The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  The towers and the earthworks went up in the proper Roman manner, and the various pieces of artillery were wheeled into position; ballistas and catapults rained missiles of all kinds except blazing bundles—the city had to fall intact. Then the three rams arrived, the last items hauled along the new road. They were made of seasoned oak swung on thick yet supple ropes attached to a portable framework that was rapidly assembled, each fronted by a great bronze ram’s head, beautifully fashioned from curled horns to sneering lips to menacing, half-closed eyes.

  There were only three gates in the walls, ram-proof because they were mighty openwork portcullises of oak plated with very heavy iron; when pounded, they bounced like springs. Undeterred, Brutus put the rams to work on the walls themselves, which had not the tensile strength to resist, and slowly began to crumble. Too slowly, for they were very thick.

  When Allienus and Drusus Nero judged that the Xanthians felt threatened enough to become desperate, Brutus withdrew his forces as if tired of trying, apparently off to see what he could do to Patara. Armed with torches, a thousand beleaguered men streamed out of Xanthus intent upon burning the artillery and siege towers. The lurking Brutus pounced and the Xanthians fled, only to find themselves shut out of the city because the prudent gate guards had lowered the portcullises. All thousand raiders perished.

  Next day at noon the Xanthians tried again, this time making sure their gates remained open. Beating a hasty retreat as soon as the torches were thrown, they discovered that the portcullis machinery was far too slow; the Romans, in hot pursuit, poured inside until the gate operators chopped through the hoist ropes and the portcullises crashed down. Those beneath died instantly, but two thousand Roman legionaries had managed to get inside. They didn’t panic. Instead, they formed up into tortoises and migrated to the main square, there to take refuge in the temple of Sarpedon, which they barred and defended.

  The sight of those falling portcullises had a profound effect on the besiegers. Legionary camaraderie was very powerful; the thought of two thousand of their fellows trapped inside Xanthus moved Brutus’s army to anguished madness. A level-headed, cool madness.

  “They will have banded together and sought shelter,” said Allienus to an assemblage of senior centurions, “so we’ll assume that for the time being they’re safe enough. What we have to do is work out how to get inside and rescue them.”

  “Not the portcullises,” said primipilus Malleus. “The rams are useless, and we’ve nothing to cut through that iron plate.”

  “Still, we can make it look as if we think we can break them down,” Allienus said. “Lanius, start.” He raised his brows. “Any other ideas?”

  “Ladders and grapples everywhere. They can’t man every inch of the walls with pots of hot oil, and they don’t have enough siege spears, the fools. We’ll probe for weak spots,” said Sudis.

  “Get it done. What else?”

  “Try to find some locals left outside the walls and—um—ask them nicely if there are any other ways to get in,” said the pilus prior Callum.

  “Now you’re talking!” said Allienus with a grin.

  Shortly afterward Callum’s party came back with two men from a nearby hamlet. It didn’t prove necessary to be nice to them; they were furiously angry because the Xanthians had burned their market gardens and orchards.

  “See there?” asked one, pointing.

  A main reason why Xanthus’s bastions were so impregnable lay in the fact that the back third of the city had been built flush against the crags of a cliff.

  “I see, but I don’t see,” said Allienus.

  “The cliff isn’t half as bad as it looks. We can show you a dozen snake paths that will put you among the outcrops on the cliff face. That isn’t getting inside, I know, but it’s a start for you clever chaps. You won’t find any patrols, though you’ll find defenses.” The orchardist spat. “Cocksucking shits that they are, they burned our apples in flower, and all our cabbages and lettuces. All we got left are onions and parsnips.”

  “Rest assured, friend, that when we’ve taken the place, your village will get first pick of whatever’s in there,” said Callum. “Edible, I mean.” He shaded his brow beneath the helmet with its immense sideways ruff of scarlet horsehair and tapped his thigh with his vine staff. “Right, all the limber ones for this. Macro, Pontius, Cafo, your legions are young, but I don’t want any ninnies that get dizzy on heights. Go on, move!”

