6

The magic hadn’t failed; when the consular elections were held just after the new tribunes of the plebs entered office on the tenth day of December, Gaius Marius was returned as the senior consul. For no one could disbelieve the testimony of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, nor Saturninus’s contention that there was still only one man capable of beating the Germans. The old German-mania rushed back into Rome like the Tiber in full spate, and once again Sicily faded from first place in the list of crises which never, never seemed to grow any less in number.

“For as fast as we eliminate one, a new one pops up out of nowhere,” said Marcus Aemilius Scaurus to Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle.

“Including Sicily,” said Lucullus’s brother-in-law with venom in his voice. “How could Gaius Marius lend his support to that pipinna Ahenobarbus when he insisted Lucius Lucullus must be replaced as governor of Sicily? By Servilius the Augur, of all people! He’s nothing but a New Man skulking in the guise of an old name!”

“He was tweaking your tail, Quintus Caecilius,’’ Scaurus said. “Gaius Marius doesn’t give a counterfeit coin who governs Sicily, not now that the Germans are definitely coming. If you wanted Lucius Lucullus to remain there, you would have done better to have kept quiet; then Gaius Marius wouldn’t have remembered that you and Lucius Lucullus matter to each other.’’

“The senatorial rolls need a stern eye to look them over,” said Numidicus. “I shall stand for censor!”

“Good thinking! Who with?”

“My cousin Caprarius.”

“Oh, more good thinking, by Venus! He’ll do exactly as you tell him.”

“It’s time we weeded the Senate out, not to mention the knights. I shall be a stringent censor, Marcus Aemilius, have no fear!” said Numidicus. “Saturninus is going, and so is Glaucia. They’re dangerous men.”

“Oh, don’t!” cried Scaurus, flinching. “If I hadn’t falsely accused him of peculation in grain, he might have turned into a different kind of politician. I can never rid myself of guilt about Lucius Appuleius.”

Numidicus raised his brows. “My dear Marcus Aemilius, you are in strong need of a tonic! What if anything caused that wolfshead Saturninus to act the way he does is immaterial. All that matters at this present moment is that he is what he is. And he has to go.” He blew through his nostrils angrily. “We are not finished as a force in this city yet,” he said. “And at least this coming year Gaius Marius is saddled with a real man as his colleague, instead of those straw men Fimbria and Orestes. We’ll make sure Quintus Lutatius is put into the field with an army, and every tiny success Quintus Lutatius has with his army, we’ll trumpet through Rome like triumphs.”

For the electorate had also voted in Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar as consul, junior to Marius admittedly, but, “A thorn in my side,” said Marius.

“Your young brother’s in as a praetor,” said Sulla.

“And going to Further Spain, nicely out of the way.”

They caught up with Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, who had parted company with Numidicus at the bottom of the Senate steps.

“I must thank you personally for your industry and enterprise in the matter of the grain supply,” said Marius civilly.

“As long as there’s wheat to be bought somewhere in the world, Gaius Marius, it’s not a very difficult job,” said Scaurus, also civilly. “What worries me is the day when there’s no wheat to be had anywhere.”

“Not likely at the moment, surely! Sicily will be back to normal next harvest, I imagine.”

Scaurus struck immediately. “Provided, that is, we don’t lose everything we’ve gained once that prating fool Servilius Augur takes office as governor!” he said tartly.

“The war in Sicily is over,” said Marius.

“You’d better hope so, consul. I’m not so sure.”

“And where have you been getting the wheat these past two years?” Sulla asked hastily, to avert an open disagreement.

“Asia Province,” said Scaurus, willing enough to be sidetracked, for he genuinely did love being curator annonae, the custodian of the grain supply.

“But surely they don’t grow much surplus?” prompted Sulla.

“Hardly a modius, as a matter of fact,” said Scaurus smugly. “No, we can thank King Mithridates of Pontus. He’s very young, but he’s mighty enterprising. Having conquered all of the northern parts of the Euxine Sea and gained control of the grainlands of the Tanais, the Borysthenes, the Hypanis, and the Danastris, he’s making a very nice additional income for Pontus by shipping this Cimmerian surplus down to Asia Province, and selling it to us. What’s more, I’m going to follow my instincts, and buy again in Asia Province next year. Young Marcus Livius Drusus is going as quaestor to Asia, and I’ve commissioned him to act for me in the matter.’’

Marius grunted. “No doubt he’ll visit his father-in-law, Quintus Servilius Caepio, in Smyrna while he’s there?”

“No doubt,” said Scaurus blandly.

“Then have young Marcus Livius send the bills for the grain to Quintus Servilius Caepio,” said Marius. “He’s got more money to pay for it than the Treasury has!”

“That’s an unfounded allegation.”

“Not according to King Copillus.”

An uneasy, silence fell for a simmering moment before Sulla said, “How much of that Asian grain reaches us, Marcus Aemilius? I hear the pirate problem grows worse every year.”

“About half, no more,” Scaurus said grimly. “Every hidden cove and harbor on the Pamphylian and Cilician coasts shelters pirates. Of course by trade they’re slavers, but if they can steal grain to feed the slaves they steal, then they’re sure of huge profits, aren’t they? And whatever grain they have left over, they sell back to us at twice the price we originally paid for it, if for no other reason than they guarantee it will reach us without being pirated—again.

“Amazing,” said Marius, “that even among pirates there are middlemen. Because that’s what they are! Steal it, then sell it back to us. Pure profit. It’s time we did something, Princeps Senatus, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is,” said Scaurus fervently.

“What do you suggest?”

“A special commission for one of the praetors—a roving governorship, if there is such an animal. Give him ships and marines, and charge him with flushing out every nest of pirates along the whole Pamphylian and Cilician coast,” said Scaurus.

“We could call him the governor of Cilicia,” said Marius.

“What a good idea!”

“All right, Princeps Senatus, let’s call the Conscript Fathers together as soon as possible, and do it.”

“Let’s,” said Scaurus, oozing charity. “You know, Gaius Marius, I may loathe everything you stand for, but I do love your capacity to act without turning the whole business into a new set of circus games.”

“The Treasury will scream like a Vestal invited to dinner in a brothel,” said Marius, grinning.

“Let it! If we don’t eradicate the pirates, trade between East and West will cease to be. Ships and marines,” said Scaurus thoughtfully. “How many, do you think?”

“Oh, eight or ten full fleets, and, say—ten thousand trained marines. If we have that many,” said Marius.

“We can get them,” Scaurus said confidently. “If necessary we can hire some at least from Rhodes, Halicarnassus, Cnidus, Athens, Ephesus—don’t worry, we’ll find them.”

“It ought to be Marcus Antonius,” said Marius.

“What, not your own brother?” asked Scaurus, aping surprise.

But Marius grinned, unruffled. “Like me, Marcus Aemilius, my brother Marcus Marius is a landlubber. Where all the Antonii like going to sea.”

Scaurus laughed. “When they’re not all at sea!”

“True. But he’s all right, our praetor Marcus Antonius. He’ll do the job, I think.”

“I think he will too.”

“And in the meantime,” said Sulla, smiling, “the Treasury is going to be so busy whining and complaining about Marcus Aemilius’s grain purchases and pirate chasers that it won’t even notice how much money it’s paying out for Head Count armies. Because Quintus Lutatius will have to enlist a Head Count army too.”

“Oh, Lucius Cornelius, you’ve been too long in the service of Gaius Marius!” said Scaurus.

“I was thinking the same thing,” said Marius unexpectedly. But more than that he would not say.

*

Sulla and Marius left for Gaul-across-the-Alps late in February, having dealt with the obsequies and aftermath of Julilla; Marcia had agreed to remain in Sulla’s house to look after the children for the time being.

“But,” she said in minatory tones, “you can’t expect me to be here forever, Lucius Cornelius. Now that I’m getting into my fifties, I have a fancy to move to the Campanian coast. My bones don’t like the damp city weather. You had better marry again, give those children a proper mother and some half brothers or half sisters to play with.’’

“It will have to wait until the Germans are dealt with,” Sulla said, trying to keep his voice courteous.

“Well, all right then, after the Germans,” said Marcia.

“Two years hence,” he warned.

“Two? One, surely!”

“Perhaps, though I doubt it. Plan on two, Mother-in-law.”

“Not a moment longer, Lucius Cornelius.”

Sulla looked at her, one brow lifting quizzically. “You had better start looking for a suitable wife for me.”

“Are you joking?”

“No, I’m not joking!” Sulla cried, his patience worn a trifle thin of late. “How do you think I can go away to fight the Germans and also look inside Rome for a new wife? If you want to move out as soon as I’m home, then you’d better have a wife picked out and willing to be picked out.”

“What sort of wife?”

“I don’t care! Just make sure she’ll be kind to my little ones,” said Sulla.

For this and other reasons, Sulla was very glad to leave Rome. The longer he remained there, the greater became his hunger to see Metrobius, and the more he saw Metrobius, the more he suspected he would want to see Metrobius. Nor could he exert the same influence and control over the grown Metrobius that he had over the boy; Metrobius was now of an age to feel that he too had something to say about how the relationship was to progress. Yes, it was best to be far from Rome! Only his children would he miss, dear little people they were. Enchanting. Utterly, uncritically loving. He would be away for many moons, but the moment he reappeared, they welcomed him with open arms and millions of kisses. Why shouldn’t adult love be like that? But the answer, he thought, was simple. Adult love was too concerned with self and with thinking.

*

Sulla and Marius had left the junior consul, Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar, in the throes of recruiting another army, and complaining loudly because it would have to be Head Count in composition.

“Of course it has to be Head Count!” said Marius shortly. “And don’t come grizzling and mewling to me about it— it wasn’t I lost eighty thousand soldiers at Arausio, nor any of the rest we’ve wasted in battle!”

That of course shut Catulus Caesar up, but in a tight-lipped, aristocratic way.

“I wish you wouldn’t cast the crimes of his own sort in his face,” said Sulla.

“Then let him stop casting the Head Count in my face!” growled Marius.

Sulla gave up.

Luckily things in Gaul were very much as they ought to be; Manius Aquillius had kept the army in good condition with more construction of bridges and aqueducts and plenty of drills. Quintus Sertorius had come back, but then returned to the Germans because, he said, he could be of better use there; he would go with the Cimbri on their trek, and report to Marius whenever he could. And the troops were beginning to quiver with eager anticipation at the thought that this year they’d see action.

That year should have seen an extra February intercalated—inserted—into the calendar, but the difference between the old Pontifex Maximus, Dalmaticus, and Ahenobarbus, the new, now showed itself: Ahenobarbus could see no virtue in keeping the calendar in time with the seasons. So when the calendar March came around, it was still winter, for the calendar now began to move ahead of the actual seasons. In a year of only 355 days, an extra 20-day month had to be intercalated each two years, traditionally at the end of February. But it was a decision made by the College of Pontifices, and if the members were not kept up to the mark by a conscientious Pontifex Maximus, the calendar fell by the wayside, as it did now.

Happily a letter arrived from Publius Rutilius Rufus not long after Sulla and Marius settled back into the routine of life in an army camp on the far side of the Alps.

This is definitely going to be an event-filled year, so my main problem is knowing where to start. Of course everyone was just waiting for you to get out of the way, and I swear you hadn’t got as far as Ocelum before there were mice and rats cavorting all over the lower end of the Forum. What a lovely play they’re having, O Cat!

All right then, I’ll start with our precious pair of censors, Piggle-wiggle and his tame cousin Billy Goat. Piggle-wiggle has been going about for some time— well, since he was elected, really, only he was careful not to talk in your vicinity—saying that he intends to “purge the Senate,” I think he put it.

