When Quintus Servilius Caepio was given a mandate to march against the Volcae Tectosages of Gaul and their German guests—now happily resettled near Tolosa—he was fully aware he was going to get that mandate. It happened on the first day of the New Year, during the meeting of the Senate in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus after the inauguration ceremony. And Quintus Servilius Caepio, making his maiden speech as the new senior consul, announced to the packed assemblage that he would not avail himself of the new kind of Roman army.
“I shall use Rome’s traditional soldiers, not the paupers of the Head Count,” he said, amid cheers and wild applause.
Of course there were senators present who did not cheer; Gaius Marius did not exist alone amid a totally inimical Senate. A good number of the backbenchers were sufficiently enlightened to see the logic behind Marius’s stand against entrenched opinion, and even among the Famous Families there were some independent-thinking men. But the clique of conservatives who sat in the front row of the House around the person of Scaurus Princeps Senatus were the men who dictated senatorial policy; when they cheered, the House cheered, and when they voted a certain way, the House voted a similar way.
To this clique did Quintus Servilius Caepio belong, and it was the active lobbying of this clique that prodded the Conscript Fathers to authorize an army eight full legions strong for the use of Quintus Servilius Caepio in teaching the Germans that they were not welcome in the lands of the Middle Sea, and the Volcae Tectosages of Tolosa that it did not pay to welcome Germans.
About four thousand of Lucius Cassius’s troops had come back fit to serve, but all save a few of the noncombatants in Cassius’s army had perished along with the actual troops, and the cavalry who survived had scattered to their homelands, taking their horses and their noncombatants with them. Thus Quintus Servilius Caepio was faced with the task of finding 41,000 infantrymen, plus 12,000 free non-combatants, plus 8,000 slave noncombatants, plus 5,000 cavalry troopers and 5,000 noncombatant cavalry servants. All this in an Italy denuded of men with the property qualifications, be they Roman, Latin, or Italian in origin.
Caepio’s recruitment techniques were appalling. Not that he himself participated in them, or even bothered to acquaint himself with how the men were going to be found; he paid a staff and set his quaestor in charge, while he himself turned his hand to other things, things more worthy of a consul. The levies were enforced ruthlessly. Men were pressed into service not only without their consent, but as victims of kidnap, and veterans were hauled willy-nilly from their homes. A mature-looking fourteen-year-old son of a pressed smallholding farmer was also pressed, as was his youthful-looking sixty-year-old grandfather. And if such a family could not produce the money to arm and equip its pressed’ members, someone was on hand to write down the price of the gear, and take the smallholding as payment; Quintus Servilius Caepio and his backers acquired a large amount of land. When, even so, neither Roman nor Latin citizens could provide anything like enough men, the Italian Allies were hounded remorselessly.
But in the end Caepio got his forty-one thousand infantrymen and his twelve thousand noncombatant freemen the traditional way, which meant that the State didn’t have to pay for their arms, armor, or equipment; and the preponderance of Italian Allied auxiliary legions put the financial burdens of upkeep upon the Italian Allied nations rather than Rome. As a result, the Senate offered Caepio a vote of thanks, and was delighted to open its purse wide enough to hire horse troopers from Thrace and the two Gauls. While Caepio looked even more self-important than usual, Rome’s conservative elements spoke of him in laudatory terms wherever and whenever they could find ears to listen.
The other things to which Caepio personally attended while his press-gangs roamed throughout the Italian peninsula were all to do with returning power to the Senate; one way or another, the Senate had been suffering since the time of Tiberius Gracchus, almost thirty years before. First Tiberius Gracchus, then Fulvius Flaccus, then Gaius Gracchus, and after them a mixture of New Men and reforming noblemen had steadily whittled away at senatorial participation in the major law courts and the making of laws.
If it hadn’t been for Gaius Marius’s recent assaults upon senatorial privilege, possibly Caepio would have been less imbued with zeal to put the state of affairs right, and less determined. But Marius had stirred up the senatorial hornets’ nest, and the result during the first weeks of Caepio’s consulship was a dismaying setback for the Plebs and the knights who controlled the Plebs.
