Fortune's Favorites

by Colleen McCullough

  "We'll march down our coast to Buca, then head inland for Beneventum," he said to his three chief centurions, who were commanding his three legions. By rights these jobs should have gone to high-born military tribunes, whom he could have found had he tried. But high-born military tribunes would have questioned Pompey's right to general his army, so Pompey had preferred to choose his subordinates from among his own people, much though certain high-born Romans might have deplored it had they known.

  "When do we move?" asked Varro, since no one else would.

  "Eight days before the end of April," said Pompey.

  Then Carbo entered the scene, and Pompey had to change his plans yet again.

  From the western Alps the straight line of the Via Aemilia bisected Italian Gaul all the way to the Adriatic Sea at Ariminum; from Ariminum another excellent road skirted the coast to Fanum Fortunae, where began the Via Flaminia to Rome. This gave Ariminum a strategic importance only equaled by Arretium, which dominated access to Rome west of the Apennines.

  It was therefore logical that Gnaeus Papirius Carbo- twice consul of Rome and now governor of Italian Gaul- should put himself, his eight legions and his cavalry into camp on the fringes of Ariminum. From this base he could move in three directions: along the Via Aemilia through Italian Gaul toward the western Alps; along the Adriatic coast in the direction of Brundisium; and along the Via Flaminia to Rome.

  For eighteen months he had known Sulla would come, and that of course would be Brundisium. But too many men still lingered in Rome who might when the time came side with Sulla, though they declared themselves completely neutral; they were all men with the political clout to overthrow the present government, which made Rome a necessary target. And Carbo also knew that Metellus Pius the Piglet had gone to earth in Liguria, bordering the western Alps of Italian Gaul; with Metellus Pius were two good legions he had taken with him out of Africa Province after Carbo's adherents had ejected him from Africa. The moment the Piglet heard that Sulla had landed, Carbo was certain he would march to join Sulla, and that made Italian Gaul vulnerable too.

  Of course there were the sixteen legions sitting in Campania, and these were much closer to Brundisium than Carbo in Ariminum; but how reliable were the consuls of this year, Norbanus and Scipio Asiagenus? Carbo couldn't be sure, with his own iron will removed from Rome herself. At the end of last year he had been convinced of two things: that Sulla would come in the spring, and that Rome would be more inclined to oppose Sulla if Carbo himself were absent from Rome. So he had ensured the election of two staunch followers in Norbanus and Scipio Asiagenus and then given himself the governorship of Italian Gaul in order to keep an eye on things and be in a position to act the moment it became necessary. His choice of consuls had been-in theory anyway-good, for neither Norbanus nor Scipio Asiagenus could hope for mercy from Sulla. Norbanus was a client of Gaius Marius's, and Scipio Asiagenus had disguised himself as a slave to escape from Aesernia during the Italian War, an action which had disgusted Sulla. Yet were they strong enough? Would they use their sixteen legions like born generals, or would they miss their chances? Carbo just didn't know.

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  On one thing he had not counted. That Pompey Strabo's heir, mere boy that he was, would have the audacity to raise three full legions of his father's veterans and march them to join Sulla! Not that Carbo took the young man seriously. It was those three legions of veterans that worried Carbo. Once they reached Sulla, Sulla would use them brilliantly.

  It was Carbo's quaestor, the excellent Gaius Verres, who had brought the news to Carbo of Pompey's projected expedition.

  "The boy will have to be stopped before he can start," said Carbo, frowning. "Oh, what a nuisance! I'll just have to hope that Metellus Pius doesn't move out of Liguria while I'm dealing with young Pompeius, and that the consuls can cope with Sulla."

  "It won't take long to deal with young Pompeius," said Gaius Verres, tone confident.

  "I agree, but that doesn't make him less of a nuisance," said Carbo. "Send my legates to me now, would you?"