One thing you can say for them, they’re not going to be a venal pair of censors, so all the State contracts will be gone into properly, and let according to price combined with merit. However, they’ve antagonized the Treasury already by demanding a large sum of money to repair and redecorate some of the temples not rich enough to pay themselves, not to mention fresh paint and marble latrine benches in the three State houses of the major flamines, also the houses of the Rex Sacrorum and the Pontifex Maximus. Personally I like my wooden latrine bench. Marble is so cold and hard! There was quite a lively little squabble when Piggle-wiggle mentioned the Domus Publicus of the Pontifex Maximus, the Treasury being of the opinion that our new P.M. is rich enough to donate paint and marble latrine benches.

They then proceeded to let all the ordinary contracts—and did very well, I consider. Tenders were plentiful, bidding was brisk, and I doubt there’ll be much chicanery.

They had moved with almost unheard-of speed to this point because what they really wanted to do, of course, was review the roll of senators and the roll of knights. Not two days after the contracts were all finished—I swear they’ve done eighteen months of work in less than one month!—Piggle-wiggle called a contio of the Assembly of the People to read out the censors’ findings on the moral plenitude or turpitude of the Conscript Fathers of the Senate. However, someone must have told Saturninus and Glaucia ahead of time that their names were going to be missing, because when the Assembly met, it was stuffed with hired gladiators and other bully-boys not normally to be found attending meetings of the Comitia.

And no sooner did Piggle-wiggle announce that he and the Billy Goat were removing Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Gaius Servilius Glaucia from the roll of senators, than the place erupted. The gladiators charged the rostra and hauled poor Piggle-wiggle down off it, then passed him from man to man slapping him viciously across the face with their huge and horny open hands. It was a novel technique—no clubs or billets of wood, just open hands. On the theory I suppose that hands cannot kill unless bunched into fists. Minimal violence, I heard it being called. How pathetic. It all happened so quickly and was so well organized that Piggle-wiggle had been passed all the way to the start of the Clivus Argentarius before Scaurus, Ahenobarbus, and a few other Good Men managed to pick him up and race him to asylum within the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. There they found his face twice its normal size, both eyes closed, his lips split in a dozen places, his nose spurting like a fountain, his ears mangled, and his brows cut. He looked for all the world like an old-time Greek boxer at the Olympic games.

How do you like the word they’re attaching to the archconservative faction, by the way? Boni—the Good Men. Scaurus is going round claiming to have invented it after Saturninus began calling the archconservatives the Policy Makers. But he ought to remember that there are plenty of us old enough to know that both Gaius Gracchus and Lucius Opimius called the men of their factions the boni. Now back to my story!

After he learned Cousin Numidicus was safe, Cousin Caprarius managed to restore order in the Comitia. He had his heralds blow their trumpets, then shouted out that he didn’t agree with his senior colleague’s findings, therefore Saturninus and Glaucia would remain on the senatorial rolls. You’d have to say Piggle-wiggle lost the engagement, but I don’t like friend Saturninus’s methods of fighting. He simply says he had nothing to do with the violence, but that he’s grateful the People are so vehemently on his side.

You might be pardoned for thinking that was the end of it. But no! The censors then began their financial assessment of the knights, having had a handsome new tribunal built near the Pool of Curtius—a wooden structure, admittedly, but designed for their purpose, with a flight of steps up each side so those being interviewed are kept orderly—up one side, across the front of the censors’ desk, and down the other side. Well done. You know the routine—each knight or would-be knight must furnish documentary evidence of his tribe, his birthplace, his citizenship, his military service, his property and capital, and his income.

Though it takes several weeks to discover whether in truth these applicants do have an income of at least 400,000 sesterces a year, the show always draws a good crowd on its first couple of days. As it did when Piggle-wiggle and the Billy Goat began to go through the equestrian rolls. He did look a sight, poor Piggle-wiggle! His bruises were more bilious-yellow than black, and the cuts had become a network of congested dark lines. Though his eyes had opened enough to see. He must have wished they hadn’t, when he saw what he saw in the afternoon of that first day on the new tribunal!

None other than Lucius Equitius, the self-proclaimed bastard son of Tiberius Gracchus! The fellow strolled up the steps when his turn came, and stood in front of Numidicus, not Caprarius. Piggle-wiggle just froze as he took in the sight of Equitius attended by a small army of scribes and clerks, all loaded down with account books and documents. Then he turned to his own secretary and said the tribunal was closing for the day, so please to dismiss this creature standing in front of him.

“You’ve got time to see me,” said Equitius.

“All right then, what do you want?” he asked ominously.

“I want to be enrolled as a knight,” said Equitius.

“Not in this censors’ lustrum, you’re not!” snarled our Good Man Piggle-wiggle.

I must say Equitius was patient. He said, rolling his eyes toward the crowd standing around the base of the tribunal—and it then became apparent that the gladiators and bully-boys were back—”You can’t turn me down, Quintus Caecidius. I fulfill all the criteria.”

“You do not!” said Numidicus. “You are disqualified on the most basic ground of all—you are not a Roman citizen.”

“But I am, esteemed censor,” said Equitius in a voice everyone could hear. “I became a Roman citizen on the death of my master, who bestowed it upon me in his will, along with all his property, and his name. That I have gone back to my mother’s name is immaterial. I have the proof of my manumission and adoption. Not only that, but I have served in the legions for ten years—and as a Roman citizen legionary, not an auxiliary.”

“I will not enroll you as a knight, and when we commence the census of the Roman citizens, I will not enroll you as a Roman citizen,” said Numidicus.

“But I am entitled,” said Equitius, very clearly. “I am a Roman citizen—my tribe is Suburana—1 served my ten years in the legions—I am a moral and respectable man—I own four insulae, ten taverns, a hundred iugera of land at Lanuvium, a thousand iugera of land at Firmum Picenum, a market porticus in Firmum Picenum—and I have an income of over four million sesterces a year, so I also qualify for the Senate.” And he snapped his fingers at his head clerk, who snapped his fingers at the minions, all of whom stepped forward holding out huge collections of papers. “I have proof, Quintus Caecilius.”

“I don’t care how many bits of paper you produce, you vulgar lowborn mushroom—and I don’t care who you bring forward to witness for you, you sucking bag of greed!” cried Piggle-wiggle. “I will not enroll you as a citizen of Rome, let alone as a member of the Ordo Equester! I piss on you, pimp! Now be off!”

Equitius turned to face the crowd, spread his arms wide—he was wearing a toga—and spoke. “Do you hear that?” he asked. “I, Lucius Equitius, son of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, am denied my citizenship as well as my knight’s status!”

Piggle-wiggle got to his feet so fast and moved so fast that Equitius didn’t even see him coming; the next thing, our valiant censor landed a right on Equitius’s jaw, and down Equitius went on his arse, sitting gaping up with his brains rattling round in their bone-box. Then Piggle-wiggle followed the punch with a kick that sent Equitius slithering off the edge of the tribunal into the crowd.

“I piss on the lot of you!” he roared, shaking his fists at the spectators and gladiators. “Be off with you, and take that non-Roman turd with you!”

So it happened all over again, only this time the gladiators didn’t touch Piggle-wiggle’s face. They dragged him off the tribunal and took to his body with fists, nails, teeth, and boots. In the end it was Saturninus and Glaucia—I forgot to tell you that they were lurking in the background—who stepped forward and pulled Numidicus out of the ranks of his attackers. I imagine it was no part of their plan to have Numidicus dead. Then Saturninus climbed up on the tribunal and quietened everyone enough for Caprarius to make himself heard.

“I do not agree with my colleague, and I will take it upon myself to admit Lucius Equitius into the ranks of the Ordo Equester!” he yelled, white-faced, poor fellow. I don’t think he ever saw so much violence on any of his military campaigns.

“Enter Lucius Equitius’s name!” roared Saturninus.

And Caprarius entered the name in the rolls.

“Home, everyone!” said Saturninus.

And everyone promptly went home, carrying Lucius Equitius on their shoulders.

Piggle-wiggle was a mess. Lucky not to be dead, is my opinion. Oh, he was angry! And went at Cousin Billy Goat like a shrew for giving in yet again. Poor old Billy Goat was just about in tears, and quite incapable of defending his actions.

“Maggots! Maggots, the lot of them!” Piggle-wiggle kept saying, over and over, while we all tried to bind up his ribs—he had several broken ones—and discover what other injuries his toga was hiding. And yes, it was all very foolish, but ye gods, Gaius Marius, one has to admire Piggle-wiggle’s courage!

Marius looked up from the letter, frowning. “I wonder exactly what Saturninus is up to?” he asked.

But Sulla’s mind was dwelling upon a far less important point. “Plautus!” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“The boni, the Good Men! Gaius Gracchus, Lucius Opimius, and our own Scaurus claim to have invented boni to describe their factions, but Plautus applied boni to plutocrats and other patrons a hundred years ago! I remember hearing it in a production of Plautus’s Captivi—put on while Scaurus was curule aedile, by Thespis! I was just old enough to be a playgoer.”

Marius was staring. “Lucius Cornelius, stop worrying about who coined pointless words, and pay attention to what really matters! Mention theater to you, and everything else is forgotten.”

“Oooops, sorry!” said Sulla impenitently.

Marius resumed reading.

We now move from the Forum Romanum to Sicily, where all sorts of things have been happening, none of them good, some of them blackly amusing, and some downright incredible.

As you know, but I shall refresh your memory anyway because I loathe ragged stories, the end of last year’s campaigning season saw Lucius Licinius Lucullus sit down in front of the slave stronghold of Triocala, to starve the rebels out. He’d thrown terror into them by having a herald retell the tale of the Enemy stronghold which sent the Romans a message saying they had food enough to last for ten years, and the Romans sent the reply back that in that case, they’d take the place in the eleventh year.

In fact, Lucullus did a magnificent job. He hemmed in Triocala with a forest of siege ramps, towers, shelter sheds, rams, catapults, and barricades, and he filled in a huge chasm which lay like a natural defense in front of the walls. Then he built an equally magnificent camp for his men, so strongly fortified that even if the slaves could have got out of Triocala, they couldn’t have got into Lucullus’s camp. And he settled down to wait the winter out, his men extremely comfortable, and he himself sure that his command would be prorogued.

Then in January came the news that Gaius Servilius Augur was the new governor, and with the official dispatch came a letter from our dear Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle, which filled in the nasty details, the scandalous way in which the deed had been done by Ahenobarbus and his arse-boy the Augur.

You don’t know Lucullus all that well, Gaius Marius. But I do. Like so many of his kind, he presents a cool, calm, detached, and insufferably haughty face to the world. You know, “I am Lucius Licinius Lucullus, a noble Roman of most ancient and prestigious family, and if you’re very lucky, I might deign to notice you from time to time.” But underneath the facade is a very different man—thin-skinned, fanatically conscious of slights, filled with passion, awesome in rage. So when Lucullus got the news, he took it on the surface with exactly the degree of calm and composed resignation you might expect. Then he proceeded to tear out every last piece of artillery, the siege ramp, the siege tower, the tortoise, the shelter sheds, the rubble-filled defile, the walled-in mountain shelves, everything. And he burned the lot he could burn, and carried every bucketload of rubble, fill, earth, whatever, far away from Triocala in a thousand different directions. After which he demolished his own camp, and destroyed the materials it contained too.

You think that’s enough? Not for Lucullus, who was only just getting started! He destroyed every single record of his administration in both Syracuse and Lilybaeum, and he marched his seventeen thousand men to the port of Agrigentum.