  By noon the cliff swarmed with soldiers, high enough to look down over the walls and see what awaited them inside: a dense palisade of spikes many feet wide. Some of the men produced iron pegs and hammered them into the rock, then tied long ropes to them that dangled over a concave section of precipice; a man would grasp the end of the rope, his fellows would start pushing him as a father pushed a child on a swing, until momentum had him soaring over the deadly palisade to drop beyond it on to paving.

  All afternoon soldiers penetrated the back defenses in dribs and drabs, forming into a tight square. When enough men had made it, the men split into two squares and fought their way to the two gates most convenient for the army waiting outside, and went to work on the portcullises with saws, axes, wedges and hammers; the inside faces had not been reinforced with iron plates. Hacking and hewing in a frenzy, they got through the oak in a superbly organized assault on the top and both sides of the portcullis until the iron outside was bared. Then they took long crowbars and twisted the plates until the whole portcullis tumbled to lie on the ground. The army cheered deafeningly, and charged.

  But the Xanthians had a tradition to uphold, and did. The streets were full of pyres, so were the light wells of every insula and the peri-styles of all the houses. The men killed their women and children, threw them on to the wood, set fire to it and climbed on top to finish themselves with the same bloody knives.

  All of Xanthus went up in flames, not one square foot of it was spared. The soldiers marooned in Sarpedon’s temple managed to carry out what valuables they could, and other groups did the same, but Brutus ended in obtaining less from Xanthus than the siege had cost him in time, food, lives. Determined that his Lycian campaign wasn’t going to begin in utter ignominy, he waited until the fires died out and had his men comb every inch of the charred wreckage for melted gold and silver.

  He did better at Patara, which defied the Romans when the artillery and siege equipment first appeared, but it had no suicidal tradition like Xanthus, and eventually surrendered without the pain of undergoing protracted siege. The city turned out to be very rich, and yielded fifty thousand men, women and children for sale into slavery.

  The appetite of the world for slaves was insatiable, for, as the saying went, you either owned slaves, or were slaves. No people anywhere disapproved of slavery, which varied from place to place and people to people. A Roman domestic slave was paid a wage and was usually freed within ten or fifteen years, whereas a Roman mine or quarry slave was worked to death within one year. Slavery too had its social gradations: if you were an ambitious Greek with a skill, you sold yourself into slavery to a Roman master knowing you would prosper, and end a Roman citizen; if you were a hulking German or some other barbarian defeated and captured in battle, you went to the mines or quarries and died. But by far the largest market for slaves was the Kingdom of the Parthians, an empire larger than the world of Our Sea plus the Gauls. King Orodes was eager to take as many slaves as Brutus could send him, for the Lycians were educated, Hellenized, skilled in many crafts, and a handsome people whose women and girl children would be popular. His majesty paid in hard cash through his own dealers, who followed Brutus’s army in their own fleet of ships like vultures the depredations of a barbarian horde on the move.

  Between Patara and Myra, the next port of call, lay fully fifty miles of the same gorgeous but awful terrain the army had covered to get this far. Building another road was no answer; Brutus now understood why Cassius had advocated sailing, and commandeered every ship in Patara harbor as well as the transports he had se
nt around from Miletus with food. Thus he sailed to Myra, at the mouth of the well-named Cataractus River.

  Sailing proved a bonus in another way than convenience. The Lycian coast was as famous for pirates as the coasts of Pamphylia and Cilicia Tracheia, for in the groins of the mighty mountains lay coves fed by streamlets, ideal for pirate lairs. Whenever he saw a pirate lair, Brutus sent a force ashore and collected a huge amount of booty. So much booty, in fact, that he decided not to bother with Myra, turned his fleet around and sailed west again.

  With three hundred million sesterces in his war chest from the Lycian campaign, most of it garnished from pirates, Brutus brought his army back to the Hermus valley in June. This time he and his legates took up residence in the lovely city of Sardis, forty miles inland and more ascetically pleasing than Smyrna.