A patrician, Caepio summoned the Assembly of the People, from which he was not disbarred, and forced through a bill that removed the extortion court from the knights, who had received it from Gaius Gracchus; once more the juries in the extortion court were to be filled solely from the Senate, which could confidently be expected to protect its own. It was a bitter battle in the Assembly of the People, with the handsome Gaius Memmius leading a strong group of senators opposed to Caepio’s act. But Caepio won.
And, having won, in late March the senior consul led eight legions and a big force of cavalry in the direction of Tolosa, his mind filled with dreams, not so much of glory as of a more private form of self-gratification. For Quintus Servilius Caepio was a true Servilius Caepio, which meant that the opportunity to increase his fortune from a term as governor was more alluring by far than mere military fortune. He had been a praetor-governor in Further Spain, when Scipio Nasica had declined the job on the grounds that he was not to be trusted, and he had done very well for himself. Now that he was a consul-governor, he expected to do even better.
If it was routinely possible to send troops from Italy to Spain by water, then Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus would not have needed to open up the land route along the coast of Gaul-across-the-Alps; as it was, the prevailing winds and sea currents made water transportation too risky. So Caepio’s legions, like Lucius Cassius’s the year before, were obliged to walk the thousand-plus miles from Campania to Narbo. Not that the legions minded the walk; every last one of them hated and feared the sea, and dreaded the thought of a hundred miles of sailing far more than the reality of a thousand miles of walking. For one thing, their muscles were laid on from infancy in the right way to facilitate swift and endless walking, and walking was the most comfortable form of locomotion.
The journey from Campania to Narbo took Caepio’s legions a little over seventy days, which meant they averaged less than fifteen miles a day—a slow pace, hampered as they were not only by a large baggage train, but by the many private animals and vehicles and slaves the old-style propertied Roman soldier knew himself entitled to carry with him to ensure his own comfort.
In Narbo, a little seaport Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus had reorganized to serve the needs of Rome, the army rested just long enough to recover from its march, yet not long enough to soften up again. In early summer Narbo was a delightful place, its pellucid waters alive with shrimp, little lobsters, big crabs, and swimmy fish of all kinds. And in the mud at the bottom of the saltwater pools around the mouths of the Atax and the Ruscino were not only oysters, but dug-mullets. Of all the fish the legions of Rome had catalogued worldwide, dug-mullets were considered the most delicious. Round and flat like plates, with both eyes on one side of their silly thin heads, they lurked under the mud, had to be dug out, and then were speared as they floundered about trying to dig themselves back into the mud.
The legionary didn’t get sore feet. He was too used to walking, and his thick-soled, ankle-supporting sandals had hobnails to raise him still further off the ground, absorb some of the shock, and keep pebbles out. However, it was wonderful to swim in the sea around Narbo, easing aching muscles, and those few soldiers who had managed to escape so far being taught to swim were here discovered, and the omission rectified. The local girls were no different from girls all over the world—crazy for men in uniform—and for the space of sixteen days Narbo hummed with irate fathers, vengeful brothers, giggling girls, lecherous legionaries, and tavern brawls, keeping the provost marshals busy and the military tribunes in a foul temper.
Then Caepio packed his men up and moved them out along the excellent road Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus had built between the coast and the city of Tolosa. Where the river Atax bent at right angles as it flowed from the Pyrenees away to the south, the grim fortress of Carcasso frowned from its heights; from this point the legions marched over the hills dividing the headwaters of the huge Garumna River from the short streams emptying into the Middle Sea, and so came down at last to the lush alluvial plains of Tolosa.
Caepio’s luck was amazing, as usual; for the Germans had quarreled bitterly with their hosts, the Volcae Tectosages, and been ordered by King Copillus of Tolosa to leave the area. Thus Caepio found that the only enemies his eight legions had to deal with were the hapless Volcae Tectosages, who took one look at the steel-shirted ranks coming down from the hills like an endless snake, and decided discretion was by far the better part of valor. King Copillus and his warriors departed for the mouth of the Garumna, there to alert the various tribes of the region and wait to see if Caepio was as foolish a general as Lucius Cassius had been last year. Left in the care of old men, Tolosa itself surrendered at once. Caepio purred.
Why did he purr? Because Caepio knew about the Gold of Tolosa. And now he would find it without even having to fight a battle. Lucky Quintus Servilius Caepio!