His quaestor proved terrifically loyal, and connived at everything Lucullus wanted to do. The pay had come for his army, and there was money in Syracuse from spoils taken after the battle of Heracleia Minoa. Lucullus then proceeded to fine every non-Roman citizen in Sicily for putting too much strain upon Publius Licinius Nerva, the previous governor, and added that money to the rest. After which he used some of the new shipment of money which had arrived for the use of Servilius the Augur in hiring a fleet of ships to transport his soldiers.

On the beach at Agrigentum he discharged his men, and gave them every last sestertius he had managed to scrape up. Now Lucullus’s men were a motley collection, and proof positive that the Head Count in Italy is as exhausted these days as all the other classes when it comes to providing troops. Aside from the Italian and Roman veterans he’d got together in Campania, he had a legion and a few extra cohorts from Bithynia, Greece, and Macedonian Thessaly—it was his demanding these from King Nicomedes of Bithynia which had led the King to say he had no men to give, because the Roman tax farmers had enslaved them all. A rather impertinent reference to our freeing the Italian Allied slaves—Nicomedes thought his treaty of friendship and alliance with us should extend the emancipation to Bithynian slaves! Lucullus rolled him up, of course, and got his Bithynian soldiers.

Now the Bithynian soldiers were sent home, and the Roman and Italian soldiers were sent home to Italy and Rome. With their discharge papers. And having removed every last trace of his governorship from the annals of Sicily, Lucullus himself sailed away.

The moment he was gone, King Tryphon and his adviser Athenion spilled out of Triocala, and began to plunder and pillage Sicily’s countryside all over again. They are now absolutely convinced that they’ll win the war, and their catch-cry is “Instead of being a slave, own a slave!” No crops have been planted, and the cities are overflowing with rural refugees. Sicily is a very Iliad of woes once more.

Into this delightful situation came Servilius the Augur. Of course he couldn’t believe it. And started to bleat in letter after letter to his patron, Ahenobarbus Pipinna.

In the meantime, Lucullus arrived back in Rome, and began to make preparations for the inevitable. When Ahenobarbus taxed him in the House with deliberate destruction of Roman property—siegeworks and camps especially—Lucullus simply looked down his nose and said he thought the new governor would want to start in his own way. He himself, said Lucullus, liked to leave everything the way he found it, and that was precisely what he had done in Sicily at the end of his term—he had left Sicily the way he had found it. Servilius the Augur’s chief grievance was the lack of an army—he had simply assumed Lucullus would leave his legions behind. But he hadn’t bothered to make a formal request of Lucullus about the troops. So Lucullus maintained that in the absence of any request from Servilius the Augur, his troops were his to do what he wanted with. And he felt they were due for discharge.

“I left Gaius Servilius Augur a new tablet, wiped clean of everything I might have done,” said Lucullus in the House. “Gaius Servilius Augur is a New Man, and New Men have their own ways of doing everything. I considered therefore that I was doing him a favor.’’

Without an army there’s very little Servilius the Augur can do in Sicily, of course. Nor, with Catulus Caesar sifting what few recruits Italy can drop into his net, is there any likelihood of another army for Sicily this year. Lucullus’s veterans are scattered far and wide, most of them with plump purses, and not anxious to be found.

Lucullus is well aware he’s left himself wide open to prosecution. I don’t think he honestly cares. He’s had the infinite satisfaction of completely destroying any chance Servilius the Augur might have had to steal his thunder. And that matters more to Lucullus than avoiding prosecution. So he’s busy doing what he can to protect his sons, for it’s plain he thinks Ahenobarbus and the Augur will utilize Saturninus’s new knight-run treason court to initiate a suit against him, and secure a conviction. He has transferred as much of his property as he possibly can to his older son, Lucius Lucullus, and given out his younger son, aged thirteen now, to be adopted by the Terentii Varrones. There is no Marcus Terentius Varro in this generation, and it’s an extremely wealthy family.

I heard from Scaurus that Piggle-wiggle—who is very upset by all this, as well he might be, for if Lucullus is convicted, he’ll have to take his scandal-making sister, Metella Calva, back—says the two boys have taken a vow to have their revenge upon Servilius the Augur as soon as they’re both of age. The older boy, Lucius Lucullus Junior, is particularly bitter, it seems. I’m not surprised. He looks like his father on the outside, so why not on the inside as well? To be cast into disgrace by the overweening ambition of the noisome New Man Augur is anathema.

And that’s all for the moment. I’ll keep you informed. I wish I could be there to help you with the Germans, not because you need my help, but because I’m feeling left out of it.

*

It was well into April of the calendar year before Marius and Sulla had word that the Germans were packing up and beginning to move out of the lands of the Atuatuci, and another month before Sertorius came in person to report that Boiorix had kept the Germans together as a people sufficiently to ensure his plan was going to be put into effect. The Cimbri and the mixed group led by the Tigurini started off to follow the Rhenus, while the Teutones wandered southeast down the Mosa.

“We have to assume that in the autumn the Germans will indeed arrive in three separate divisions on the borders of Italian Gaul,” said Marius, breathing heavily. “I’d like to be there in person to greet Boiorix himself when he comes down the Athesis, but it isn’t sensible. First, I have to take on the Teutones and render them impotent. Hopefully the Teutones will travel the fastest of the three groups, at least as far as the Druentia, because they don’t have any alpine territory to cross until later. If we can beat the Teutones here—and do it properly—then we ought to have time to cross the Mons Genava Pass and intercept Boiorix and the Cimbri before they actually enter Italian Gaul.’’

“You don’t think Catulus Caesar can deal with Boior on his own?” asked Manius Aquillius.

“No,” said Marius flatly.

Later, alone with Sulla, he enlarged upon his feelings about his junior colleague’s chances against Boiorix; for Quintus Lutatius Catulus was leading his army north to the Athesis as soon as it was trained and equipped.

“He’ll have about six legions, and he has all spring and summer to get them into condition. But a real general he’s not,” said Marius. “We must hope Teutobod comes earliest, that we beat Teutobod, cross the Alps in a tearing hurry, and join up with Catulus Caesar before Boiorix reaches Lake Benacus.”

Sulla raised an eyebrow. “It won’t happen that way,” he said, voice certain.

Marius sighed. “I knew you were going to say that!”

“I knew you knew I was going to say that,” said Sulla, grinning. “It isn’t likely that either of the two divisions traveling without Boiorix himself will make better time than the Cimbri. The trouble is, there’s not going to be enough time for you to be in each place at the right moment.”

“Then I stay here and wait for Teutobod,” said Marius, making up his mind. “This army knows every blade of grass and twig of tree between Massilia and Arausio, and the men need a victory badly after two years of inaction. Their chances of victory are very good here. So here I must stay.”

“I note the ‘I,’ Gaius Marius,” said Sulla gently. “Do you have something else for me to do?”

“I do. I’m sorry, Lucius Cornelius, to cheat you of a well-deserved chance to swipe a few Teutones, but I think I must send you to serve Catulus Caesar as his senior legate. He’ll stomach you in that role; you’re a patrician,” said Marius.

Bitterly disappointed, Sulla looked down at his hands. ‘ ‘What help can I possibly be when I’m serving in the wrong army?”

“I wouldn’t worry so much if I didn’t see all the symptoms of Silanus, Cassius, Caepio, and Mallius Maximus in my junior consul. But I do, Lucius Cornelius, I do! Catulus Caesar has no grasp either of strategy or of tactics—he thinks the gods popped them into his brain when they ordained his high birth, and that when the time comes, they’ll be there. But it isn’t like that, as you well know!”

“Yes, I do,” said Sulla.

“If Boiorix and Catulus Caesar meet before I can get across Italian Gaul, Catulus Caesar is going to commit some ghastly military blunder, and lose his army. And if he’s allowed to do that, I don’t see how we can win. The Cimbri are the best led of the three branches, and the most numerous. Added to which, I don’t know the lie of the land anywhere in Italian Gaul on the far side of the Padus. If I can beat the Teutones with less than forty thousand men, it’s because I know the country.”

Sulla tried to stare his superior out of countenance, but those eyebrows defeated him. “But what do you expect me to do?” he asked. “Catulus Caesar is wearing the general’s cape, not Cornelius Sulla! What do you expect me to do?”

Marius’s hand went out and closed fast about Sulla’s arm above the wrist. “If I knew that, I’d be able to control Catulus Caesar from here,” he said. “The fact remains, Lucius Cornelius, that you survived over a year of living among a barbarian enemy as one of them. Your wits are as sharp as your sword, and you use both superbly well. I have no doubt that whatever you might have to do to save Catulus Caesar from himself, you will do.”

Sulla sucked in a breath. “So my orders are to save his army at all costs?”

“At all costs.”

“Even the cost of Catulus Caesar?”

“Even the cost of Catulus Caesar.”

*

Spring wore itself out in a smother of flowers and summer came in as triumphantly as a general on his victory parade, then stretched itself out, hot and dry. Teutobod and his Teutones came steadily down through the lands of the Aedui and into the lands of the Allobroges, who occupied all the area between the upper Rhodanus and the Isara River, many miles to the south. They were warlike, the Allobroges, and had an abiding hatred for Rome and Romans; but the German host had journeyed through their lands three years earlier, and they did not want the Germans as their overlords. So there was hard fighting, and the Teutonic advance slowed down. Marius began to pace the floor of his command house, and wonder how things were with Sulla, now a part of Catulus Caesar’s army in Italian Gaul, camped along the Padus.

Catulus Caesar had marched up the Via Flaminia at the head of six understrength new legions late in June; the manpower shortage was so acute he could recruit no more. When he got to Bononia on the Via Aemilia, he took the Via Annia to the big manufacturing town of Patavium; this was well to the east of Lake Benacus, but a better route for an army on the march than the side roads and lanes and tracks with which Italian Gaul was mostly provided. From Patavium he marched on one of these poorly kept-up side roads to Verona, and there established his base camp.

Thus far Catulus Caesar had done nothing Sulla could fault, yet he understood better now why Marius had transferred him to Italian Gaul and what he had thought at the time was the lesser task. Militarily it might well be—yet Marius, Sulla thought, had not mistaken the cut of Catulus Caesar. Superbly aristocratic, arrogant, overconfident, he reminded Sulla vividly of Metellus Numidicus. The trouble was, the theater of war and the enemy Catulus Caesar faced were very much more dangerous than those Metellus Numidicus had faced; and Metellus Numidicus had owned Gaius Marius and Publius Rutilius Rufus as legates, besides harboring the memory of a salutary experience in a pigsty at Numantia. Whereas Catulus Caesar had never encountered a Gaius Marius on his way up the chain of military command; he had served his requisite terms as a cadet and then as a tribune of the soldiers with lesser men engaged in lesser wars—Macedonia, Spain. War on a grand scale had always eluded him.

His reception of Sulla had not been promising, as he had sorted out his legates before leaving Rome, and when he reached Bononia found Sulla waiting for him with a directive from the commander-in-chief, Gaius Marius, to the effect that Lucius Cornelius Sulla was appointed senior legate and second-in-command. The action was arbitrary and highhanded, but of course Marius had had no choice; Catulus Caesar’s manner toward Sulla was freezing, and his conduct obstructive. Only Sulla’s birth stood him in good stead, but even that was weakened by his past history of low living. There was also a tiny streak of envy in Catulus Caesar, for in Sulla he saw a man who had not only seen major actions in major theaters, but had also pulled off a brilliant coup in spying on the Germans. Had he only known of Sulla’s real role in that spying, he would have been even more mistrustful and suspicious of Sulla than he already was.

