Fortune's Favorites

by Colleen McCullough

  Perhaps seventy men were gathered around him as he stood on a small box to give him sufficient height to see everyone; the cohort centurions were there as well as the officers. His frowning gaze rested upon Caesar and the pilus prior centurion who commanded that cohort of rebels he had originally intended as arrow fodder. Lucullus had no trouble in remembering the name of the pilus prior–Marcus Silius–an aggressive, ill-mannered upstart who was always the ringleader of the deputations the men of the Fimbriani sent regularly to petition him. This was no time to exact revenge; what he needed was to make a decision based firmly in good sense. And what he had to decide was whether this cohort ought to form the spearhead of that central peak-a cohort sure to die almost to its last man-or be buried at the back of one of the two crescent curves where it could do little save form a reinforcement. He made up his mind.

  "Caesar and Silius-you will take your cohort to the head of the peak and drive toward the gate. Once you reach the gate, hold your ground no matter what they throw at you." And he went on to make the rest of his dispositions.

  "The gods help me, that cunnus Lucullus has given me a pretty baby to lead us," growled Silius to Caesar out of the side of his mouth as they waited for Lucullus to end.

  From a seasoned centurion Caesar took the slur without so much as a flicker of irritation. Instead, he laughed. "Would you rather be led by a pretty baby who sat at Gaius Marius's knee for two years hearing how to fight, or by some ostensibly skilled legate who doesn't know his military arse from his military elbow?"

  Gaius Marius! That was the one name echoed in the heart of every Roman soldier like a joy-bell. The gaze Marcus Silius bent upon his commander was searching, even a little mollified. "And what was you to Gaius Marius?" he asked.

  "He was my uncle. And he believed in me," said Caesar.

  "But this is your first campaign-and your first battle!" Silius objected.

  "Know everything, Silius, don't you? Then you'd better add this. I won't let you or your men down. But if you let me down, I'll have the lot of you flogged," said Caesar.

  "You got a deal," said Silius promptly, and slipped off to tell his junior centurions what to do.

  Lucullus was not the kind of general who wasted time. The moment his officers knew what was expected of them and had put their men into formation, he sounded the advance. It was clear to him that the enemy had no actual plan of battle, for they simply waited in a huge mass spread along the ground under their walls, and when the Roman army began to walk, made no attempt to charge it. They would take its assault on their shields and then fight. Their numbers, they were sure, would win the day.

  As shrewd as he was truculent, Silius spread the word from one end of his six hundred men to the other: their commander was a pretty baby who also happened to be Gaius Marius's nephew-and Gaius Marius had believed in him.

  Caesar walked alone in front of the standard, his big rectangular shield on his left arm, his sword still in its metal scabbard; Marius had told him that it must not be drawn until the last moment before the enemy was engaged, because,

  "You can't afford to look down at the ground, whether you're advancing at a run or a walk," he had mumbled out of the unparalyzed corner of his mouth. "If you're carrying the thing unsheathed in your right hand and you stumble into a hole or trip over a rock, you'll end in wounding yourself."

  Caesar was not afraid, even in the most secret corner of himself, and it never occurred to him for one moment that he might be killed. Then he became aware that his men were singing:

  "We-are-the Fim-bri-ani!

  Be-ware-the Fim-bri-ani!

  We-trapped-the King-of-Pontus!

  We-are-the best-there-is!''

  Fascinating, mused Caesar as the waiting hordes of Mitylene came closer and closer. It must be four years since Fimbria died, four years in which they've fought for two Licinii, Murena and then Lucullus. He was a wolfshead, Fimbria. But they still think of themselves as his men. They are not- and I suspect they never will be-the Liciniani. How they felt about Murena, I don't know. But they loathe Lucullus! Well, who doesn't? He's such a stiff-rumped aristocrat. And he doesn't believe it's useful to have his soldiers love him. How wrong he is.

  At exactly the correct moment Caesar signaled the bugler to play "launch spears," and kept cool enough not to duck when over a thousand of them whistled above his head in two volleys which sorely distressed and unsettled the men of Mitylene. Now follow up!