  3

  The coast of Asia Province was not only rugged; it also thrust a series of peninsulas out into the Aegean Sea, which made voyages tedious for merchantmen sailing close inshore, always having to traipse around another rocky protrusion. The last such peninsula on the way to Rhodes was the Cnidan Cheronnese, with the port of Cnidus on its very tip; the entire very long, thin finger of land was simply referred to by the city’s name, Cnidus.

  For Cassius, Cnidus was handy. He took four legions from the Hermus valley and put them into camp there, while he marshaled his fleets at Myndus on the next peninsula up, just west of the fabulous city of Halicarnassus. He was using a vast number of big, slow galleys from quinquereme down to trireme, nothing any smaller, which he knew the Rhodians, masters of maritime warfare, would deem easy game. His admirals were the same trusty fellows who had made mincemeat out of Dolabella’s men: Patiscus, the two Liberators Cassius Parmensis and Decimus Turullius, and Sextilius Rufus. The command of his land army was split between Gaius Fannius Caepio and Lentulus Spinther.

  Of course the Rhodians heard about all this activity and sent an innocent-looking pinnace to spy on Cassius; when its crew reported back about the mammoth craft Cassius was employing, the Rhodian admirals had a good laugh. They preferred taut, trim triremes and biremes, usually undecked, with two banks of oars in outriggers and very businesslike bronze beaks for ramming. Rhodians never used marines or soldiers to board the enemy, they simply raced around clumsy warships in deft circles and either forced these leviathans to collide with each other, or got up a good straight run and rammed them so hard they were holed; they were also experts at coming alongside a ship and shearing off its oars.

  “If Cassius is stupid enough to attack with his elephants of ships,” said the wartime chief magistrate, Alexander, to the wartime chief admiral Mnaseas, “he’ll go the way of Poliorketes and King Mithridates the so-called Great, ha ha ha. Ignominious defeat! I agree with the Carthaginians of old—no Roman ever born can fight on the sea when the enemy’s a seafaring people.”

  “Yes, but in the end the Romans crushed the Carthaginians,” said Archelaus the Rhetor, who had been brought to the city of Rhodus from his idyllic rural retreat because he had once taught Cassius rhetoric when Cassius had been a youth in the Forum.

  “Oh, yes!” sneered Mnaseas. “But only after a hundred and fifty years and three wars! And then they did it on land.”

  “Not entirely,” Archelaus persisted stubbornly. “Once they invented the corvus gangplank and could board troops in number, Carthage’s fleets didn’t do very well.”

  The two wartime leaders glared at the old pedant and began to wish that they had left him to his bucolic maunderings.

  “Send Gaius Cassius an embassage,” Archelaus pleaded.

  So the Rhodians sent an embassage to see Cassius at Myndus, more to shut Archelaus up than because they thought it would achieve anything. Cassius received the deputation arrogantly and loftily told its members that he was going to wallop them.

  “So when you get home,” he said, “tell your council to start thinking about negotiating a peace settlement.”

  Back they went to tell Alexander and Mnaseas that Cassius had sounded so confident! Perhaps it might be best to negotiate? Alexander and Mnaseas hooted in derision.

  “Rhodes cannot be beaten at sea,” said Mnaseas. He lifted his lip in contempt and looked thoughtful. “To illustrate the point, I note that Cassius has his ships out exercising every day, so why don’t we show him what Rhodes can do? Catch him sitting on the latrine, dreaming that Roman drill can beat Rhodian skill.”

  “You’re a poet,” said Archelaus, who really was a nuisance.

  “Why don’t you hop off to Myndus and see Cassius yourself?” Alexander suggested.

  “All right, I will,” said Archelaus.

  Who took a pinnace to Myndus and saw his old pupil, pulling all his rhetorical brilliance out of his magical speaking hat to no avail. Cassius heard him out unmoved.

  “Go back and tell those fools that their days are numbered” was as much satisfaction as Archelaus could get.

  “Cassius says your days are numbered,” he told the wartime commanders, and was sent back to his rustic villa in disgrace.