In fact, Marius had displayed his usual genius in sending Sulla rather than Manius Aquillius, who might also have proven his worth as a watchdog-cum-guardian; for Sulla grated on Catulus Caesar’s nerves, rather as if out of the corner of Catulus Caesar’s eye he was always conscious that a white pard stalked him—yet when he turned to confront the thing, it wasn’t there. No senior legate was ever more helpful; no senior legate was ever more willing to take the burdens of day-to-day administration and supervision of the army from a busy general’s shoulders. And yet—and yet—Catulus Caesar knew something was wrong. Why should Gaius Marius have sent this fellow at all, unless he was up to something devious?

It was no part of Sulla’s plan to settle Catulus Caesar down, allay his fears and suspicions; on the contrary, what Sulla aimed to do was keep Catulus Caesar fearful and suspicious, and thus gain a mental ascendancy over him which when necessary—if necessary—he could bring to bear. And in the meantime he made it his business to get to know every military tribune and centurion in the army, and a great many of the ranker soldiers as well. Left to his own devices by Catulus Caesar in the matter of routine training and drilling once camp was established near Verona, Sulla became the senior legate everyone below the rank of legate knew, respected, trusted. It was very necessary that this happen, in case he was obliged to eliminate Catulus Caesar.

Not that he had any intention of killing or maiming Catulus Caesar; he was enough of a patrician to want to protect his fellow noblemen, even from themselves. Affection for Catulus Caesar he could not feel; affection for that man’s class he did.

*

The Cimbri had done well under the leadership of Boiorix, who had guided both his own division and that of Getorix as far as the confluence of the Danubius with the Aenus; at that point he left Getorix with a relatively short journey to complete on his own, while the Cimbri turned south down the Aenus. Soon they were passing through the alpine lands peopled by a tribe of Celts called the Brenni, after the first Brennus. They controlled the Pass of Brennus, the lowest of all the passes into Italian Gaul, but were in no condition to prevent Boiorix and his Cimbri from using it.

In late Quinctilis of the calendar, the Cimbri reached the Athesis River where it joined the Isarcus, the stream they had followed down from the Pass of Brennus. Here in verdant alpine meadows they spread out a little, and looked up to the height of the mountains against a rich and cloudless sky. And here the scouts Sulla had sent out discovered them.

Though he had thought himself prepared for every contingency, Sulla hadn’t dreamed of the one he now was called upon to cope with; for he didn’t yet know Catulus Caesar well enough to predict how he would react to the news that the Cimbri were at the head of the Athesis Valley and about to invade Italian Gaul.

“So long as I live, no German foot will touch Italian soil!” said Catulus Caesar in ringing tones when the matter was discussed in council. “No German foot will touch Italian soil!” he said again, rising majestically from his chair and looking at each of his senior officers in turn. “We march.”

Sulla stared. “We march?” he asked. “We march where?”

“Up the Athesis, of course,” said Catulus Caesar, with a look on his face that said he considered Sulla a fool. “I shall turn the Germans back across the Alps before an early snow makes that impossible.”

“How far up the Athesis?” Sulla asked.

“Until we meet them.”

“In a narrow valley like the Athesis?”

“Certainly,” said Catulus Caesar. “We’ll be in much better case than the Germans. We’re a disciplined army; they’re a vast and unorganized mob. It’s our best chance.”

“Our best chance is where the legions have room to deploy,” said Sulla.

“There’s more than enough room along the Athesis for as much deployment as we’ll need.” And Catulus Caesar would hear no further argument.

Sulla left the council with mind reeling, the plans he had formulated to deal with the Cimbri all worse than useless; he had rehearsed how he would go about feeding whichever one of his alternatives would work the best to Catulus Caesar so that Catulus Caesar thought the scheme was his. Now Sulla found himself with no plan, and could formulate no plan. Not until he managed to persuade Catulus Caesar to change his mind.

But Catulus Caesar would not change his mind. He uprooted the army and made it march upstream along the Athesis where that river flowed a few miles to the east of Lake Benacus, the biggest of the exquisite alpine lakes which filled the laps of the foothills of the Italian Alps. And the further the little army—it contained twenty-two thousand soldiers, two thousand cavalry, and some eight thousand noncombatants—marched northward, the narrower and more forbidding the valley of the Athesis grew.

Finally Catulus Caesar reached the trading post called Tridentum. Here three mighty alps reared up, three jagged broken fangs which had given the area its name of Three Teeth. The Athesis now ran very deep and fast and strong, for its sources lay in mountains where the snows never melted fully, and so fed the river all year round. Beyond Tridentum the valley closed in even more, the road which wound down it to the village petering out where the river roared in full spate beneath a long wooden bridge set on stone piers.

Riding ahead with his senior officers, Catulus Caesar sat his horse gazing around him, and nodding in satisfaction.

“It reminds me of Thermopylae,” he said. “This is the ideal place to hold the Germans back until they give up and turn north again.”

“The Spartans holding Thermopylae all died,” said Sulla.

Catulus Caesar raised his brows haughtily. “And what does that matter, if the Germans are pushed back?”

“But they’re not going to turn back, Quintus Lutatius! Turn back at this time of year, with nothing but snow to their north, their provisions low, and all the grass and grain of Italian Gaul not many miles away to their south?” Sulla shook his head vehemently. “We won’t stop them here,” he said.

The other officers stirred restlessly; all of them had caught Sulla’s jitters since the march up the Athesis began and their common sense screamed that Catulus Caesar’s actions were foolish. Nor had Sulla concealed his jitters from them; if he had to prevent Catulus Caesar from losing his army, he would need the support of Catulus Caesar’s senior staff.

“We fight here,” Catulus Caesar said, and would not be budged. His mind was full of visions of the immortal Leonidas and his tiny band of Spartans; what did it matter if the body died untimely, when the reward was enduring fame?

The Cimbri were very close. It would have been impossible for the Roman army to have marched further north than Tridentum, even if Catulus Caesar had wished it. Despite this, Catulus Caesar insisted upon crossing the bridge with his whole force, and putting it into camp on the wrong side of the river, in a place so narrow the camp stretched for miles north to south, for each legion was strung behind its neighbor, with the last legion bivouacking near the bridge.

“I have been atrociously spoiled,” said Sulla to the primus pilus centurion of the legion closest to the bridge, a sturdy steady Samnite from Atina named Gnaeus Petreius; his legion was Samnite too, composed of Samnite Head Count, and classified as an auxiliary.

“How’ve you been spoiled?” asked Gnaeus Petreius, staring at the flashing water from the side of the bridge; it had no railing, just a low kerb made from logs.

“I’ve soldiered under none but Gaius Marius,” Sulla said.

“Half your luck,” said Gnaeus Petreius. “I was hoping I’d get the chance.” He grunted, a derisive sound. “But I don’t think any of us will, Lucius Cornelius.”

They were standing with a third man, the commander of the legion, who was an elected tribune of the soldiers. None other than Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Junior, son of the Leader of the House—and a keen disappointment to his doughty father. Scaurus Junior turned now from his own contemplation of the river to look at his chief centurion.

“What do you mean, none of us will?” he asked.

Gnaeus Petreius grunted again. “We’re all going to die here, tribunus.”

“Die? All of us? Why?”

“Gnaeus Petreius means, young Marcus Aemilius,” said Sulla grimly, “that we have been led into an impossible military situation by yet another highborn incompetent.”

“No, you’re quite mistaken!” cried young Scaurus eagerly. ‘ ‘I noticed that you didn’t seem to understand Quintus Lutatius’s strategy, Lucius Cornelius, when he explained it to us.”

Sulla winked at the centurion. “You explain it, then, tribunus militum! I’m all agog.”

“Well, there are four hundred thousand Germans, and only twenty-four thousand of us. So we can’t possibly face them on an open battlefield,” said young Scaurus, emboldened by the intent stares of these two Military Men. “The only way we can possibly beat them is to squeeze them up into a front no wider than our own army can span, and hammer at that front with all our superior skill. When they realize we won’t be budged—why, they’ll do the usual German thing, and turn back.”

“So that’s how you see it,” said Gnaeus Petreius.

“That’s how it is!” said young Scaurus impatiently.

“That’s how it is!” said Sulla, beginning to laugh.

“That’s how it is,” said Gnaeus Petreius, laughing too.

Young Scaurus stood watching them in bewilderment, their amusement filling him with fear. “Please, why is it so funny?”

Sulla wiped his eyes. “It’s funny, young Scaurus, because it’s hopelessly naive.” His hand went up, swept the mountain flanks on either side like a painter’s brush. “Look up there! What do you see?”

“Mountains,” said young Scaurus, bewilderment increasing.

“Footpaths, bridle tracks, cattle trails, that’s what we see!” said Sulla. “Haven’t you noticed those frilly little terraces that make the mountains look like Minoan skirts? All the Cimbri have to do is take to the heights along the terraces and they’ll outflank us in three days—and then, young Marcus Aemilius, we’ll be between the hammer and the anvil. Squashed flatter than a beetle underfoot.”

Young Scaurus turned so white that Sulla and Petreius moved automatically to make sure he didn’t pitch overboard into the water, for nothing falling into that stream would survive.

“Our general has made a bad plan,” said Sulla harshly. “We should have waited for the Cimbri between Verona and Lake Benacus, where we would have had a thousand alternatives to trap them properly, and enough ground to spring our trap.”

“Why doesn’t someone tell Quintus Lutatius, then?” young Scaurus whispered.

“Because he’s just another stiff-rumped consul,” said Sulla. “He doesn’t want to hear anything except the gibberish inside his own head. If he were a Gaius Marius, he’d listen. But that’s a non sequitur—Gaius Marius wouldn’t have needed telling! No, young Marcus Aemilius, our general Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar thinks it best to fight as at Thermopylae. And if you remember your history, you’ll know that one little footpath around the mountain was enough to undo Leonidas.”

Young Scaurus gagged. “Excuse me!” he gasped, and bolted for his tent.

Sulla and Petreius watched him weave along trying to hold his gorge.

“This isn’t an army, it’s a fiasco,” said Petreius.

“No, it’s a good little army,” Sulla contradicted. “The leaders are the fiasco.’’

“Except for you, Lucius Cornelius.”

“Except for me.”

“You’ve got something in your mind,” Petreius said.

“Indeed I do.” And Sulla smiled to show his long teeth.

“Am I allowed to ask what it is?”

“I think so, Gnaeus Petreius. But I’d rather answer you at—dusk, shall we say? In the assembly forum of your own Samnite legion’s camp,” said Sulla. “You and I are going to spend the rest of the afternoon summoning every primus pilus and chief cohort centurion to a meeting there at dusk.” He calculated swiftly under his breath. “That’s about seventy men. But they’re the seventy who really count. Now on your way, Gnaeus Petreius! You take the three legions at this end of the valley, and I’ll hop on my trusty mule and take the three at the far end.”

The Cimbri had arrived that same day just to the north of Catulus Caesar’s six legions, boiling into the valley far ahead of their wagons to be brought up short by the ramparts of a Roman camp. And there remained, boiling, while the word flew through the legions and sightseers made their way north to peer over the wicker breastworks at the chilling sight of more men than any Roman had ever seen—and gigantic men at that.

Sulla’s meeting in the assembly forum of the Samnite legion’s camp took very little time. When it was over, there was still sufficient light in the sky for those who attended it to follow Sulla across the bridge and into the village of Tridentum, where Catulus Caesar had established his headquarters in the local magistrate’s house. Catulus Caesar had called a meeting of his own to discuss the arrival of the Cimbri, and was busy complaining about the absence of his second-in-command when Sulla walked into the crowded room.