  Carbo's legates proved difficult to locate; Verres chased from one part of the gigantic camp to another for a length of time he knew would not please Carbo. Many things occupied his mind while he searched, none of them related to the activities of Pompey Strabo's heir, young Pompeius. No, what preyed upon the mind of Gaius Verres was Sulla. Though he had never met Sulla (there was no reason why he ought, since his father was a humble backbencher senator, and his own service during the Italian War had been with Gaius Marius and then Cinna), he remembered the look of Sulla as he had walked in the procession going to his inauguration as consul, and had been profoundly impressed. As he was not martial by nature, it had never occurred to Verres to join Sulla's expedition to the east, nor had he found the Rome of Cinna and Carbo an unendurable place. Verres liked to be where the money was, for he had expensive tastes in art and very high ambitions. Yet now, as he chased Carbo's senior legates, he was beginning to wonder if it might not be time to change sides.

  Strictly speaking, Gaius Verres was proquaestor rather than quaestor; his official stint as quaestor had ended with the old year. That he was still in the job was due to Carbo, whose personal appointee he had been, and who declared himself so well satisfied that he wanted Verres with him when he went to govern Italian Gaul. And as the quaestor's function was to handle his superior's money and accounts, Gaius Verres had applied to the Treasury and received on Carbo's behalf the sum of 2,235,417 sesterces; this stipend, totted up with due attention to every last sestertius (witness those 417 of them!), was intended to cover Carbo's expenses-to pay his legions, victual his legions, assure a proper life-style for himself, his legates, his servants and his quaestor, and defray the cost of a thousand and one minor items not able to be classified under any of the above.

  Though April was not yet done, something over a million and a half sesterces had already been swallowed up, which meant that Carbo would have to ask the Treasury for more before too long. His legates lived extremely well, and Carbo himself had long grown used to having Rome's public resources at his fingertips. Not to mention Gaius Verres; he too had stickied his hands in a pot of honey before dipping them deeply into the moneybags. Until now he had kept his peculations unobtrusive, but, he decided with fresh insight into his present position, there was no point in being subtle any longer! As soon as Carbo's back was turned to deal with Pompey's three legions, Gaius Verres would be gone. Time to change sides.

  And so indeed Gaius Verres went. Carbo took four of his legions-but no cavalry-the following dawn to deal with Pompey Strabo's heir, and the sun was not very high when Gaius Verres too departed. He was quite alone save for his own servants, and he did not follow Carbo south; he went to Ariminum, where Carbo's funds lay in the vaults of a local banker. Only two persons had the authority to withdraw it: the governor, Carbo, and his quaestor, Verres. Having hired twelve mules, Verres removed a total of forty-eight half-talent leather bags of Carbo's money from the banker's custody, and loaded them upon his mules. He did not even have to offer an excuse; word of Sulla's landing had already flown around Ariminum faster than a summer storm, and the banker knew Carbo was on the march with half his infantry.

  Long before noon, Gaius Verres had escaped the neighborhood with six hundred thousand sesterces of Carbo's official allowance, bound via the back roads first for his own estates in the upper Tiber valley, and then-the lighter of twenty-four talents of silver coins-for wherever he might find Sulla.

  Oblivious to the fact that his quaestor had decamped, Carbo himself went down the Adriatic coast toward Pompey's position near the Aesis. His mood was so sanguine that he did not move with speed, nor did he take special precautions to conceal his advent. This was going to be a good exercise for his largely unblooded troops, nothing more. No matter how formidable three legions of Pompey Strabo's veterans might sound, Carbo was quite experienced enough to understand that no army can do better than its general permits it to. Their general
was a kid! To deal with them would therefore be child's play.

  When word of Carbo's approach was brought to him, Pompey whooped with joy and assembled his soldiers at once.

  "We don't even have to move from our own lands to fight our first battle!" he shouted to them. "Carbo himself is coming down from Ariminum to deal with us, and he's already lost the fight! Why? Because he knows I'm in command! You, he respects. Me, he doesn't. You'd think he'd realize The Butcher's son would know how to chop up bones and slice meat, but Carbo is a fool! He thinks The Butcher's son is too pretty and precious to bloody his hands at his father's trade! Well, he's wrong! You know that, and I know that. So let's teach it to Carbo!"

