Be that as it may, Crassus said an emphatic no. The flat terrain of Mesopotamia was more suited to the maneuvers of a Roman army, he maintained; he didn’t want his men mutinying as the troops of Lucullus had done when they saw Mount Ararat in the distance and realized that Lucullus expected them to climb over it. Added to which, a mountain campaign in far-off Media would have to be a summer one. His army, said Crassus, would be ready to march early in April, the beginning of winter. He thought that asking the troops to delay until Sextilis would reduce their enthusiasm. In my view, specious arguments. I saw no evidence of enthusiasm among Crassus’s troops at any time for any reason.
Greatly displeased, King Artavasdes quit Antioch to go home; he had hoped, of course, to usurp the Parthian kingdom for himself through an alliance with Rome. But having been rejected, he decided to throw in his lot with the Parthians. He left Abgarus in Antioch to spy; from the time Artavasdes vanished, everything Crassus did was reported to the enemy.
Then in March an embassage arrived from King Orodes of the Parthians. The chief ambassador was a very old man named Vagises. They look so odd, Parthian nobles, with their necks throttled by coiled golden collars from chin down to shoulders; their round, brimless, pearl-encrusted hats like inverted bowls on their heads; their false beards held on by golden wires around their ears; their gold tissue finery sparkling with fabulous jewels and pearls. I think all Crassus saw was the gold, the jewels and the pearls. How much more there must be in Babylonia!
Vagises asked Crassus to abide by the treaties both Sulla and Pompeius Magnus had negotiated with the Parthians: that everything west of the Euphrates should be in the dominion of Rome, and everything east of the Euphrates in the dominion of the Parthians.
Crassus actually laughed in their faces! “My dear Vagises,” he said through stifled guffaws, “tell King Orodes that I will indeed think about those treaties—after I’ve conquered Seleuceia-on-Tigris and Babylonia!”
Vagises said nothing for a moment. Then he held out his right hand, and showed its palm to Crassus. “Hair will grow here, Marcus Crassus, before you set foot in Seleuceia-on-Tigris!” he shrilled. My hackles rose. The way he said it was so eerie that it rang like a prophecy.
You perceive that Marcus Crassus was not endearing himself to any of these eastern kings, who are very touchy fellows. If any but a Roman proconsul had laughed, the joker would have parted with his head on the instant. Some of us tried to reason with him, but the trouble was that he had Publius there, his own son, who adored him and thought his father could do no wrong. Publius was Crassus’s echo, and he listened to his echo, not to the voices of reason.
At the beginning of April we marched northeast from Antioch. The army was morose, and consequently slow. The Aeduan horse troopers had been unhappy enough in the fertile valley of the Orontes, but once we got into the poorer pasture around Cyrrhus, they began to behave as if someone had drugged them. Nor were the three thousand Galatians optimistic. In fact, our progress was more like a funeral procession than a march into everlasting glory. Crassus himself traveled apart from the army, in a litter because the road was too rough for a carriage. To give him his due, I doubt that he was entirely well. Publius Crassus fussed about him perpetually. It is not easy for a man of sixty-three to campaign, especially one who has not been to war for almost twenty years.
Abgarus of the Skenite Arabs was not with us. He had gone ahead a month earlier. We were to meet him on the east bank of the Euphrates at Zeugma, which we reached at the end of the month. As this proves, a very leisurely march. At the beginning of winter the Euphrates is about as low and placid as it gets. I have never seen such a river! So wide and deep and strong! However, we should have had no difficulty crossing it on the bridge of pontoons the engineers put together, I must say, swiftly and efficiently.
But it was not to be, like so much else on this doomed expedition. Violent storms came roaring out of nowhere. Afraid that the river would rise, Crassus refused to postpone the crossing. So the soldiers crawled on all fours while the pontoons bucked and pitched, the lightning flashed thick as hawsers in a dozen places at once, the thunder set the horses screaming and bolting, and the air became suffused with a sulfurous yellow glow, along with a sweet strange scent I associate with the sea. It was horrifying. Nor did the storms let up. One after another for days. Rain so hard that the ground dissolved into soup, while the river kept rising higher and the crossing continued nonetheless.