“I would appreciate punctuality, Lucius Cornelius,” he said frigidly. “Please sit down, then we can get down to the business of planning our attack tomorrow.”

“Sorry, but I haven’t time to sit down,” said Sulla, who wasn’t wearing a cuirass, but was clad in his leather undersuit and pteryges, and had sword and dagger belted about him.

“If you have more important things to do, then go!” said Catulus Caesar, face mottling.

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere,” said Sulla, smiling. “The important things I have to do are right here in this room, and the most important thing of all is that there will be no battle tomorrow, Quintus Lutatius.”

Catulus Caesar got to his feet. “No battle? Why?”

“Because you have a mutiny on your hands, and I’m its instigator.’’ Sulla drew his sword. “Come in, centuriones!’’ he called. “It’ll be a bit of a crush, but we’ll all fit.”

None of the original inhabitants of the room said a word, Catulus Caesar because he was too angry, the rest either because they were too relieved—not all the senior staff were happy about the projected battle of the morrow—or too bewildered. Seventy centurions filed through the door and stood densely packed behind and to both sides of Sulla, thus leaving about three feet of vacant space between themselves and Catulus Caesar’s senior staff—who were now all standing, literally with their backs against the wall.

“You’ll be thrown off the Tarpeian Rock for this!” said Catulus Caesar.

“If I have to, so be it,” said Sulla, and sheathed his sword. “But when is a mutiny really a mutiny, Quintus Lutatius? How far can a soldier be expected to go in blind obedience? Is it true patriotism to go willingly to death when the general issuing the orders is a military imbecile?”

It was nakedly obvious that Catulus Caesar just did not know what to say, could not find the perfect rejoinder to such brutal honesty. On the other hand, he was too proud to splutter inarticulate expostulations, and too sure of his ground to make no reply at all. So in the end he said, withcold dignity, “This is untenable, Lucius Cornelius!”

Sulla nodded. “I agree, it is untenable. In fact, our whole presence here in Tridentum is untenable. Tomorrow the Cimbri are going to find the hundreds of paths along the slopes of the mountains made by cattle, sheep, horses, wolves. Not one Anopaea, but hundreds of Anopaeas! You are not a Spartan, Quintus Lutatius, you’re a Roman, and I’m surprised your memories of Thermopylae are Spartan rather than Roman! Didn’t you learn how Cato the Censor used the Anopaea footpath to outflank King Antiochus? Or did your tutor feel Cato the Censor was too lowborn to serve as an example of anything beyond hubris? It’s Cato the Censor at Thermopylae I admire, not Leonidas and his royal guard, dying to the last man! The Spartans were willing to die to the last man simply to delay the Persians long enough for the Greek fleet to ready itself at Artemisium. Only it didn’t work, Quintus Lutatius. It—didn’t—work! The Greek fleet perished, and Leonidas died for nothing. And did Thermopylae influence the course of the war against the Persians? Of course it didn’t! When the next Greek fleet won at Salamis, there was no prelude at Thermopylae. Can you honestly say you prefer the suicidal gallantry of Leonidas to the strategic brilliance of Themistocles?”

“You mistake the situation,” said Catulus Caesar stiffly, his personal pride in tatters thanks to this red-haired Ulyssean trickster; for the truth was that he cared more to extricate himself with dignitas and auctoritas unimpaired than he did about the fate of either his army or the Cimbri.

“No, Quintus Lutatius, you mistake the situation,” said Sulla. “Your army is now my army by right of mutiny. When Gaius Marius sent me here”—he dropped the name with dulcet clarity into the pool of silence—”I came with only one order. Namely, to make sure this army survives intact until Gaius Marius can take it into his personal care— and he cannot do that until he has defeated the Teutones. Gaius Marius is our commander-in-chief, Quintus Lutatius, and I am acting under his orders at this very moment. When his orders conflict with yours, I obey his orders, not yours. If I permit this foolhardy escapade to continue, this army will lie dead on the field of Tridentum. Well, there is not going to be a field of Tridentum. This army is going to retreat tonight. In one piece. And live to fight another day, when the chances of victory are infinitely better.”

“I vowed no German foot would tread on Italian soil,” said Catulus Caesar, “and I will not be forsworn.”

“The decision isn’t your to make, Quintus Lutatius, so you are not forsworn,” said Sulla.

Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar was one of those old-guard senators who refused to wear a golden ring as an insignia of his senatorship; instead, he wore the ancient iron ring all senators had once worn, so when he moved his right hand imperiously at the ogling men filling the room, his index finger didn’t flash a yellow beam—it wrote a dull grey blur upon the air. Utterly still until they saw that grey blur, the men now stirred, moved, sighed.

“Leave us, all of you,” said Catulus Caesar. “Wait outside. I wish to speak alone with Lucius Cornelius.”

The centurions turned and filed out, the tribunes of the soldiers followed, and Catulus Caesar’s personal staff, and his senior legates. When only Catulus Caesar and Sulla remained, Catulus Caesar returned to his chair and sat down heavily.

He was caught in a cleft stick, and he knew it. Pride had led him up the Athesis; not pride in Rome or in his army, but that pride of person which had prompted him to announce no German foot should tread Italian soil—and then prevented his recanting, even for the sake of Rome or for his army. The further he had penetrated up the valley, the stronger his feeling became that he had blundered; and yet pride of person would not allow him to admit the blunder. Higher and higher up the river Athesis, lower and lower his spirits. So when he came to Tridentum and thought how like Thermopylae it was—though of course in strictly geographic terms it was not like Thermopylae at all—he conceived a worthy death for all concerned, and thereby salvaged his honor, that fatal personal pride. Just as Thermopylae rang down the ages, so too would Tridentum. The fall of the gallant few confronted with the overwhelming many. Stranger, go tell the Romans that here we lie in obedience to their command! With a magnificent monument, and pilgrimages, and immortal epic poems.

The sight of the Cimbri spilling into the northern end of the valley brought him to his senses, then Sulla completed the process. For of course he did have eyes, and there was a brain behind them, even if it was a brain too easily clouded by the vastness of his own dignitas; the eyes had taken note of the many terraces making giant steps out of the steep green slopes above, and the brain had understood how quickly the Cimbric warriors could outflank them. This was no gorge with cliffs; it was simply a narrow alpine valley unsuitable for deploying an army because its pastures sloped upward at an angle quite impossible for troops to take in rank and file, let alone wheel and turn in proper maneuvers.

What he hadn’t been able to see was how to extricate himself from his dilemma without losing face, and at first Sulla’s invasion of his pre-battle conference had seemed the perfect answer; he could blame it on a mutiny, and thunder in the House, and arrange for the treason trials of every officer involved, from Sulla down to the least centurion. But that solution hadn’t lasted more than a very few moments. Mutiny was the most serious crime in the military manual, but a mutiny which saw him standing alone against every other officer in his entire army (he had quickly seen from their faces that none of the men who had been closeted with him when Sulla walked in would refuse to join the mutiny) smacked a great deal more of common sense overcoming monumental stupidity. If there had never been an Arausio—if Caepio and Mallius Maximus had not forever besmirched the concept of the Roman general’s imperium in the eyes of the Roman People—and even some factions within the Senate—then it might have been different. As it was, he understood very quickly after Sulla’s appearance that were he to continue to insist a mutiny had taken place, it was he himself who would suffer in the eyes of the Roman world, he himself who might well end in being arraigned in the special treason court set up by Saturninus.

Consequently, Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar drew a deep breath and embarked upon conciliation. “Let me hear no more talk of mutiny, Lucius Cornelius,” he said. “There was no need for you to make your feeling so public. You should have come to see me privately. Had you only done so, matters could have been sorted out between the two of us alone.”

“I disagree, Quintus Lutatius,” said Sulla smoothly. “If I had come to you privately, you’d have sent me about my business. You needed an object lesson.”

Catulus Caesar’s lips tightened; he looked down his long Roman nose, a handsome member of a handsome clan, fair of hair and blue of eye, his hauteur armed for battle. “You’ve been with Gaius Marius far too long, you know,” he said. “This sort of conduct doesn’t accord with your patrician status.”

Sulla slapped his hand against his leather skirt of straps so loudly its fringes and metal ornaments clattered. “Oh, for the sake of all the gods, let’s forget this family claptrap, Quintus Lutatius! I’m fed up to vomit-point with exclusivity! And before you start ranting on about our mutual superior, Gaius Marius, let me remind you that when it comes to soldiering and generaling, he outshines us the way the Alexandrian lighthouse dims a single piddling candle! You’re not a natural military man any more than I am! But where I have the advantage of you is that I learned my craft in apprenticeship to the lighthouse of Alexandria, so my candle burns brighter than yours!”

“That man is overrated!” said Catulus Caesar between his clenched teeth.

“Oh no, he’s not! Bleat and bellow about it as hard as you like, Quintus Lutatius, Gaius Marius is the First Man in Rome! The man from Arpinum took on the lot of you single-handed, and beat you hollow.”

“I’m surprised you’re such an adherent—but I promise you, Lucius Cornelius, that I won’t ever forget it.”

“I’ll bet you won’t,” said Sulla grimly.

“I do advise you, Lucius Cornelius, to change your loyalties somewhat in years to come,” Catulus Caesar said. “If you don’t, you’ll never become praetor, let alone consul!”

“Oh, I do like naked threats!” said Sulla conversationally. “Who are you trying to fool? I have the birth, and if the time should come when it’s to your advantage to woo me, woo me you will!” He looked at Catulus Caesar slyly. “One day, you know, I’ll be the First Man in Rome. The tallest tree in the world, just like Gaius Marius. And the thing about trees so tall is that no one can chop them down. When they fall, they fall because they rot from within.”

Catulus Caesar did not answer, so Sulla flung himself into a chair and leaned forward to pour himself wine.

“Now about our mutiny, Quintus Lutatius. Disabuse yourself of any belief you might be cherishing that I don’t have the gumption to follow this through to its bitterest end.”

“I admit I don’t know you at all, Lucius Cornelius, but I’ve got sufficient measure of your steel these last couple of months to understand there’s very little you’re unwilling to do to get your own way,’’ said Catulus Caesar. He looked down at his old iron senator’s ring as if he could draw inspiration from it. “I said before, and I say it again now, let there be no more talk of mutiny.’’ He swallowed audibly. “I shall abide by the army’s decision to retreat. On one condition. That the word ‘mutiny’ is never mentioned to anyone ever again.”

“On behalf of the army, I agree,” said Sulla.

“I would like to order the retreat personally. After that— I presume your strategy is already worked out?”

“It’s absolutely necessary that you order the retreat personally, Quintus Lutatius. Including to the men waiting outside for us to emerge,” said Sulla. “And yes, I do have a strategy worked out. A very simple strategy. At dawn the army will pull up stakes and move out as quickly as it possibly can. Everyone must be over the bridge and south of Tridentum before tomorrow’s nightfall. The Samnite auxiliaries are lying closest to the bridge, therefore they can guard it until everyone else is over, then cross it themselves in last place. I need the entire corps of engineers immediately, because the moment the last Samnite is over the bridge, it must come down. The pity of it is that it’s built on stone piers we won’t have the opportunity to dismantle, so the Germans will be able to rebuild the bridge. However, they’re not engineers, and that means the job will take them far longer than it would us, and their structure may fall apart a few times as Boiorix brings his people across. If he wants to go south, he has to cross the river here at Tridentum. So we must slow him down.”