  Teach it to Carbo they did. His four legions came down to the Aesis in a fashion orderly enough, and waited in disciplined ranks for the scouts to test the river crossing, swollen from the spring thaw in the Apennines. Not far beyond the ford, Carbo knew Pompey still lay in his camp, but such was his contempt that it never occurred to him Pompey might be in his own vicinity.

  Having split his forces and sent half across the Aesis well before Carbo arrived, Pompey fell on Carbo at the moment when two of his legions had made the crossing, and two were about to do so. Both jaws of his pincer attacked simultaneously from out of some trees on either bank, and carried all before them. They fought to prove a point-that The Butcher's son knew his trade even better than his father had. Doomed by his role as the general to remain on the south bank of the river, Pompey couldn't do what he most yearned to do-go after Carbo in person. Generals, his father had told him many times, must never put the base camp out of reach in case the battle didn't develop as planned and a swift retreat became necessary. So Pompey had to watch Carbo and his legate Lucius Quinctius rally the two legions left on their bank of the Aesis, and flee back toward Ariminum. Of those on Pompey's bank, none survived. The Butcher's son did indeed know the family trade, and crowed jubilantly.

  Now it was time to march for Sulla!

  Two days later, riding a big white horse which he said was the Pompeius family's Public Horse–so called because the State provided it-Pompey led his three legions into lands fiercely anti-Rome a few short years earlier. Picentines of the south, Vestini, Marrucini, Frentani, all peoples who had struggled to free the Italian Allied states from their long subjection to Rome. That they had lost was largely due to the man Pompey marched to join-Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Yet no one tried to impede the army's progress, and some in fact came asking to enlist. Word of his defeat of Carbo had outstripped Pompey, and they were martial peoples. If the fight for Italia was lost, there were other causes; the general feeling seemed to be that it was better to side with Sulla than with Carbo.

  Everyone's spirits were high as the little army left the coast at Buca and headed on a fairly good road for Larinum in central Apulia. Two eight-day market intervals had gone by when Pompey's eighteen thousand veteran soldiers reached it, a thriving small city in the midst of rich agricultural and pastoral country; no one of importance in Larinum was missing from the delegation which welcomed Pompey-and sped him onward with subtle pressure.

  His next battle lay not three miles beyond the town. Carbo had wasted no time in sending a warning to Rome about The Butcher's son and his three legions of veterans, and Rome had wasted no time in seeking to prevent amalgamation between Pompey and Sulla. Two of the Campanian legions under the command of Gaius Albius Carrinas were dispatched to block Pompey's progress, and encountered Pompey while both sides were on the march. The engagement was sharp, vicious, and quite decisive; Carrinas stayed only long enough to see that he stood no chance to win, then beat a hasty retreat with his men reasonably intact-and greater respect for The Butcher's son.

  By this time Pompey's soldiers were so settled and secure that the miles swung by under their hobnailed, thick-soled caligae as if no effort was involved; they had passed into their third hundred of these miles with no more than a mouthful or two of sour weak wine to mark the event. Saepinum was reached, a smaller place than Larinum, and Pompey had news that Sulla was now not far away, camped outside Beneventum on the Via Appia.

  But first another battle had to be fought. Lucius Junius Brutus Damasippus, brother of Pompey Strabo's old friend and senior legate, tried to ambush the son in a small section of rugged country between Saepinum and Sirpium. Pompey's overweening confidence in his ability seemed not to be misplaced; his scouts discovered where Brutus Damasippus and his two legions were concealed, and it was Pompey who fell upon Brutus Damasippus without warning. Several hundred of Brutus Damasippus's men died before he managed to extricate himself from a difficult position, and fled in the direction of Bovianum.

  After none of his three battles had Pompey attempted to pursue his foes, but not for the reasons men like Varro and the three primus pilus centurions assumed; the facts that he didn't know the lay of the land, nor could be sure that these were not diversions aimed at luring him into the arms of a far bigger force, did not so much as intrude into Pompey's thoughts. For Pompey's mind was obsessed to the exclusion of all else with the coming meeting between himself and Lucius Cornelius Sulla.