You never saw a more disorganized force than ours was when everyone and everything were finally on the east bank. Nothing was dry, including the wheat and other food supplies in the baggage train. The ropes and springs in the artillery were swollen and flaccid, the charcoal for the smiths was useless, the tents may as well have been made from bridal fabric, and our precious store of fortification timber was split and cracked. Imagine if you can four thousand horses (Crassus refused to allow his troopers two mounts each), two thousand mules and several thousand oxen reduced to wild-eyed terror. It took two nundinae to calm them down, sixteen precious days which should have seen us well along the way to Mesopotamia. The legionaries were in little better condition than the animals. The expedition, they were saying among themselves, was cursed. Just as Crassus himself was cursed. They were all going to die.
But Abgarus arrived with his four thousand light-armed infantry and horse. We held a council of war. Censorinus, Vargunteius, Megabocchus and Octavius, four of Crassus’s five legates, wanted to follow the course of the Euphrates all the way. It was safer, there was grazing for the animals, and we’d pick up a bit more food as we went. I agreed with them, and was told for my pains that it was not the place of a mere quaestor to advise his seniors.
Abgarus was against hugging the Euphrates. In case you do not know, it takes a great bend westward below Zeugma, which would admittedly have added many, many miles to the march. From the confluence of the Bilechas and the Euphrates on downward into Mesopotamia its course is fairly straight and in the right direction, southeast.
Therefore, said Abgarus, we could save at least four or five days of marching if we headed due east from Zeugma across the desert until we came to the Bilechas River. A sharp turn south would then take us down the Bilechas to the Euphrates, and we’d be right where we wanted to be, at Nicephorium. With him as our guide, said Abgarus winningly, we couldn’t get lost, and the march through the desert was short enough to survive comfortably.
Well, Crassus agreed with Abgarus, and Publius Crassus agreed with tata. We would take the short cut across the desert. Again the four legates tried to persuade Crassus not to, but he wouldn’t be budged. He’d fortified Carrhae and Sinnaca, he said, and these forts were all the protection he needed—though he didn’t believe he needed any protection at all. Quite so, said friend King Abgarus. There would be no Parthians this far north.
But of course there were. Abgarus had made sure of that. Seleuceia-on-Tigris knew every move we made, and King Orodes was a better strategist by far than poor, money-mad Marcus Crassus.
I imagine, dearest Rome-bound Servilia, that you do not know a great deal about the Kingdom of the Parthians, so I should tell you that it is a vast conglomeration of regions. Parthia itself is to the east of the Caspian Sea, which is why we say the King of the Parthians, and not the King of Parthia. Under the sway of King Orodes are Media, Media Atropatene, Persia, Gedrosia, Carmania, Bactria, Margiana, Sogdiana, Susiana, Elymais and Mesopotamia. More land than is contained in the Roman provinces.
Each of these regions is ruled by a satrap who bears the title of the Surenas. Most of them are the sons, nephews, cousins, brothers or uncles of the King. The King never goes to Parthia itself; he reigns in summer from Ecbatana in the softer mountains of Media, visits Susa in the spring or the autumn, and reigns during winter from Seleuceia-on-Tigris in Mesopotamia. That he devotes his time to these most western regions of his huge kingdom is probably due to Rome. He fears us, whereas he does not fear the Indians or the Sericans, both great nations. He garr
isons Bactria to keep the Massagetae at bay, as they are tribes, not a nation.
It so happens that the Surenas of Mesopotamia is an extremely able satrap, and to him Orodes entrusted his campaign against Crassus. King Orodes himself journeyed north to meet with King Artavasdes of Armenia in the Armenian capital, Artaxata, taking enough troops with him to ensure that he was made very welcome in Artaxata. His son Pacorus went with him. The Pahlavi Surenas (for so he is properly called) remained in Mesopotamia to marshal a separate army to deal with us. He had ten thousand horse archers and two thousand mail-clad cataphracti. No foot at all.