Catulus Caesar rose to his feet. “Then let’s get this farce over and done with.” He walked outside and stood calmly, completely in control of his outer self; the repairing of dignitas and auctoritas was already beginning. “Our position here is untenable, so I am ordering a full retreat,” he said, crisply and clearly. “I have given Lucius Cornelius full instructions as to how to proceed, so you will take your orders from him. However, I wish to make it plain that the word ‘mutiny’ has never been spoken. Is that understood?”

The officers murmured assent, profoundly glad that the word “mutiny” could be forgotten.

Catulus Caesar turned to go back inside. “You are dismissed,” he said over his shoulder.

As the group scattered, Gnaeus Petreius fell in beside Sulla, and walked with him toward the bridge. “That went pretty well, I consider, Lucius Cornelius. He did better than I thought he would. Better than others of his kind, I swear.’’

“Oh, he has a brain behind all that grand manner,” said Sulla easily. “But he’s right, ‘mutiny’ is a word never spoken.”

“You won’t hear it from my lips!” said Petreius fervently.

It was fully dark, but the bridge was lit by torches, so they crossed its chinked logs without difficulty. At its far end Sulla ran ahead of the centurions and tribunes following him and Petreius, and turned round to face them.

“All troops ready to roll at the first sign of light,” he said. “Corps of engineers and all centurions are to report to me here one hour before first light. Tribunes of the soldiers, come with me now.”

“Oh, I’m glad we’ve got him!” said Gnaeus Petreius to his second centurion.

“So am I, but I’m not a bit glad we’ve got him,” said the second centurion, pointing in the direction of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Junior, hurrying after Sulla and his fellow tribunes.

Petreius grunted. “I agree, he is a bit of a worry. Still, I’ll keep an eye on him tomorrow. ‘Mutiny’ may be a word none of us has heard, but our men of Samnium aren’t going to be misled by a Roman idiot, no matter who his father is.”

*

At dawn the legions began to move out. The retreat began—as all maneuvers did among well-trained Roman troops—with remarkable silence and no confusion whatsoever. The legion farthest from the bridge crossed it first, then was followed by the legion next farthest from the bridge, so that the army in effect rolled itself up like a carpet. Luckily the baggage train and all the beasts of burden save a handful of horses reserved for the use of the most senior officers had been kept to the south of the village and the bridge; Sulla got these started down the road at first light well ahead of the legions, and had issued orders that half of the army would bypass the baggage train when it caught up, while the other half followed it all the way down to Verona. For if they got clear of Tridentum, Sulla knew the Cimbri wouldn’t move fast enough to see their dust.

As it turned out, the Cimbri were so busy scouting the tracks terracing the mountainsides that it was a full hour after the sun rose before they realized the Roman force was in retreat. Then confusion reigned until Boiorix arrived in person and got his enormous mass of men into some semblance of order. In the meantime the Roman column had indeed moved fast; when the Cimbri finally formed up to attack, the farthest legion from the bridge was already marching at the double across it.

The corps of engineers had worked feverishly among the beams and struts beneath the causeway from well before dawn.

“It’s always the same!” complained the chief of engineers to Sulla when he came to see how the work was progressing. “I always have to deal with a properly built Roman bridge just when I want the wretched thing to fall apart with a gentle tug.”

“Can you do it?” asked Sulla.

“Hope so, legatus! There’s not a bit of lashing or a bolt in the thing, though. Proper sockets and tongues, everything rabbeted together to hold it down, not up. So I can’t pull it apart in a hurry without a bigger crane than any we’ve got with us, even if I had time to assemble a crane that big, which I don’t. No, it’s the hard way, I’m afraid, and that means it’s going to be a bit wobbly when the last of our men are tramping across it,” said the chief engineer.

Sulla frowned. “What’s the hard way?”

“We’re sawing through the main struts and beams.”

“Then keep at it, man! I’ve got a hundred oxen coming to give you that gentle tug—enough?”

“It’ll have to be,” said the chief engineer, and moved off to look at the job from a different angle.

The Cimbric cavalry came shrieking and screaming down the valley, taking the deserted hurdles of five Roman camps in their stride, for these were routine walls and ditches; there hadn’t been sufficient time to build anything else. Only the Samnite legion was left on the far side of the bridge, and was actually in the process of marching out of the main gate of its camp when the Cimbri flashed between them and the bridge, cutting them off. The Samnites turned files into ranks and prepared to withstand the coming charge, spears at the ready, faces set.

Watching helplessly from the opposite side of the bridge, Sulla waited for the first rush of cavalry to go by and wheel their horses, straining to see what the Samnite legion commander was going to do. This was young Scaurus, and now Sulla began to fret that he hadn’t removed this timid son of an intrepid father and taken over command himself. But it was too late now; he couldn’t recross the bridge because he didn’t have enough men with him, and he didn’t trust Catulus Caesar to see to the retreat, which meant he himself had to survive. Nor did he want to draw the Cimbri’s attention to the existence of the bridge, for if they turned their barbarian eyes toward it, there plain to see were five Roman legions and a baggage train marching south and begging for pursuit. If necessary, he decided, he would have the oxen start to haul on the chains connecting them to the undermined bridge; but the moment he did that, there was no hope for the Samnite legion.

“Lead a charge, young Scaurus, lead a charge north!” he found himself muttering. “Roll them back, get your men to the bridge!”

The Cimbric cavalry was turning, its front ranks carried far past the Samnite camp by the impetus of their charge, and the ranks in the rear pulled back on their mounts to give the front ranks room to turn and gallop back; the whole press would then fall upon the Samnite camp, leap their horses up and over, and trample everything down so that the hordes of foot warriors could finish things off. From that point on, the cavalry would turn itself into a giant scoop, pushing the Samnites north into the mass of Cimbric infantry.

The only chance the Samnites had was to drive across the front of the rear ranks of horsemen and cut the front ranks off from this reinforcement, then bring down the mounts of both ranks with their spears, while those not engaged made a dash for the bridge. But where was young Scaurus? Why wasn’t he doing it? A few moments more, and it would be too late!

The cheering of the three centuries of men Sulla had with him actually preceded his own view of the Samnite charge, for he was looking for a horse-mounted tribune of the soldiers, while the charge was led by a man on foot. Gnaeus Petreius, the Samnite primus pilus centurion.

Yelling along with the rest of his men, Sulla hopped and danced from one foot to the other as the Samnites not engaged began to stream across the bridge at a run, packing their numbers so close together that they gave the Cimbri no room to cut them off a second time. The front ranks of Cimbric horses were falling in hundreds before the rain of Samnite spears, warriors struggling to free themselves from fallen steeds, tangling themselves into an ever-increasing chaos as more Samnite spears hurtled to stick into heaving equine sides, chests, rumps, necks, flanks; and the rear ranks of Cimbric horse penned on the other side of the Samnites fared no better. In the end it was their own fallen cavalry which kept the Cimbric foot away. And Gnaeus Petreius came across the bridge behind the last of his men with hardly a German in pursuit.

The oxen had been putting their shoulders to the job long before this happened, for the hundred beasts harnessed two abreast couldn’t gather impetus in under many moments, the lead beasts pulling, then the next, and so on down the fifty pairs until the chains tightened and the bridge began to feel the strain. Being a good stout Roman bridge, it held for much longer than even the chief of engineers—a pessimistic fellow, like all his breed—had thought; but eventually one of the struts parted company with its companions, and amid groans, snaps, pops, and roars the Tridentine bridge across the Athesis gave way. Its timbers tumbled into the torrent and whirled away downstream like straws bobbing about in a garden fountain.

Gnaeus Petreius was wounded in the side, but not badly; Sulla found him sitting while the legion’s surgeons peeled away his mail shirt, his face streaked with a mixture of mud, sweat, and horse dung, but looking remarkably fit and alert nonetheless.

“Don’t touch that wound until you’ve got him clean, you mentulae!” Sulla snarled. “Wash every last bit of dung off him first! He’s not going to bleed to death, are you, Gnaeus Petreius?”

“Not Gnaeus Petreius!” said the centurion, grinning broadly. “We did it, eh, Lucius Cornelius? We got ‘em all across, and only a handful of dead on the other side!”

Sulla sank down beside him and leaned his head too close to the centurion’s to permit of anyone’s overhearing. “What happened to young Scaurus?”

Down went Petreius’s lips. “Got a dose of the shits while he should have been thinking, then when I kept pushing him as to what to do, he passed out on me. Just fell over in a faint. He’s all right, poor young chap; some of the lads carried him over the bridge. Pity, but there it is. None of his dad’s guts, none at all. Ought to have been a librarian.”

“I can’t tell you how glad I am you were there, and not some other primus pilus. I just didn’t think! The moment I did, I kicked myself because I didn’t relieve him of the command myself,” said Sulla.

“Doesn’t matter, Lucius Cornelius, it all worked out in the end. At least this way, he knows his limitations.”

The surgeons were back with enough water and sponges to wash off a dozen men; Sulla got up to let them get to work, extending his right arm. Gnaeus Petreius held up his own, and the two men expressed everything they felt in that handshake.

“It’s the grass crown for you,” said Sulla.

“No!” said Petreius, looking embarrassed.

“But yes. You saved a whole legion from death, Gnaeus Petreius, and when a man single-handedly saves a whole legion from death, he wears the grass crown. I shall see to it myself,” said Sulla.

Was that the grass crown Julilla had seen in his future all those years ago? wondered Sulla as he headed off down the slope to the town to organize wagon transportation for Gnaeus Petreius, the hero of Tridentum. Poor Julilla! Poor, poor Julilla… She never had managed to do anything right, so perhaps that extended to her brushes against the strange manifestations of Fortune. The sole Julia not born with the gift of making her men happy, that had been Julilla. Then his mind passed to other, more important things; Lucius Cornelius Sulla was not about to start blaming himself for Julilla. Her fate had nothing to do with him; she brought it on herself.

*

Catulus Caesar had his army back in the camp outside Verona before Boiorix was able to get the last of his wagons across the last of several rickety bridges, and commence the downhill trek to the lush plains of the Padus River. At first Catulus Caesar had insisted they stand and fight the Cimbri near Lake Benacus, but Sulla, firmly in the saddle now, would not countenance it. Instead, he made Catulus Caesar send word to every city and town and village from Aquileia in the east to Comum and Mediolanum in the west: Italian Gaul-across-the-Padus was to be evacuated by all Roman citizens, Latin Rights holders, and Gauls unwilling to fraternize with the Germans. The refugees were to move south of the Padus and leave Italian Gaul-across-the-Padus completely to the Cimbri.

“They’ll be like pigs in acorn mush,” said Sulla confidently, veteran of a year of living among the Cimbri. “When they get a taste of the pastures and the peace between Lake Benacus and the north bank of the Padus, Boiorix won’t be able to hold his people together. They’ll scatter in a hundred different directions, you wait and see.”

“Looting, wrecking, burning,” said Catulus Caesar.

“That—and forgetting what they’re supposed to be doing, namely, invading Italy. Cheer up, Quintus Lutatius! At least it’s the most Gallic of the Gauls on the Italian side of the Alps, and they won’t cross the Padus until they’ve picked it as clean as a hungry man a chicken’s carcass. Our own people will be gone well ahead of the Germans, carrying everything they value. Their land will keep; we’ll get it back when Gaius Marius comes.”

Catulus Caesar winced, but held his tongue; he had learned how biting was Sulla’s tongue. But more than that, he had learned how ruthless was Sulla. How cold, how inflexible, how determined. An odd intimate for Gaius Marius, despite the fact they were brothers-in-law. Or had been brothers-in-law. Did Sulla get rid of his Julia too? wondered Catulus Caesar, who in the many hours of thought he expended upon Sulla had remembered a rumor that had circulated among the Julius Caesar brothers and their families around the time Sulla had emerged out of obscurity into public life, and married his Julia-Julilla. That he had found the money to enter public life by murdering his—mother?—stepmother?—mistress?—nephew? Well, when the time came to return to Rome, thought Catulus Caesar, he would make a point of making inquiries about that rumor. Oh, not to use it blatantly, or even right away; just to have ready for the future, when Lucius Cornelius might hope to run for praetor. Not aedile, let him have the joy of that—and the ruinous drain on his purse. Praetor. Yes, praetor.