  Cassius knew exactly what he was doing, little though Rhodes thought that. His drills and exercises went on remorselessly; he supervised them himself, and punished severely when his ships did not perform up to expectations. A great deal of his time was filled in shuttling back and forth between Myndus and Cnidus, which he could do while supervising, for the land army had to be fit for action too, and he believed in the personal touch.

  Early in April the Rhodians picked out their thirty-five best vessels and sent them out on a surprise raid, their quarry Cassius’s busily exercising fleet of unwieldy quinqueremes. At first it looked as if the Rhodians would win easily, but Cassius, standing in his pinnace flagging messages to his captains, was not at all flustered. Nor did his captains panic, start to run into each other or present a tempting beam to the enemy. Then the Rhodians realized that the Roman ships were herding them into a smaller and smaller area of water, until finally they could not turn, ram, or perform any of the brilliant maneuvers for which they were so famous. Darkness enabled the Rhodians to break out of the net and dash for home, but behind them they left two ships sunk and three captured.

  Rhodes sat ideally poised at the eastern bottom corner of the Aegean Sea; eighty miles long, the lozenge-shaped, hilly, fertile island was large enough to feed itself, as well as to form a barrier to ongoing sea traffic heading for Cilicia, Syria, Cyprus and all points east. The Rhodians had exploited this natural bounty by going to sea, and relied upon their naval superiority to protect their island.

  Cassius’s land army sailed on the Kalends of May in a hundred transports, with Cassius himself leading eighty war galleys that also carried marines. He was ready on all fronts.

  When it saw this huge armada bearing down, out came the entire Rhodian fleet, only to succumb to the same tactics Cassius had used off Myndus; while the sea battle raged, the transports slipped past unharmed, allowing Fannius Caepio and Lentulus Spinther to land their four legions safely on the coast to the west of Rhodus city. Not only were there twenty thousand well-equipped, mail-shirted soldiers forming up into rank and column, but cranes were winching and gangways were rolling staggering amounts of artillery and siege machines ashore! Oh, oh, oh! The horrified Rhodians had no land army of their own, and no idea how to withstand a siege.

  Alexander and the Rhodian council sent a frantic message to Cassius that they would capitulate, but even as this was being done, the ordinary people inside Rhodus were busy opening all the gates and doors in the walls to admit the Roman army.

  The only casualty was a soldier who fell and broke his arm.

  Thus the city of Rhodus was not sacked, and the island of Rhodes sustained little damage.

  Cassius set up a tribunal in the agora. Wearing a wreath of victory laurels on his cropped light brown hair, he mounted it clad in his purple-bordered toga. With him were twelve lictors in crimson tunics bearing the axed fasces, and two hoary veteran primipilus centurions in decorations and
shirts of gold scales, one bearing a ceremonial spear. At a gesture from Cassius, the centurion rammed the spear into the tribunal deck, a signal that Rhodes was the prisoner of the Roman war machine.

  He had the other centurion, owner of a famously stentorian voice, read out a list of fifty names, including those of Mnaseas and Alexander, had them brought to the foot of his tribunal and executed on the spot. The centurion then read out twenty-five more names; they were exiled, their property confiscated along with the property of the fifty dead men. After which Cassius’s impromptu herald bawled out in bad Greek that every piece of jewelry, every coin, every gold or silver or bronze or copper or tin sow, every temple treasure and every item of valuable furniture or fabric were to be brought to the agora. Those who obeyed willingly and honestly would not be molested, but those who tried to flee or conceal their possessions would be executed. Rewards for information were offered to free men, freedmen, and slaves.

  It was a perfect act of terrorism that achieved Cassius’s ends immediately. The agora became so piled with loot that the soldiers couldn’t carry it away fast enough. Very graciously he allowed Rhodes to keep its most revered work of art, the Chariot of the Sun, but he allowed it to keep nothing else. Alegate entered every dwelling in the city to make sure no precious thing remained, while Cassius himself led three of the legions into the countryside and stripped it barer than carrion birds a carcass. Archelaus the Rhetor lost nothing for the most logical of reasons: he had nothing.