An interesting man, the Pahlavi Surenas. Barely thirty years old—my own age—and a nephew of the King, he is said to be very, very beautiful in a most exquisite and effeminate way. He has no congress with women, preferring boys between thirteen and fifteen. Once they are too grown for his taste, he drafts them into his army or his bureaucracy as esteemed officers. This is acceptable Parthian conduct.
What worried him as he assembled his men was a fact well known to Crassus and the rest of us—a fact which, Abgarus assured us, would see us win comfortably. Namely that the Parthian horse archer runs out of arrows very quickly. Thus, despite his skill at shooting over his horse’s rump as he flees the field, he is soon useless.
The Pahlavi Surenas devised a scheme to rectify this. He marshaled enormous camel trains and loaded the camels’ panniers with spare arrows. He then got together some thousands of slaves and trained them in the art of getting fresh arrows to the archers in the midst of battle. So that when he set out north from Seleuceia-on-Tigris to intercept us with his horse archers and his cataphracti, he also took thousands of camels loaded with spare arrows, and thousands of slaves to feed the arrows to the archers in an endless chain.
How can I possibly know all this? I hear you ask. I will come to that in due time, but here I will simply say that I learned of it from a fascinating prince at the Jewish court, Antipater, whose spies and sources of information are absolutely everywhere.
There is a crossroads on the Bilechas where the caravan route from Palmyra and Nicephorium meets the caravan route to the upper Euphrates at Samosata and the one which goes through Carrhae to Edessa and Amida. It was for this junction that the army set out to march across the desert.
We had thirty-five thousand Roman foot, one thousand Aeduan horse and three thousand Galatian horse. They were terrified before they so much as started into the wilderness, and grew more terrified with each day that passed. All I had to do to ascertain this was to ride among them and listen with half an ear: Crassus was cursed, they were all going to die. Mutiny was never a risk, for mutinous troops are, to say the least, energetic. Our men were devoid of hope.
They simply shuffled on to meet their doom like captives going to the slave markets. The Aeduan cavalry were worst. Never in their lives had they seen a waterless waste, a dun drear landscape without shelter or beauty. They turned their eyes inward and ceased to care about anything.
Two days out, heading southeast for the Bilechas, we began to see small bands of Parthians, usually horse archers, sometimes cataphracti. Not that they bothered us. They would ride in fairly close, then spur off again. I know now that they were liaising with Abgarus and reporting back about us to the Pahlavi Surenas, who was camped outside Nicephorium, at the confluence of the Bilechas and the Euphrates.
On the fourth day before the Ides of June we reached the Bilechas, where I begged Marcus Crassus to build a strongly fortified camp and put the troops into it for long enough to enable the legates and tribunes to try to put some stiffening into them. But Crassus wouldn’t hear of it. He was fretful because we’d been on the march so long already; he wanted to reach the canals where the Euphrates and the Tigris almost marry before summer clamped down, and he was beginning to wonder if he was going to succeed. So he ordered the troops to take a quick meal and march on down the Bilechas. It was still early in the afternoon.
Suddenly I became aware that King Abgarus and his four thousand men had literally disappeared. Gone! Some Galatian scouts came galloping up, shouting that the countryside was swarming with Parthians, but they had barely managed to attract anyone’s attention when a storm of arrows came thrumming from every direction and the soldiers began falling like leaves, like stones—I have never seen anything as fast or as vicious as that hail of arrows.
Crassus didn’t do anything. He simply let it happen.
“It’ll be over in a moment,” he shouted from beneath a shelter of shields; “they’ll run out of arrows.”
They did not run out of arrows. There were Roman soldiers fleeing all over the place, and falling. Falling. Finally Crassus had the buglers blow “form square,” but it was far too late. The cataphracti moved in for the kill, huge men on huge horses dark with chain mail. I discovered that when they advance at a trot—they are too big and ponderous to move at a canter—they jingle like a million coins in a thousand purses. I wonder did Crassus find it music to his ears? The earth shakes as they pound along. The dust rises in a huge column, and they turn and tread it up around them so that they come out of it rather than ride ahead of it.
