Sulla was wearing his Grass Crown, an unkind reminder that Pompey as yet had not managed to win one—had not managed to win a Civic Crown, for that matter! Silly wig and all, scar—spattered face and all, the Dictator still contrived to look every inch the Dictator. Pompey was quick to note it. The lictors moved twelve to either side of the road, thus permitting the tanned young man in his gold—plated armor to walk between their files toward Sulla, who had halted and arranged his party so that he stood a few feet ahead of the others, but was not isolated from them.
“Ave, Pompeius Magnus!” cried Sulla, right hand lifted.
“Ave, Dictator of Rome!” cried Pompey, transported with joy. Sulla had actually called him in public by the third name he had given himself—he could now officially be Pompey the Great!
They kissed on the mouth, something neither man enjoyed. And, the lictors preceding as always, turned slowly to walk in the direction of Pompey’s camp, the others following on.
“You’re prepared to admit I’m Great!” said Pompey happily.
“The name has stuck,” said Sulla. “But so has Kid Butcher.”
“My army is determined that I triumph, Lucius Cornelius.”
“Your army has absolutely no right to make that determination, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus.”
Out flew both powerful, freckled arms. “What can I do?”’ he cried. “They won’t take a scrap of notice of me!”
“Rubbish!” said Sulla roundly. “Surely you realize, Magnus, that throughout the course of four letters—if you count the original one you received in Utica—you have demonstrated that you are not competent enough to control your troops?’’
Pompey flushed, drew his small mouth in even smaller. “That is not a fair criticism!” he exclaimed.
“It most certainly is. You have admitted its truth yourself in no less than three letters.”
“You’re deliberately failing to understand!” said Pompey, red-faced. “They’re only behaving like this because they love me!”
“Love or hate, insubordination is insubordination. If they belonged to me, I’d be decimating them.”
“It’s a harmless insubordination,” Pompey protested lamely.
“No insubordination is harmless, as you well know. You are threatening the legally appointed Dictator of Rome.”
“This is not a march on Rome, Lucius Cornelius, it’s just a march to Rome,” labored Pompey. “There is a difference!
My men simply want to see that I receive what is due to me.”
“What is due to you, Magnus, is whatever I, as Dictator of Rome, decide to give you. You are twenty-four years old. You are not a senator. I have agreed to call you by a wonderful name which could only be improved by degree—Magnus can go to Maximus, but nowhere else—unless it be diminished to Parvus—or Minutus—or even Pusillus,” said Sulla.
Pompey stopped in the middle of the road, faced Sulla; the party behind somehow forgot to stop until they were well and truly close enough to hear.
“I want a triumph!” said Pompey loudly, and stamped a foot.
“And I say you can’t have one!” said Sulla, equally loudly.
Pompey’s broad, temper—reddened face grew beetling, the thin lips drew back to reveal small white teeth. “You would do well to remember, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Dictator of Rome, that more people worship the rising than the setting sun!”
For no reason any of the enthralled listeners could determine, Sulla burst out laughing. He laughed until he cried, slapping his hands helplessly on his thighs and quite losing control of the many folds of toga draped upon his left arm; it began to fall away and drag upon the ground. “Oh, very well!” he gasped when he could speak at all. “Have your triumph!” And then, still shaken by fresh guffaws, he said, “Don’t just stand there, Magnus, you great booby! Help me pick up my toga!”
*
“You are a complete fool, Magnus,” said Metellus Pius to Pompey when he had an opportunity to speak in private.
“I think I’ve been very clever,” said Pompey smugly.
Still not consul though he had entered into his late forties, the Piglet had aged well; his curly brown hair was frosted with white at the temples and his skin bore none but attractive lines at the corners of his brown eyes. Even so, next to Pompey he paled into insignificance. And he knew it. Not so much with envy as with sadness.