*
A hundred and seventy years before, the Volcae Tectosages had joined a migration of the Gauls led by the second of the two famous Celtic kings called Brennus. This second Brennus had overrun Macedonia, poured down into Thessaly, turned the Greek defense at the pass of Thermopylae, and penetrated into central Greece and Epirus. He had sacked and looted the three richest temples in the world— Dodona in Epirus, Olympian Zeus, and the great sanctuary of Apollo and the Pythoness at Delphi.
Then the Greeks fought back, the Gauls retreated north with their plunder, Brennus died as the result of a wound, and his master plan fell apart. In Macedonia his leaderless tribes decided to cross the Hellespont into Asia Minor; there they founded the Gallic outpost nation called Galatia. But perhaps half of the Volcae Tectosages wanted to go home to Tolosa rather than cross the Hellespont; at a grand council, all the tribes agreed that these homesick Volcae Tectosages should be entrusted with the riches of half a hundred pillaged temples, including the riches of Dodona, Olympia, and Delphi. It was just that, a trust. The homebound Volcae Tectosages would hold the wealth of that whole migration in Tolosa against the day when all the tribes would return to Gaul, and claim it.
They melted everything down, to make their journey home easier: bulky solid-gold statues, silver urns five feet tall, cups and plates and goblets, golden tripods, wreaths made of gold or silver—into the crucibles they went, a small piece at a time, until a thousand laden wagons rolled westward through the quiet alpine valleys of the river Danubius, and came at last after several years down to the Garumna and Tolosa.
*
Caepio had heard the story while he had been governor of Further Spain three years before, and had dreamed ever since of finding the Gold of Tolosa, even though his Spanish informant had assured him the treasure trove was commonly regarded as a myth. There was no gold in Tolosa, every visitor to the city of the Volcae Tectosages swore to that fact; the Volcae Tectosages had no more wealth than their bountiful river and wonderful soil. But Caepio knew his luck. He knew the gold was there in Tolosa. Otherwise, why had he heard the story in Spain, and then got this commission to follow in the footsteps of Lucius Cassius to Tolosa—and found the Germans gone when he got there, the city his without a fight? Fortune was working her will, all in his cause.
He shed his military gear, put on his purple-bordered toga, and walked the rather rustic alleys of the town, poked through every nook and niche inside the citadel, wandered into the pastures and fields which encroached upon the outskirts in a manner more Spanish than Gallic. Indeed, Tolosa had little Gallic feel to it—no Druids, no typical Gallic dislike for an urban environment. The temples and temple precincts were laid out in the fashion of Spanish cities, a picturesque parkland of artificial lakes and rivulets, fed from and going back to the Garumna. Lovely!
Having found nothing on his walks, Caepio put his army to looking for the gold, a treasure hunt in a gala atmosphere conducted by troops who were released from the anxiety of facing an enemy, and who smelled a share in fabulous booty.
But the gold couldn’t be found. Oh, the temples yielded a few priceless artifacts, but only a few, and no bullion.
And the citadel was a complete disappointment, as Caepio had already seen for himself; nothing but weapons and wooden gods, horn vessels and plates of fired clay. King Copillus had lived with extreme simplicity, nor were there secret storage vaults under the plain flags of his halls.
Then Caepio had a bright idea, and set his soldiers to digging up the parks around the temples. In vain. Not one hole, even the deepest, revealed a sign of a gold brick. The gold diviners brandished their forked withies without finding one tiny signal to set the palms of their hands tingling or the withies bending like bows. From the temple precincts, the search spread into the fields and into the streets of the town, and still nothing. While the landscape came more and more to resemble the demented burrowing of a gigantic mole, Caepio walked and thought, thought and walked.
The Garumna was alive with fish, including freshwater salmon and several varieties of carp, and since the river fed the temple lakes, they too teemed with fish. It was more comfortable for Caepio’s legionaries to catch fish in the lakes than in the river, wide and deep and swift flowing, so as he walked, he was surrounded by soldiers tying flies and making rods out of willow canes. Down to the biggest lake he walked, deep in thought. And as he stood there, he absently watched the play of light on the scales of lurking fish, glitters-and gleams flickering in and out of the weeds, coming and going, ever changing. Most of the flashes were silver, but now and then an exotic carp would slide into view, and he would catch a gleam of gold.