Publius Crassus gathered the Aeduan cavalry, who seemed suddenly to come to their senses. Perhaps a battle was the only familiar thing they had to cling to. The Galatians followed, and four thousand of our horsemen charged into the cataphracti like bulls with pepper up their nostrils. The cataphracti broke and fled, Publius Crassus and his horsemen behind them, into the dust fog. During this respite, Crassus managed to form his square. Then we waited for the Aeduans and the Galatians to reappear, praying to every God we knew. But it was the cataphracti who returned. They had Publius Crassus’s head on a spear. Instead of attacking our square, they trotted back and forth along its sides brandishing that awful head. Publius Crassus seemed to look at us; we could see his eyes flash, and his face was quite unmarred.
His father was devastated—there are no words to tell that story. But it seemed to give him something I had not seen him display since the campaign began. Up and down the square he went, cheering the men on, encouraging them to hold fast, telling them that his own son had purchased the precious moments they had needed with his life, but that the grief was Crassus’s alone.
“Stand!” he cried, over and over. “Stand!”
We stood, hideously thinned by the never-ending rain of arrows, until darkness fell and the Parthians drew off. They do not seem to fight at night.
Having built no camp, we had nothing to keep us there. Crassus elected to retreat at once to Carrhae, about forty miles away to the north. By dawn we began to arrive, straggling, perhaps half the infantry and a handful of horse troopers. Futile! Impossible. Carrhae owned a small fortress, but nothing capable of protecting so many men, so much disorder.
I daresay that Carrhae has stood there at the junction of the caravan routes to Edessa and Amida for two thousand years, and I daresay it hasn’t changed in those two thousand years. A pathetic little collection of beehive-shaped mud brick houses in the midst of a stony, desolate wilderness—dirty sheep, dirty goats, dirty women, dirty children, dirty river—great wheels of dried dung the only source of warmth in the bitter cold, the only glory the night skies.
The prefect Coponius was in command of the garrison, a scant cohort strong. As we dribbled in, more and more, he was horrified. We had no food because the Parthians had captured our baggage train; most of the men and horses were wounded. We couldn’t stay in Carrhae, so much was obvious.
Crassus held a council, and it was decided to retreat at nightfall to Sinnaca, as far away again northeast in the direction of Amida. It was much better fortified and had at least several granaries. The wrong direction entirely! I wanted to yell. But Coponius had brought a man of Carrhae to the council with him. Andromachus. And Andromachus swore huge oaths that the Parthians were lying in wait between Carrhae and Edessa, Carrhae and Samosata, Carrhae and anywhere along the Euphrates. Andromachus then offered to guide us to Sinnaca, and from t
here to Amida. Bent over with grief for Publius, Crassus accepted the offer. Oh, he was cursed! Whatever decision he made was the wrong one. Andromachus was the local Parthian spy.
I knew. I knew, I knew, I knew. As the day dragged on I became ever more firmly convinced that to go to Sinnaca under the guidance of Andromachus was to die. So I called my own council. Invited Crassus. He didn’t come. The others did—Censorinus, Megabocchus, Octavius, Vargunteius, Coponius, Egnatius. Plus a disgustingly dirty, tattered group of local soothsayers and magi; Coponius had been in this unspeakable anus of the world for long enough to have gathered them to him as flies gather on a putrescent carcass. I told those who came that they could do whatever they liked, but that as soon as night fell I was riding southwest for Syria, not northeast for Sinnaca. If the Parthians were lying in wait, I’d take my chances. But, I said, I refused to believe they were. No more Skenite guides for me!
Coponius demurred. So did the others. It was not fit or proper for the General’s legates, tribunes and prefects to abandon him. Nor for the General’s quaestor to abandon him. The only one who agreed with me was the prefect Egnatius.
No, they said, they would stand by Marcus Crassus.
I lost my temper—a Cassian flaw, I admit. “Then stay to die!” I shouted. “Those who would rather live had better find a horse in a hurry, because I’m riding for Syria and trusting to none but my own star!”
The soothsayers squawked and fluttered. “No, Gaius Cassius!” wheezed the most ancient of them, hung with amulets and rodent backbones and horrible agate eyes. “Go, yes, but not yet! The Moon is still in Scorpio! Wait for it to enter Sagittarius!”
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