped the muck and the tears from his face, put an arm about his waist and helped him walk to a block of stone beside the Nola road. There he was lowered gently until he sat upon it, then his rescuer sat alongside him; Lucius Licinius Lucullus, the senior tribune of the soldiers.
The sun had set into the Tuscan Sea. The greatest day of Sulla’s life was coming to its end in darkness. He dangled his arms down between his legs limply, drew in great breaths, and came to ask himself the old, old question: Why am I never happy?
“I have no wine to offer you, Lucius Cornelius. Nor water, for that matter,” said Lucullus. “We ran from Pompeii without a thought for anything except catching Cluentius.”
Sulla heaved an enormous sigh, straightened himself. “I’ll live, Lucius Lucullus. As a woman friend of mine says, there is always work to do.”
“We can do the work. You rest.”
“No. I am the commander. I can’t rest while my men work. A moment more, and I’ll be right. I was right until I thought of my son. He died, you know.” The tears came back, were suppressed.
Lucullus said nothing, just sat quietly.
Of this young man Sulla had seen little so far; elected a tribune of the soldiers last December, he had gone first to Capua and only been posted to command his legion days before it marched for Pompeii. Yet though he had changed enormously—grown from a stripling to a fine specimen of man—Sulla recognized him.
“You and your brother Varro Lucullus prosecuted Servilius the Augur in the Forum ten years ago, am I not right?’’ he asked.
“Yes, Lucius Cornelius. The Augur was responsible for the disgrace and death of our father, and the loss of our family fortune. But he paid,’’ said Lucullus, his long homely face growing brighter, his humorous mouth turning up at the corners.
“The Sicilian slave war. Servilius the Augur took your father’s place as governor of Sicily. And later prosecuted him.”
“That is so.”
Sulla got up, extended his right hand to take the right hand of Lucius Licinius Lucullus. “Well, Lucius Licinius, I must thank you. Was the Grass Crown your idea?”
“Oh no, Lucius Cornelius. Blame the centurions! They informed me that the Grass Crown has to come from the army’s professionals, not the army’s elected magistrates. They brought me along because one of the army’s elected magistrates must be a witness.” Lucullus smiled, then laughed. “I suspect too that addressing the general formally isn’t quite in their line!. So I got the job.”
*
Two days later Sulla’s army was back inside its camp before Pompeii. Everyone was so exhausted even decent food had no lure, and for twenty-four hours a complete silence reigned as the men and their officers slept like the dead they had burned against the walls of Nola, an insult to the nostrils of the flesh-famished inhabitants.
The Grass Crown now resided within a wooden box Sulla’s servants had produced; when Sulla had the time, it would be put in the hair of the wax mask of himself he was now entitled to commission. He had distinguished himself highly enough to join the imagines of his ancestors, even though he had not yet been consul. And his statue would go into the Forum Romanum wearing a Grass Crown, erected in memory of the greatest hero of the war against the Italians. All of which hardly seemed real; but there in its box lay the Grass Crown, a testament to reality.
When, rested and refreshed, the army went on parade for the awarding of battle decorations, Sulla put his Grass Crown upon his head and was greeted with prolonged and deafening cheers as he climbed upon the camp tribunal. The task of organizing the ceremony had been given to Lucullus, just as Marius had once given the same task to Quint
us Sertorius.
But as he stood there acknowledging the army’s adulation, a thought occurred to Sulla that he didn’t think had ever crossed the mind of Marius during those years in Numidia and Gaul—though perhaps it had while he commanded against the Italians. A sea of faces in parade order, parade dress—a sea of men who belonged to him, to Lucius Cornelius Sulla. These are my legions! They belong to me before they belong to Rome. I crafted them, I led them, I have given them the greatest victory of this war—and I will have to find their retirement gratuity. When they gave me the Grass Crown, they also gave me a far more significant gift—they gave me themselves. If I wanted to, I could lead them anywhere. I could even lead them against Rome. A ridiculous idea; but it was born in Sulla’s mind at that moment on the tribunal. And it curled itself up beneath consciousness, and waited.
Pompeii surrendered the day after its citizens watched Sulla’s decoration ceremony from their walls; Sulla’s heralds had shouted the news of the defeat of Lucius Cluentius before the walls of Nola, and word had come confirming it. Still being relentlessly bombarded with flaming missiles from the ships in the river, the city was suffering badly. Every fiery breath of wind seemed to carry the message that the Italian and Samnite ascendancy was crumbling, that defeat was inevitable.
From Pompeii, Sulla moved with two of his legions against Stabiae, while Titus Didius took the other two to Herculaneum. On the last day of April Stabiae capitulated, and shortly afterward so too did Surrentum. As May reached its middle, Sulla was on the move again, this time heading east. Catulus Caesar had bestowed fresh legions upon Titus Didius before Herculaneum, so Sulla’s own two legions were returned to him. Though it had held out the longest against joining the Italian insurrection, Herculaneum now demonstrated that it understood only too well what would happen if it surrendered to Rome; whole streets burning as the result of a naval bombardment, it continued to defy Titus Didius long after the other Italian-held seaports had given in.
Masters of Rome Boxset: First Man in Rome, the Grass Crown, Fortune's Favourites, Caesar's Women, Caesar Page 194