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  Visions of it unrolled before his sightless dreaming eyes like a moving pageant-two godlike men with hair of flame and faces both strong and beautiful uncoiled from their saddles with the grace and power of giant cats and walked with measured stately steps toward each other down the middle of an empty road, its sides thronged with every traveler and every last inhabitant of the countryside, an army behind each of these magnificent men, and every pair of eyes riveted upon them. Zeus striding to meet Jupiter. Ares striding to meet Mars. Hercules striding to meet Milo. Achilles striding to meet Hector. Yes, it would be hymned down the ages so loudly that it would put Aeneas and Turnus to shame! The first encounter between the two colossi of this world, the two suns in its sky-and while the setting sun was still hot and still strong, its course was nearing an end. Ah! But the rising sun! Hot and strong already, yet with all the soaring vault before it in which to grow ever hotter, ever stronger. Thought Pompey exultantly, Sulla's sun is westering! Whereas mine is barely above the eastern horizon.

  He sent Varro ahead to present his compliments to Sulla and to give Sulla an account of his progress from Auximum, the tally of those he had killed, the names of the generals he had defeated. And to ask that Sulla himself venture down the road to meet him so that everyone could witness his coming in peace to offer himself and his troops to the greatest man of this age. He didn't ask Varro to add, "or of any other age"- that he was not prepared to admit, even in a flowery greeting.

  Every detail of this meeting had been fantasized a thousand times, even down to what Pompey felt he ought to wear. In the first few hundred passes he had seen himself clad from head to foot in gold plate; then doubt began to gnaw, and he decided golden armor was too ostentatious, might be labeled crass. So for the next few hundred passes he saw himself clad in a plain white toga, shorn of all military connotations and with the narrow purple stripe of the knight slicing down the right shoulder of his tunic; then doubt gnawed again, and he worried that the white toga would merge into the white horse to produce an amorphous blob. The final few hundred passes saw him in the silver armor his father had presented to him after the siege of Asculum Picentum had concluded; doubt did not gnaw at all, so he liked that image of self best.

  Yet when his groom assisted him into the saddle of his big white Public Horse, Gnaeus Pompeius (Magnus) was wearing the very plainest of steel cuirasses, the leather straps of his kilt were unadorned by bosses or fringes, and the helmet on his head was standard issue to the ranks. It was his horse he bedizened, for he was a knight of the eighteen original centuries of the First Class, and his family had held the Public Horse for generations. So the horse wore every conceivable knightly trapping of silver buttons and medallions, silver-encrusted scarlet leather harness, an embroidered blanket beneath a wrought and ornamented saddle, a clinking medley of silver pendants. He looked, Pompey cong
ratulated himself as he set off down the middle of the empty road with his army in rank and file behind him, like a genuine no-nonsense soldier-a workman, a professional. Let the horse proclaim his glory!

  Beneventum lay on the far side of the Calor River, where the Via Appia made junction with the Via Minucia from coastal Apulia and Calabria. The sun was directly overhead when Pompey and his legions came over the brow of a slight hill and looked down to the Calor crossing. And there on this side of it, waiting in the middle of the road upon an unutterably weary mule, was Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Attended only by Varro. The local populace!-where were they? Where were Sulla's legates, his troops? Where the travelers?

  Some instinct made Pompey turn his head and bark to the standard-bearer of his leading legion that the soldiers would halt, remain where they were. Then, hideously alone, he rode down the slope toward Sulla, his face set into a mask so solid he felt as if he had dipped it in plaster. When he came within a hundred paces of the mule, Sulla more or less fell off it, though he kept his feet because he threw one arm around the mule's neck and fastened his other hand upon the mule's long bedraggled ear. Righting himself, he began to walk down the middle of the empty road, his gait as wide-based as any sailor's.

  Down from his clinking Public Horse leaped Pompey, not sure if his legs would hold him; but they did. Let one of us at least do this properly, he thought, and strode out.

  Even at a distance he had realized that this Sulla bore absolutely no resemblance to the Sulla he remembered, but as he drew ever closer, Pompey began to discern the ravages of time and awful malaise. Not with sympathy or pity, but with stupefied horror, a physical reaction so profound that for a moment he thought he would vomit.