When the legions had marched into camp outside Verona, Catulus Caesar knew the first thing he had to do was send word posthaste to Rome of the disaster up the Athesis; if he didn’t, he suspected Sulla would via Gaius Marius, so it was important that his be the first version Rome absorbed. With both the consuls in the field, a dispatch to the Senate was addressed to the Leader of the House, so to Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus did Catulus Caesar send his report, including with it a private letter which more accurately detailed what had actually occurred. And he entrusted the report and letter, heavily sealed, to young Scaurus, son of the Princeps Senatus, ordering him to take the packet to Rome at the gallop.

“He’s the best horseman we’ve got,” Catulus Caesar said blandly to Sulla.

Sulla eyed him with the same ironic, superior derision he had shown during their interview about the mutiny. “You know, Quintus Lutatius, you own the most exquisitely refined kind of cruelty I’ve ever encountered,” Sulla said.

“Do you wish to countermand the order?” asked Catulus Caesar, sneering. “You have the clout to do so.”

But Sulla shrugged, turned away. “It’s your army, Quintus Lutatius. Do what you like.”

And he had done what he liked, sent young Marcus Aemilius Scaurus posthaste to Rome bearing the news of his own disgrace.

“I have given you this duty, Marcus Aemilius Junior, because I cannot think of a worse punishment for a coward of your family background than to bring to his own father the news of both a military failure and a personal failure,” said Catulus Caesar in measured, pontifical tones.

Young Scaurus—pallid, hangdog, pounds lighter in weight than he had been two weeks earlier—stood to attention and tried not to look at his general. But when Catulus Caesar named the task, young Scaurus’s eyes—a paler, less beautiful version of his father’s green—dragged themselves unwillingly to Catulus Caesar’s haughty face.

“Please, Quintus Lutatius!” he gasped. “Please, I beg of you, send someone else! Let me face my father in my own time!”

“Your time, Marcus Aemilius Junior, is Rome’s time,” said Catulus Caesar icily, the contempt welling up in him. “You will ride at the gallop to Rome, and give the Princeps Senatus my consular dispatch. A coward in battle you may be, but you are one of the best horsemen we possess, and you have a name sufficiently illustrious to procure you good mounts all the way. You need have no fear, you know! The Germans are well to the north of us, so you’ll find none to threaten you in the south.”

Young Scaurus rode like a sack of meal in the saddle for mile after mile after mile, down the Via Annia and the Via Cassia to Rome, a shorter journey but a rougher. His head bobbed up and down in time to the gait of his horse, his teeth clicking together in a kind of heartbeat, curiously comforting. At times he talked to himself.

“If I had any courage there to screw up, don’t you think I would have found it?’’ he asked the phantom listeners in wind and road and sky. “What can I do when there is no courage in me, Father? Where does courage come from? Why did I not receive my share? How can I tell you of the pain and fear, the terror I felt when those awful savages came shrieking and screaming like the Furies? I couldn’t move! I couldn’t even control my bowels, let alone my heart! It swelled up and up and up until it burst, until I fell down inanimate, glad I was dead! And then I woke to find myself alive after all, still full of terror—my bowels still loose—the soldiers who carried me to safety washing themselves free of my stinking shit in the river under my very eyes, with such contempt, such loathing! Oh, Father, what is courage? Where did my share go? Father, listen to me, let me try to explain! How can you blame me for something I do not possess? Father, listen to me!”

But Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus did not listen. When his son arrived with the packet from Catulus Caesar he was in the Senate, and when he came home his son had bolted himself in his room, leaving a message with the steward for his father that he had brought a packet from the consul and would wait in his room until his father read it, and sent for him.

Scaurus chose to read the dispatch first, grim-faced, but thankful at least that the legions were safe. Then he read Catulus Caesar’s letter, lips uttering word after dreadful word out loud, shrinking further and further into his chair until he seemed but half his normal size, and the tears gathered in his eyes and fell with great blurry splashes onto the paper. Of course he had Catulus Caesar’s measure; that part did not surprise him, and he was profoundly thankful that a legate as strong and unafraid as Sulla had been on hand to protect those precious troops.

But he had thought his son would discover in the throes of a vital, last-ditch emergency that courage, that bravery Scaurus truly believed lived inside all men. Or all men named Aemilius, anyway. The boy was the only son he had sired—the only child, for that matter. And now his line would end in such disgrace, such ignominy—! Fitting it did, if such was the mettle of his son, his only child.

He drew a breath, and came to a decision. There would be no disguise, no coat of whitewash, no excuses, no dissimulation. Leave that kind of ploy to Catulus Caesar. His son was a proven coward; he had deserted his troops in their hour of gravest danger in a way more craven, more humiliating than mere flight—he had shit himself and fainted. His troops carried him to safety, when it should have been the other way around. The shame Scaurus resolved to bear with that courage he himself had always possessed. Let his son feel the scourge of a whole city’s scorn!

His tears dried, his face composed, he clapped his hands for his steward, and when the man came he found his master sitting erect in his chair, his hands folded loosely on the desk.

“Marcus Aemilius, your son is most anxious to see you,” said the steward, very aware something was wrong, for the young man was acting strangely.

“You may take a message to Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Junior,” said Scaurus stiffly, “to the effect that though I disown him, I will not strip him of our name. My son is a coward—a white-livered mongrel dog—but all of Rome shall know him a coward under our name. I will never see him again as long as I live, you will tell him. And tell him too that he is not welcome in this house, even as a beggar at its door. Tell him! Tell him I will never have him come into my presence again as long as I shall live! Go, tell him! Tell him!”

Shivering from the shock of it and weeping for the poor young man, of whom he was fond—and about whom he could have told the father any time during these past twenty years that his son had no courage, no strength, no internal resources—the steward went and told young Scaurus what his father had said.

“Thank you,” said young Scaurus, and closed his door, but did not bolt it.

When the steward ventured into his room several hours later because Scaurus had demanded to know whether his no-son had quit the house yet, he found young Scaurus dead upon the floor. The only quarry his sword deemed too unworthy to live turned out to be himself, so he bloodied it at last upon himself.

But Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus remained true to his words. He refused to see his son, even in death. And in the Senate he gave the litany of the disasters in Italian Gaul with all of his customary energy and spirit, including the hideously frank, unvarnished story of his son’s cowardice and suicide. He didn’t spare himself, nor did he show grief.

When after the meeting Scaurus made himself wait on the Senate steps for Metellus Numidicus, he did wonder if perhaps the gods had meted out so much courage to him that there was none left in the family cupboard for his son, so great was the fund of courage it took to wait there for Metellus Numidicus while the senators hustled themselves past him, pitying, anxious, shy, unwilling to stop.

“Oh, my dear Marcus!” cried Metellus Numidicus as soon as there were no ears to hear. “My dear, dear Marcus, what can I possibly say?”

“About my son, nothing,” said Scaurus, a thin splinter of warmth piercing the icy wastes inside his chest; how good it was to have friends! “About the Germans, how do we manage to keep Rome from panicking?”

“Oh, don’t worry your head about Rome,” said Metellus Numidicus comfortably. “Rome will survive. Panic today and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and by the next market day—business as usual! Have you ever known people to move because the place where they’re living is unusually prone to suffer earthquakes, or there’s a volcano belching outside the back door?”

“That’s true, they don’t. At least, not until a rafter falls down and squashes Granny, or the old girl falls into a pool of lava,” said Scaurus, profoundly glad to find that he could conduct a normal discussion, and even smile a little.

“We’ll survive, Marcus, never fear.” Metellus Numidicus swallowed, then demonstrated that he too was not without his share of courage by saying manfully, “Gaius Marius is still waiting for his share of the Germans to come. Now if he goes down to defeat—then we had better worry. Because if Gaius Marius can’t beat them, nobody can.”

Scaurus blinked, deeming Metellus Numidicus’s gesture so heroic he had better not comment; furthermore, he had better instruct his memory to forget for all eternity that Metellus Numidicus had ever ever ever admitted Gaius Marius was Rome’s best chance—and best general.

“Quintus, there is one thing I must mention about my son, and then we can close that book,” said Scaurus.

“What’s that?”

“Your niece—your ward, Metella Dalmatica. This wretched episode has caused you—and her—great inconvenience. But tell her she’s had a lucky escape. It would have been no joy to a Caecilia Metella to find herself married to a coward,” said Scaurus gruffly.

Suddenly he found himself walking alone, and turned to see Metellus Numidicus standing looking thunderstruck.

“Quintus? Quintus? Is anything the matter?” Scaurus asked, returning to his friend’s side.

“The matter?” asked Metellus Numidicus, returning to life. “Good Amor, no, nothing’s the matter! Oh, my dear, dear Marcus! I have just been visited by a splendid idea!”

“Oh?”

“Why don’t you marry my niece Dalmatica?”

Scaurus gaped. “I?”

“Yes, you! Here you are, a widower of long standing, and now with no child to inherit your name or your fortune. That, Marcus, is a tragedy,” said Metellus Numidicus in tones of great warmth and urgency. “She’s a sweet little girl, and so pretty! Come, Marcus, bury the past, start all over again! She’s very rich, into the bargain.”

“I’d be no better than that randy old goat Cato the Censor,” said Scaurus, just enough doubt in his voice to signal Metellus Numidicus that he might be won round if the offer was really a serious one. “Quintus, I am fifty-five years old!”

“You look good for another fifty-five years.”

“Look at me! Go on, look at me! Bald—a bit of a paunch—more wrinkled than Hannibal’s elephant—getting stooped—plagued by rheumatics and haemorrhoids alike— no, Quintus, no!”

“Dalmatica is young enough to think a grandfather exactly the right sort of husband,” said Metellus Numidicus. “Oh, Marcus, it would please me so much! Come on, what do you say?”

Scaurus clutched at his hairless pate, gasping, yet also beginning to feel a new wellspring trickle through him. “Do you honestly think it could work? Do you think I could have another family? I’d be dead before they grew up!”

“Why should you die young? You look like one of those Egyptian things to me—preserved well enough to last another thousand years. When you die, Marcus Aemilius, Rome will shake to her very foundations.”

They began to walk across the Forum toward the Vestal Steps, deep in their discussion, right hands waving emphasis.

“Will you look at that pair?” asked Saturninus of Glaucia. “Plotting the downfall of all demagogues, I’ll bet.”

“Coldhearted old shit, Scaurus,” said Glaucia. “How could he get up and speak that way about his own son?”

Saturninus lifted his lip. “Because family matters more than the individuals who make up family. Still, it was brilliant tactics. He showed the world his family’s not lacking in courage! His son almost lost Rome a legion, but no one is going to blame Marcus Aemilius, nor hold it against his family.”

*

By the middle of September the Teutones had passed through Arausio, and were nearing the confluence of the Rhodanus and the Druentia; spirits in the Roman fortress outside Glanum rose higher and higher.

“It’s good,” said Gaius Marius to Quintus Sertorius as they did a tour “of inspection.

“They’ve been waiting years for this,” said Sertorius.

“Not a bit afraid, are they?”

“They trust you to lead them well, Gaius Marius.”