  He drew his sword and flashed it in the air, heard the peculiar scrape of six hundred swords being pulled out of their sheaths, and then he walked calmly into the enemy like a senator into a Forum crowd, shield round and not a thought in his head for what was happening at his back. Short, double-edged and razor-sharp, the gladius was not a weapon to swing about one's head and slash downward; Caesar used it as it was meant to be used, held at groin level with its blade a hypotenuse and its wicked point upward, outward. Stab and thrust, thrust and stab.

  The enemy didn't like this form of attack, aimed at precious loins, and the cohort of Fimbriani troublemakers just kept on advancing, which gave the men of Mitylene scant room to wield their longer swords above their heads. Shock hurled them back, the pressure of the Romans kept them back for long enough to see Lucullus's peak at the hollow middle of his crescent bury itself deep in the enemy ranks.

  After that they took courage and stood to fight by any means they could, all haters of Rome, and determined to die before their beloved Mitylene would fall once more into Roman hands.

  A big part of it, Caesar soon discovered, was bluff. When a man came at you, you displayed no terror nor gave ground; for if you did, you lost the encounter mentally and your chances of dying were far greater. Attack, attack, always attack. Look invincible, then it was the enemy soldiers who gave ground. He reveled in it, blessed with fine reflexes and a phenomenally accurate eye, and for a long time he fought on without pausing to think what was happening behind him.

  Then, he discovered, there was room even in the hottest contest for intelligence; he was the cohort's commander, and he had almost forgotten its existence. But how to turn about and see what was going on without being cut down? How to gain a vantage spot from which he could assess the situation? His arm was tiring a little, though the low sword stance and the light weight of the sword staved off the kind of fatigue the enemy were obviously suffering as they waved their far heavier weapons around; their swings were becoming progressively wilder and their slashes less enthusiastic.

  A heap of enemy dead lay to one side of where he stood, pushed there by the eddying movements of those who still lived and fought. Caesar put everything he had into a sudden flurry of aggression and seized the opportunity this gave him to spring up onto the mound of bodies. His legs were vulnerable, but nothing higher, and the pile was wide enough once he gained its summit to turn around without guarding his legs.

  A cheer went up from his men when they saw him, and that gladdened him. But he could see that his cohort was now cut off; Lucullus's spearhead had done its work, yet had not been backed up strongly enough. We are an island in the midst of enemy, he thought. Thanks to Lucullus. But we will stand, and we will not die! Coming down in a series of savage leaps which confused the enemy, he ranged himself beside Marcus Silius, soldiering on.

  "We're cut off-blow 'form square,' " he said to the cohort bugler, who fought alongside the standard-bearer.

  It was done with formidable precision and speed-oh, these were good troops! Caesar and Silius worked their way inside the square and went around its perimeter cheering the men on and seeing that any weak spots were strengthened.

  "If only I had my mule, I could find out what was going on all over the field," said Caesar to Silius, "but junior military tribunes in charge of mere cohorts don't ride. That's a mistake."

  "Easy fixed!" said Silius, who now looked at Caesar with great respect. He whistled up a dozen reserves standing nearby. "We'll build you a tribunal out of men and shields."

  A short tim
e later Caesar was standing at full stretch on top of four men who held their shields over their heads, having attained this lofty height by a series of human steps.

  "Watch out for enemy spears!" shouted Silius to him.

  It now became apparent that the outcome of the battle was still hotly disputed, but that Lucullus's tactics were basically sound; the enemy looked as if it might find itself rolled up by the Roman wings, closing inexorably.

  "Give me our standard!" Caesar yelled, caught it when the bearer flung it into the air, and waved it on high in the direction of Lucullus, clearly visible on a white horse. “There, that should at least inform the general that we're alive and holding our ground as ordered," he said to Silius when he jumped down, having given two thwarted spearmen a rude gesture with his hand as he did so. "My thanks for providing the tribunal. Hard to know who'll win."

  Not long after that the men of Mitylene launched an all-out offensive on Caesar's square.