“You’ve been anything but clever,” the Piglet said, pleased to see the brilliant blue eyes widen incredulously. “I know our master considerably better than you do, and I can tell you that his intelligence is greater than both of ours put together. If he has a failing, it is only a failing of temperament—not of character! And this failing doesn’t affect the brilliance of his mind one iota. Nor does it affect the consummate skill of his actions, as man or as Dictator.”
Pompey blew a derisive noise. “Oh, Pius, you’re not making any sense! Failing? What failing of Sulla’s can you possibly mean?”
“His sense of the ridiculous, of course. Better to cuh—cuh—call it that than a sense of huh—huh—huh—humor.” The Piglet floundered, his own disability recollected, and stopped for a few moments to discipline his tongue. “I mean things like his appointing me the Pontifex Maximus when I stumble over my words. He can never resist that kind of joke.”
Pompey contrived to look bored. “I have no idea where you are going, Pius, or what it has to do with me.”
“Magnus, Magnus! He’s been having a laugh at your expense all along! That’s what it has to do with you. He always intended that you should triumph—what does he care about your age or your knight’s status? You’re a military hero, and he raises them to all kinds of exalted heights! But he wanted to see how much it meant to you, and how far you’d go to get it. You should never have risen to his bait. Now, he has you properly assessed and tucked away in his mental accounting system. He knows now that your courage is almost the equal of your self-esteem, not to mention your ambition. Almost. But not quite. He knows now that at the bitter end, Magnus, you won’t stick the course.”
“What do you mean, I won’t stick the course?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean.”
“I was marching on Rome!”
“Rubbish!” The Piglet smiled. “You were marching to Rome. You said so yourself. And I believed you. So did Sulla.”
Confounded, Pompey glared at his critic, not sure what he ought to—what he could say. “I got my triumph.”
“Yes, you did. But he’s making you pay a price for it you wouldn’t have had to pay if you’d behaved yourself.”
“Price? Price?” Pompey shook his head like a large and angry animal confused by teasing. “Today, Pius, you seem quite determined to speak in riddles!”
“You’ll see,” said the Piglet, no less obscure.
*
And Pompey did see, but not until the day of his triumph. The clues were there; excitement clouded his perceptions, was the trouble. The date of his triumph was set at the twelfth day of March. On the sixth day of March, Gaius Flaccus, the ex-governor of Gaul-across-the-Alps, triumphed for victories over rebellious Gallic tribes; and on the ninth day of March, Murena, the ex-governor of Asia Province, triumphed for victories in Cappadocia and Pontus. So by the time that the day of Pompey’s triumph came round, Rome had had enough of victory parades. A few people turned out, but not a crowd; after Sulla’s magnificent two—day extravaganza Flaccus had been mildly interesting, Murena somewhat less so, and Pompey hardly at all. For no one knew his name, no one was aware of his youth or beauty, and no one could have cared less. Another triumph? Ho hum, said Rome.
However, Pompey wasn’t particularly worried as he set off from the Villa Publica; word would fly and the people would come running from all directions when they heard the style of this particular triumph! By the time he turned the corner from the Circus Maximus into the Via Triumphalis, all of Rome would be there to see. In almost every respect his procession was a standard one—first the magistrates and senators, th
en musicians and dancers, the carts displaying spoils and the floats depicting various incidents from the campaign, the priests and the white male sacrificial victims, the captives and hostages, and then the general in his chariot, followed by his army.
Even Pompey’s garb was correct—the purple toga solidly embroidered with gold, the laurel wreath upon his head, the palm—embroidered tunic with the massive purple stripe. But when it came to painting his face red with minim, he balked. It was vital to his plans that Rome should see his youth and beauty, the face of an individual. His likeness to Alexander the Great. If his face were to be reduced to a brick—red blob, he might be anyone of any age. Therefore, no minim!