The idea invaded his conscious mind slowly. And then it struck, it exploded inside his brain. He sent for his corps of engineers and told them to drain the lakes—not a difficult job, and one which certainly paid off. For the Gold of Tolosa lay at the bottom of these sacred pools, hidden by mud, weeds, the natural detritus of many decades.
When the last bar was rinsed off and stacked, Caepio came to survey the hoard, and gaped; that he had not watched as the gold was retrieved was a quirk of his peculiar nature, for he wanted to be surprised. He was surprised! In fact, he was flabbergasted. There were roughly 50,000 bars of gold, each weighing about 15 pounds; 15,000 talents altogether. And there were 10,000 bars of silver, each weighing 20 pounds; 3,500 talents of silver altogether. Then the sappers found other silver in the lakes, for it turned out that the only use the Volcae Tectosages had made of their riches was to craft their millstones out of solid silver; once a month they hauled these silver millstones from the river and used them to grind a month’s supply of flour.
“All right,” said Caepio briskly, “how many wagons can we spare to transport the treasure to Narbo?” He directed his question at Marcus Furius, his praefectus fabrum, the man who organized supply lines, baggage trains, equipment, accoutrements, fodder, and all the other necessities entailed in maintaining an army in the field.
“Well, Quintus Servilius, there are a thousand wagons in the baggage train, about a third of which are empty at this stage. Say three hundred and fifty if I do a bit of shuffling around. Now if each wagon carries about thirty-five talents—which is a good but not excessive load—then we’ll need about three hundred and fifty wagons for the silver, and four hundred and fifty wagons for the gold,” said Marcus Furius, who was not a member of the ancient Famous Family Furius, but the great-grandson of a Furian slave, and now was a client of Caepio’s, as well as a banker.
“Then I suggest that we ship the silver first, in three hundred and fifty wagons, unload it in Narbo, and bring the wagons back to Tolosa to transport the gold,” said Caepio. “In the meantime, I’ll have the troops unload an extra hundred wagons, so that we have sufficient to send the gold off in one convoy.”
By the end of Quinctilis, the silver had made its way to the coast and been unloaded, and the empty wagons sent back to Tolosa for the gold; Caepio, as good as his word, had found the extra hundred wagons during the interval.
While the gold was loaded, Caepio wandered around deliriously from one stack of rich bricks to another, unable to resist stroking one or two in passing. He chewed the side of his hand, thinking hard, and finally sighed. “You had better go with the gold, Marcus Furius,” he said then. “Someone very senior will have to stay with it in Narbo until every last brick is safely loaded on board the last ship.’’ He turned to his Greek freedman Bias. “The silver is already on its way to Rome, I trust?”
“No, Quintus Servilius,” said Bias smoothly. “The transports which brought heavy goods across on the winter winds at the beginning of the year have dispersed. I could only locate a dozen good vessels, and I thought it wiser to save them for the gold. The silver is under heavy guard in a warehouse and is quite safe. The sooner we ship the gold to Rome, the better, I think. As more decent ships come in, I’ll hire them for the silver.”
“Oh, we can probably send the silver to Rome by road,” Caepio said easily.
“Even with the risk of a ship’s foundering, Quintus Servilius, I would rather trust to the sea for every single brick, gold and silver,” said Marcus Furius. “There are too many hazards by road from raiding alpine tribes.”
“Yes, you’re quite right,” agreed Caepio, and sighed. “Oh, it’s almost too good to be true, isn’t it? We are sending more gold and silver to Rome than there is in every one of Rome’s treasuries!”
“Indeed, Quintus Servilius,” said Marcus Furius, “it is remarkable.”
*
The gold set out from Tolosa in its 450 wagons midway through Sextilis. It was escorted by a single cohort of legionaries, for the Roman road was a civilized one passing through civilized country that had not seen a hand lifted in anger in a very long time, and Caepio’s agents had reported that King Copillus and his warriors were still within Burdigala, hoping to see Caepio venture down the same road Lucius Cassius had taken to his death.