  "We'll never hold," said Silius.

  "We'll hold, Silius! Squeeze everybody up as tight as a fish's anus," said Caesar. "Come on, Silius, do it!"

  He forced his way to where the brunt of the attack was falling, Silius with him, and there laid about left and right, sensing the enemy's desperation. This marooned cohort of Romans must die to serve as an example to the rest of the field. Someone loomed beside him; Caesar heard Silius gasp, and saw the saber coming down. How he managed to fend his own opponent off with his shield and deflect the blow which would have cleaved Silius's head in two, Caesar never afterward understood-only that he did it, and then killed the man with his dagger, though that arm still carried his shield.

  The incident seemed to form a kind of watershed, for after it the cohort slowly found the enemy pressure lessening, and was able some time later to continue its advance. The barred gate was reached; in its shelter the Fimbriani turned to face the far-distant Roman wall, exultant-nothing would dislodge them now!

  Nothing did. At about an hour before sunset Mitylene gave up the fight, leaving thirty thousand dead soldiers upon the field, mostly old men and little boys. Mercilessly just, Lucullus then executed every woman of Lesbos in the Roman camp, while at the same time he allowed the women of Mitylene to visit the shambles of the battlefield to gather in their dead for proper burial.

  It took, Caesar learned, a full month to tidy up the aftermath of battle, and was harder work than preparing for the fray. His cohort-with whom he now associated himself at all times-had decided that he was worthy of Gaius Marius's favor (of course he didn't tell them that Gaius Marius's favor had manifested itself in the form of a flaminate), and that it was Caesar's to command. Several days before the ceremony at which the general, Lucullus, and the governor, Thermus, awarded military decorations to those who had earned them, the pilus prior centurion Marcus Silius had gone to Lucullus and Thermus and formally sworn that Caesar had personally saved his life in battle, then held the ground on which it happened until after the contest was over; he also swore that it was Caesar who saved the cohort from certain death.

  "If it had been a full legion you would have won the Grass Crown," said Thermus as he fitted the chaplet of oak leaves on Caesar's big golden head by pulling its open ends further apart, "but as only a cohort was involved, the best Rome can do is to give you the corona civica." After a moment's thought, he went on to say, "You realize, Gaius Julius, that winning the Civic Crown automatically promotes you to the Senate, and entitles you to other distinctions under the Republic's new laws. It would certainly seem that Jupiter Optimus Maximus is determined to have you in the Senate! The seat you lost when you ceased to be the flamen Dialis is now returned to you."

  Caesar was the only man at the battle of Mitylene so honored, and his the only cohort given phalerae to adorn its vexillum; Marcus Silius was awarded a full set of nine golden phalerae, which he proudly strapped on the front of his leather cuirass. He already had nine silver phalerae (now switched to adorn the back of his cuirass), five broad silver armillae, and two gold torcs suspended from his front shoulder straps.

  "I'll give Sulla this," said Silius to Caesar as they stood together among the other decorated soldiers on the tribunal while the army saluted them, "he may have denied us the chance to go home, but he was too fair a man to take our decorations off us." He eyed Caesar's oak leaf chaplet admiringly. "You're a real soldier, pretty baby," he said. "I never saw a better."

  And that, said Caesar to himself afterward, was worthier praise than all the platitudes and congratulations Lucullus and Thermus and the legates heaped upon him during the banquet they gave in his honor. Gabinius, Octavius, Lippus and Rufus were very pleased for him, and the two Lentuli very quiet. Bibulus, who was not a coward but had not won anything because he had done routine messenger service throughout the battle, could not stay quiet.

  "I might have known it," he said bitterly. "You did not one thing any of us could not have done, were we lucky enough to have found ourselves in the same situation. But you, Caesar, have all the luck. In every way."

  Caesar laughed merrily as he chucked Bibulus under the chin, a habit he had fallen into; it was Gabinius who protested.

  "That is to deny a man the proper merit of his actions," he said angrily. "Caesar shamed every last one of us with the amount of work he did during the winter, and he shamed every last one of us on the battlefield by doing more hard work! Luck? Luck, you small-minded, envious fool, had nothing to do with it!"