This barefaced presentation was not the major difference between Pompey and every other triumphing general; that lay in the animals which drew the antique four—wheeled triumphal chariot in which Pompey rode. Instead of the customary matched white horses, he was using four enormous male African elephants he had personally captured in Numidia. Four mahouts had worked every day since—in Utica and Tarentum, on the Via Appia, at Capua—to tame the recalcitrant pachyderms sufficiently to persuade them to act as beasts of slight burden. No easy feat, yet accomplished. Thus Pompey was able to set off in a triumphal chariot towed by four elephants. His companion in the car did not drive, simply held on to a set of ornate reins attached to the flashy trappings worn by these fabulous creatures. The elephants were under the control of the mahouts, each one sitting between a pair of massive, wrinkled grey shoulders more than ten feet off the ground. Once word spread—and it would, very quickly!—crowds would line the route of the parade just to see this remarkable sight—the New Alexander drawn by the very animals Rome regarded as most sacred. Elephants! Gigantic elephants with ears the size of sails and tusks seven feet long!
The path of the parade led from the Villa Publica on the Campus Martius to a narrow roadway lined with villas and apartment houses that wound around the base of the Capitoline Hill and approached the Servian Walls below the sharp cliffs at the hill’s western end; here was the Porta Triumphalis, through which the parade passed into the city itself. As Pompey ‘s was the third triumph within six days, senators and magistrates were thoroughly fed up with the whole procedure, so this first contingent was thin of company and inclined to be brisk. Taking their cue from the leaders, the musicians, dancers, carts, floats, priests, sacrificial victims, captives and hostages also moved quickly. Trundling along at the leisurely pace of four elephants harnessed two abreast, Pompey soon fell behind.
The chariot came to the Triumphal Gate at last, and stopped dead. The army—minus swords and spears but carrying staves wrapped in laurels—also stopped. Because the triumphal car was so old it belonged to Etruscan times and had been ceremonial from the beginning, it was much lower to the ground than the classical two—wheeled war chariot still employed by some outlandish tribes of Gauls; Pompey couldn’t see what was happening over the majestic but tousled rumps of the pair of elephants in front of him. At first he merely fretted and fumed a little; then when the halt became tediously long, he sent his driver forward to see what was the matter.
Back came the driver, looking horrified. “Triumphator, the elephants are too big to fit through the gate!”
Pompey’s jaw dropped. He felt a prickling in his skin, beads of sweat popping out on his forehead. “Nonsense!” he said.
“Truly, Triumphator, it is so! The elephants are too big to fit through the gate,” the driver insisted.
Down from the chariot in all his glory descended Pompey to run, trailing gold and purple garments, in the direction of the gate. There the mahouts belonging to the two leading pachyderms were standing looking helpless; thankfully they turned to Pompey.
“The opening is too small,” said one.
While on his way to the gate, Pompey had been mentally unharnessing the beasts and leading them through the aperture one at a time to the far side, but now he saw what he had not been able to see from the chariot; it was not a question of width, but of height. This opening—the only one by which the triumphal parade was permitted to travel—was wide enough to allow an army to march through eight abreast, even to allow the entry of a chariot drawn by four horses abreast, or a huge float; but it was not high enough to pass the head of an old and mighty African tusker, as the masonry above it which burrowed into the cliff of the Capitoline Hill began at about the height of these elephants’ shoulders.
“All right,” said Pompey confidently, “unharness them and lead them through one at a time. Just make them bend their heads right down.”
“They’re not trained to do that!” said one mahout, aghast.
“I don’t care whether they’re trained to shit through the eye of a needle!” snapped Pompey, face beginning to look as if it had been painted with minim after all. “Just do it!”
The leading elephant refused to bend his head.
“Pull on his trunk and make him!” said Pompey.
But no amount of pulling on his trunk or sitting on his glorious curving tusks would persuade the beast to bend his head; instead, he became angry. His unrest began to infect the other three, two of whom were still attached to the chariot. They began to back away, and the chariot began to threaten the lionskin—clad band of Pompey’s standard—bearers immediately behind.