Once Carcasso was reached, the road was literally downhill all the way to the sea, and the pace of the wagon train increased. Everyone was pleased, no one worried; the cohort of soldiers began to fancy that they could smell the salt of the shore. By nightfall, they knew, they would be clattering into the streets of Narbo; their minds were on oysters, dug-mullets, and Narbonese girls.
The raiding party, over a thousand strong, came whooping out of the south from the midst of a great forest bordering the road on either side, spilling in front of the first wagon and behind the last wagon some two miles further back, where the halves of the cohort were distributed. Within a very short space of time not a single Roman soldier was left alive, and the wagon drivers too lay in jumbled heaps of arms and legs.
The moon was full, the night fine; during the hours when the wagon train had waited for darkness, no one had come along the Roman road from either direction, for provincial Roman roads were really for the movement of armies, and trade in this part of the Roman Province was scant between coast and interior, especially since the Germans had come to settle around Tolosa.
As soon as the moon was well up, the mules were again harnessed to the wagons and some of the raiders climbed up to drive, while others walked alongside as guides. For when the forest ceased to march alongside the road, the wagon train turned off it onto a stretch of hard coastal ground suited only to the nibbling mouths of sheep. By dawn Ruscino and its river lay to the north; the wagon train resumed tenure of the Via Domitia and crossed the pass of the Pyrenees in broad daylight.
South of the Pyrenees its route was circuitous and not within sight of any Roman road until the wagon train crossed the Sucro River to the west of the town of Saetabis; from there it headed straight across the Rush Plain, a desolate and barren stretch of country which dived between two of the greatest of the chains of Spanish mountains, yet was not used as a short cut because of its waterlessness. After which the trail petered out, and further progress of the Gold of Tolosa was never ascertained by Caepio’s investigators.
*
It was the misfortune of a dispatch rider carrying a message from Narbo to find the tumbled heaps of looted corpses alongside the road through the forest just to the east of Carcasso. And when the dispatch rider reported to Quintus Servilius Caepio in Tolosa, Quintus Servilius Caepio broke down and wept. He wept loudly for the fate of Marcus Furius, he wept loudly for the fate of that cohort of Roman soldiers, he wept loudly for wives and families left orphaned in Italy; but most of all he wept loudly for those glittering heaps of ruddy bricks, the loss of the Gold of Tolosa. It wasn’t fair! What had happened to his luck? he cried. And wept loudly.
Clad in a dark toga of mourning, his tunic dark and devoid of any stripe on its right shoulder, Caepio wept again when he called his army to an assembly, and told them the news they had already learned through the camp grapevine.
“But at least we still have the silver,” he said, wiping his eyes. “It alone will ensure a decent profit for every man at the end of the campaign.”
“I’m thankful for small mercies, myself,” said one veteran ranker to his tentmate and messmate; they had both been pressed off their farms in Umbria, though each had already served in ten campaigns over a period of fifteen years.
“You are?” asked his companion, somewhat slower in his thought processes, due to an old head wound from a Scordisci shield boss.
“Too right I am! Have you ever known a general to share gold with us scum-of-the-earth soldiers? Somehow he always finds a reason why he’s the only one gets it. Oh, and the Treasury gets some, that’s how he manages to hang on to most of it, he buys the Treasury off. At least we’re going to get a share of the silver, and there was enough silver to make a mountain of. What with all the fuss about the gold going missing, the consul don’t have much choice except to be fair about dishing out the silver.”
‘‘I see what you mean,’’ said his companion. ‘‘Let’ s catch a nice fat salmon for our supper, eh?”
Indeed, the year was wearing down and Caepio’s army had not had to do any fighting at all, save for that one unlucky cohort deputed to guard the Gold of Tolosa. Caepio wrote off to Rome with the whole story from the decamped Germans to the lost gold, asking for instructions.
By October he had his answer, which was much as he had expected: he was to remain in the neighborhood of Narbo with his entire army, winter there, and wait for fresh orders in the spring. Which meant that his command had been extended for a year; he was still the governor of Roman Gaul.
But it wasn’t the same without the gold. Caepio fretted and moped, and often wept, and it was noted by his senior officers that he found it difficult to settle, kept on walking back and forth. Typical of Quintus Servilius Caepio, was the general feeling; no one really believed that the tears he shed were for Marcus Furius, or the dead soldiers. Caepio wept for his lost gold.