  "Oh, Gabinius, you shouldn't let him irk you," said Caesar, who could afford to be gracious-and knew it annoyed Bibulus almost to a fit of tears. "There is always an element of luck. Special luck! It's a sign of Fortune's favor, so it only belongs to men of superior ability. Sulla has luck. He's the first one to say it. But you wait and see! Caesar's luck will become proverbial."

  "And Bibulus's nonexistent," said Gabinius more calmly.

  "Probably," said Caesar, his tone indicating that this was a matter which neither interested nor provoked him.

  Thermus, Lucullus, their legates, officials and tribunes returned to Rome at the end of June. The new governor of Asia Province, Gaius Claudius Nero, had arrived in Pergamum and taken over, and Sulla had given Lucullus permission to come home, at the same time informing him that he and his brother, Varro Lucullus, would be curule aediles the next year.

  "By the time you come home," ended Sulla's letter, "your election as curule aedile will be over. Please excuse me from the role of matchmaker-I seem not to have my usual luck in that particular area. You will by now have heard that Pompeius's new wife has died. Besides, if your taste runs to little girls, my dear Lucullus, then you're better off doing your own dirty work. Sooner or later you'll find some impoverished nobleman willing to sell you his underaged daughter. But what happens when she grows up a bit? They all do!"

  It was Marcus Valerius Messala Rufus who arrived in Rome to find a marriage in the making. His sister-of whom he was very fond-had, as he knew from her tear-stained letters, been summarily divorced by her husband. Though she continued to vow that she loved him with every breath she took, the divorce made it plain that he did not love her at all. Why, no one understood. Valeria Messala was beautiful, intelligent, well educated and not boring in any way; she didn't gossip, she wasn't spendthrift, nor did she ogle other men.

  One of the city's wealthiest plutocrats died late in June, and his two sons put on splendid funeral games to his memory in the Forum Romanum. Twenty pairs of gladiators clad in ornamental silver were to fight; not one after the other, as was customary, but in two conflicts of ten pairs each-a Thracian pitted against a Gaul. These were styles, not nationalities-the only two styles practiced at that time-and the soldiers of the sawdust had been hired from the best gladiatorial school in Capua. Pining for a little diversion, Sulla was eager to go, so the brothers mourning their dead father were careful to install a comfortable enclosure in the middle of the front row facing north wherein the Dictator could dispose himself without being crushed up against people on either
side.

  Nothing in the mos maiorum prevented women from attending, nor from sitting among the men; funeral games were held to be a kind of circus, rather than a theatrical performance. And her cousin Marcus Valerius Messala Niger, fresh from his triumph of having engaged Cicero to defend Roscius of Ameria, thought that it might cheer poor divorced Valeria Messala up if he took her to see the gladiators fight.

  Sulla was already ensconced in his place of honor when the cousins arrived, and the seating was almost filled; the first ten pairs of men were already in the sawdust-cushioned ring, going through their exercises and flexing their muscles as they waited for the bereaved brothers to decide the games should start with the prayers and the sacrifice carefully chosen to please the dead man. But at such affairs it was very useful to have highborn friends, and especially to have an aunt who was both an ex-Vestal and the daughter of Metellus Balearicus. Sitting with her brother, Metellus Nepos, his wife, Licinia, and their cousin Metellus Pius the Piglet (who was consul that year, and hugely important), the ex-Vestal Caecilia Metella Balearica had saved two seats which no one quite had the courage to usurp.

  In order to reach them, Messala Niger and Valeria Messala had to work their way past those already sitting in the second row, and therefore directly behind the Dictator. He was, everyone noted, looking rested and well, perhaps because Cicero's tact and skill had enabled him to quash a great deal of lingering feeling about the proscriptions-and eliminate a problem-by throwing Chrysogonus off the Tarpeian Rock. All of the Forum was thronged, the ordinary people perched on every roof and flight of steps, and those with clout in the wooden bleachers surrounding the ring, a roped-off square some forty feet along a side.