While the mahouts continued to battle to obey him, Pompey stood articulating every horrific profanity in a ranker soldier’s vocabulary and producing threats which reduced the mahouts to glassy-eyed jellies of fear. All to no avail. The elephants were too big and too unwilling to be brought through the gate.
Over an hour had gone by when Varro came through the gate to see what had gone wrong. He, of course, had been walking with the other senators at the very front of the parade.
One look was enough. A terrible urge invaded Varro to lie down in the road and howl with laughter. This he could not do—not, one glance at Pompey’s face told him, if he wanted to live.
“Send Scaptius and some of his men to the Stabulae to get the horses,” said Varro crisply. “Come, Magnus, abandon these tantrums and think! The rest of the parade has reached the Forum, and no one knows why you’re not following. Sulla is sitting up on Castor’s podium fidgeting more and more, and the caterers for the feast in Jupiter Stator are tearing their hair out!”
Pompey’s answer was to burst into tears and sit down on the dirty cobbles in all his triumphal finery to weep his heart out. Thus it was Varro who sent the men for horses, and Varro who supervised the unhitching of the elephants. By this the scene had been complicated by the arrival of several market gardeners from the Via Recta, armed with shovels and barrows, and determined to appropriate what was known to be the best fertilizer in the world. Stepping unconcernedly between the gigantic legs of the pachyderms, they busied themselves scooping up piles of dung the size of wheels of cheese from Arpinum. Only urgency and pity kept Varro’s mirth at bay as he shouted and shooed, finally saw the mahouts get their charges under way toward the Forum Holitorium—no one could have driven them back the way they had come, with six legions congesting the roadway.
In the meantime the front half of the parade had ground to a halt in the Forum Romanum opposite the imposing Ionic facade of the temple of Castor and Pollux—upon which, high up, sat Sulla with his Master of the Horse, the two consuls, and some of his family and friends. Courtesy and custom said that the triumphator must be the most important man in his parade as well as at his feast, so these august men did not participate in the parade, nor would they attend the feast afterward.
Everyone was restless; everyone was also cold. The day was fine, but a bitter north wind was blowing, and the sun in the depths of the lower Forum not strong enough to melt the icicles hanging from temple eaves. Finally Varro returned, took the steps of Castor’s two at a time, and bent to whisper in Sulla’s ear. A huge gust of laughter assailed all the suddenly curious men; then, still laughing, Sulla got to his feet and walked to the edge of the podium to address the crowd.
General titters followed that announcement, but only the men who knew Pompey—Metellus Pius, Varro Lucullus, Crassus—roared their amusement.
“You know, it isn’t wise to offend Sulla,” said Metellus Pius to those around him. “I’ve noticed it time and time again. He has some sort of exclusive claim on Fortune, so he doesn’t even have to exert himself to see a man humiliated. The Goddess does it for him. Sulla is her favorite person in the world.”
“What I can’t understand,” said Varro Lucullus, frowning, “is why Pompeius didn’t measure the gate beforehand. Give him his due, he’s usually very efficient.”
“Until his daydreams overpower his good sense,” said Varro, arriving breathless; he had run all the way from the Triumphal Gate as well as up Castor’s steps. “His mind was so set on those wretched elephants that it never occurred to him anything could go wrong. Poor Magnus, he was shocked.”
“I feel sorry for him, actually,” said Varro Lucullus.
“So do I, now I’ve proved my point to him,” said Metellus Pius, and looked closely at the panting, scarlet—faced Varro. “How is he taking it?”
“He’ll be all right by the time he gets to the Forum,” Varro said, too loyal to describe the bout of tears.
Indeed, Pompey carried the rest of his triumphal parade with grace and dignity, though there could be no denying, even in his mind, that the two—hour fracture in its middle relegated it to the level of a very pedestrian triumph. Nor had many people lined the route to see him; what were horses compared to old men elephants, especially the plodding bay mediocrities which were all Scaptius could find?
Masters of Rome Boxset: First Man in Rome, the Grass Crown, Fortune's Favourites, Caesar's Women, Caesar Page 278