The news of the fiasco at Tridentum had come with Quintus Sertorius, who had abandoned his Cimbric guise for the time being; he had seen Sulla in secret, and picked up a letter for Marius which described events graphically, and concluded by informing Marius that Catulus Caesar’s army had gone into a winter camp outside Placentia. Then came a letter from Publius Rutilius Rufus in Rome, giving Rome’s view of the affair.

I presume it was your personal decision to send Lucius Cornelius to keep an eye on our haughty friend Quintus Lutatius, and I applaud it heartily. There are all kinds of peculiar rumors floating about, but what the truth is, no one seems able to establish, even the boni. No doubt you already know through the offices of Lucius Cornelius—later on, when all this German business is over, I shall claim sufficient friendship with you to be given the true explanation. So far I’ve heard mutiny, cowardice, bungling, and every other military crime besides. The most fascinating thing is the brevity and—dare I say it?—honesty of Quintus Lutatius’s report to the House. But is it honest? A simple admission that when he encountered the Cimbri he realized Tridentum was not a suitable place for a battle, and so turned round and retreated to save his army, having first destroyed a bridge and delayed the German advance? There has to be more to it than that! I can see you smiling as you read.

This is a very dead place without the consuls. I was extremely sorry for Marcus Aemilius, of course, and I imagine you are too. What does one do when one finally realizes one has sired a son not worthy to bear one’s name? But the scandal died a quick death, for two reasons. The first, that everyone respects Scaurus (this is going to be a long letter, so you will forgive the use of the cognomen) enormously, whether they like him or not, and whether they agree with his politics or not. The second reason is far more sensational. The crafty old culibonia (how’s that for a pun?) provided everyone with a new talking point. He’s married his son’s betrothed, Caecilia Metella Dalmatica, now in the ward of Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle. Aged seventeen, if you please! If it wasn’t so funny, I’d weep. Though I’ve not met her, I hear she’s a dear little thing, very gentle and thoroughly nice—a trifle hard to believe coming out of that stable, but I believe, I do believe! You ought to see Scaurus—how you’d chuckle! He’s positively prancing. I am seriously thinking of taking a prowl through Rome’s better-type schoolrooms in search of a nubile maiden to be the new Mrs. Rutilius Rufus!

We face a serious grain shortage this winter, O senior consul, just to remind you of the duties attached to your office the Germans have rendered it impossible for you to deal with. However, I hear that Catulus Caesar will be leaving Sulla in command at Placentia shortly, and will return to Rome for the winter. No news as far as you’re concerned, I’m sure. The business at Tridentum has strengthened your own candidacy in absentia for yet another consulship, but Catulus Caesar won’t be holding any elections until after you meet your Germans! It must be very difficult for him, hoping for Rome’s sake that you have a great victory, yet hoping for his own sake that you fall flat on your peasant podex. If you win, Gaius Marius, you will certainly be consul next year. It was a clever move, by the way, to free Manius Aquillius to stand for consul. The electorate was terrifically impressed when he came, declared his candidacy, and then said very firmly that he was going back to you to face the Germans, even if that meant he wouldn’t be in Rome for the elections, and so missed out on standing after all. If you defeat the Germans, Gaius Marius—and you send Manius Aquillius back immediately afterward—you will have a junior colleague you can actually work with for a change.

Gaius Servilius Glaucia, boon companion of your quasi-client Saturninus—unkind comment, I know!— has announced that he will run for tribune of the plebs. What a great big furry grey cat among the pigeons he’ll be! Talking of Serviliuses and getting back to the grain shortage, Servilius the Augur continues to do abysmally in Sicily. As I told you in an earlier missive, he really did expect that Lucullus would meekly hand over everything he’d worked so hard to establish. Now the House gets a letter once every market day, as regular as a prune eater’s bowel movements, in which Servilius the Augur bemoans his lot and reiterates that he’ll be prosecuting Lucullus the minute he gets back to Rome. The slave-king is dead—Salvius or Tryphon, he called himself—and another has been elected, the Asian Greek named Athenion. He’s cleverer than Salvius/Tryphon. If Manius Aquillius gets in as your junior consul, it might be an idea to send him off to Sicily and end that business once and for all. At the moment King Athenion is ruling Sicily, not Servilius the Augur. However, my real complaint about the Sicilian mess is purely semantic. Do you know what that despicable old culibonia had the gall to say in the House the other day? Scaurus, I am referring to, may his pro-creative apparatus drop off from overuse in overjuice! “Sicily,” he roared, “is become a very Iliad of woes!” And everyone rushed up to him after the meeting and poured syrupy praise all over him for coining such a neat epigram! Well, as you know from my earlier missive, that’s my neat epigram! He must have heard me say it, rot his entire back and front everythings.

Now I leap lightly back to the subject of tribunes of the plebs. They have been a most dismal and uninspiring lot this year—one reason why, though I shudder as I say it, I’m rather glad Glaucia is standing for next year. Rome is a very boring place without a decent brawl or two going on in the Comitia. But we have just had one of the oddest of all tribunician incidents, and the rumors are absolutely whizzing around.

About a month ago some twelve or thirteen fellows arrived in town, clad in remarkable raiment—coats of brilliant colors interwoven with pure gold flowing about their feet—jewels dripping from their beards and curls and earlobes—heads trailing gorgeous embroidered scarves. I felt as if I was in the midst of a pageant! They presented themselves as an embassage, and asked to see the Senate in a special sitting. But after our revered rejuvenated phrase-pinching Scaurus Princeps Senatus friskily examined their credentials, he denied them an audience on the grounds that they had no official status. They purported to have come from the sanctuary of the Great Goddess at Pessinus in Anatolian Phrygia, and to have been sent to Rome by the Great Goddess herself to wish Rome well in her struggle against the Germans! Now why, I can hear you asking, should the Anatolian Great Goddess give tuppence about the Germans? It has us all scratching our heads, and I’m sure that’s why Scaurus refused to have anything to do with these gaudy fellows.

Yet no one can work out what they’re after. Orientals are such confidence tricksters that any Roman worth his salt sews his purse shut and straps it into his left armpit the moment he encounters them. However, not this lot! They’re going around Rome distributing largesse as if their own purses were bottomless. Their leader is a splendidly showy specimen called Battaces. The eye positively glazes in beholding him, for he’s clad from head to foot in genuine cloth of gold, and wears a huge solid-gold crown on his head. I’d heard of cloth of gold, but I never thought I’d live to see it unless I took a trip to see King Ptolemy or the King of the Parthians.

The women of this silly city of ours went wild over Battaces and his entourage, dazzled at the sight of so much gold and holding their greedy little hands out for any stray pearls or carbuncles which might happen to fall off a beard or a—say no more, Publius Rutilius! I merely add with exquisite delicacy that they are not— repeat, not!—eunuchs.

Anyway, whether because his own wife was one of the bedazzled Roman ladies or for more altruistic motives, the tribune of the plebs Aulus Pompeius got up on the rostra and accused Battaces and his fellow priests of being charlatans and imposters, and called for their forcible ejection from our fair city—preferably riding backward on asses and bedaubed with pitch and feathers. Battaces took great exception to Aulus Pompeius’s diatribe, and marched off to complain to the Senate. A few wives within that worthy body must have been infected—or injected—with enthusiasm for the ambassadors, for the House promptly ordered Aulus Pompeius to cease and desist his badgering of these Important Personages. The purists among us Conscript Fathers sided with Aulus Pompeius because it is not the province of the Senate to discipline a tribune of the plebs for his conduct within the Comitia. There was then a row about whether Battaces and his gang were an embassage or not an embassage, despite Scaurus’s previous ruling. Since no one could find Scaurus—I presume he was either looking up my old speeches for more epigrams, or looking up his wife’s skirts for more epidermis— the point remained unresolved.

So Aulus Pompeius went on roaring like a lion from the rostra, and accusing Rome’s ladies of cupidity as well as unchastity. The next thing, Battaces himself comes striding down to the rostra trailing gorgeous priests and gorgeous Roman ladies behind him like a fishmonger stray cats. Luckily I was there—well, you know what Rome’s like! I was tipped off, of course, as was half the rest of the city—and witnessed a terrific farce, much better than anything Sulla could hope for in a theater. Aulus Pompeius and Battaces went at it— alas, verbally only—faster than Plautus, our noble tribune of the plebs insisting his opponent was a mountebank, and Battaces insisting Aulus Pompeius was dicing with danger because the Great Goddess didn’t like hearing her priests insulted. The scene ended with Battaces pronouncing a blood-curdling curse of death upon Aulus Pompeius—in Greek, which meant everyone understood it. I would have thought she liked being hailed in Phrygian.

Here comes the best bit, Gaius Marius! The moment the curse was pronounced, Aulus Pompeius began to choke and cough. He tottered off the rostra and had to be helped home, where he took to his bed for the next three days, growing sicker and sicker. And at the end of three days—he died! Turned up his toes and breathed no more. Well, you can imagine the effect it’s had upon everyone from the Senate to the ladies of Rome. Battaces can go where he likes, do what he likes. People hop out of his path as if he suffered from a kind of golden leprosy. He gets free dinners, the House changed its mind and received his embassage formally (still no sign of Scaurus!), the women hang all over him, and he smiles and waves his hands about in blessing and generally acts like Zeus.

I am amazed, disgusted, sickened, and about a thousand other equally unpalatable things. The big question is, how did Battaces do it? Was it divine intervention, or some unknown poison? I am betting on the last, but then, I am of the Skeptic persuasion—if not an out-and-out Cynic.

Gaius Marius laughed himself sore in the sides, then went out to deal with the Germans.

*

A quarter of a million Teutones crossed the Druentia River just east of the spot where it entered the Rhodanus, and began to stream toward the Roman fortress. The ragged column was spread out for miles, its flanks and vanguard made up of the warriors, one hundred and thirty thousand strong, its meandering tail a vast congregation of wagons and cattle and horses shepherded by the women and children; there were few old men, fewer still old women. In the foreground of the fighting men there strode the tribe called the Ambrones, fierce, proud, valorous. The very last group of wagons and animals were twenty-five miles to their rear.

German scouts had found the Roman citadel, but Teutobod the King was confident. They would march to Massilia in spite of Rome, for in Massilia—the biggest city aside from Rome any of them had ever heard of—they would find women, slaves, food, luxuries. After the satisfaction of sacking and burning it, they would turn east along the coast for Italy, for though Teutobod had discovered the Via Domitia over the Mons Genava Pass was in excellent condition, he still believed the coastal route would get him to Italy faster.

The harvest still stood in the fields, and so was trampled down by the passing of the host; to none of them, even Teutobod, did it seem to matter that a modicum of care might have preserved the grain for reaping and storing against the coming winter. The wagons were full of provisions plundered from all who had been in the German path; as for the crops in the field, what human foot had trodden down could still be chewed by bovine and equine mouths. Unharvested crops simply meant grazing fodder.

When the Ambrones reached the foot of the hill upon which the Roman fortress perched, nothing happened. Marius didn’t stir, nor did the Germans bother storming him. But he did present a mental barrier, so the Ambrones stopped and the rest of the warriors piled up behind until Germans milled like ants all about the hill, and Teutobod himself arrived. First they tried to tempt the Roman army out by catcalls, boos, jeers, and a parade of captured civilians who had all been put to the torture. No Roman answered; no Roman ventured out. Then the host attacked en masse, a simple frontal assault which broke and ebbed away fruitlessly against the magnificent fortifications of Marius’s camp; the Romans hurled a few spears at easy targets, but did nothing else.

Teutobod shrugged. His thanes shrugged. Let the Romans stay there, then! It didn’t really matter. So the German host rolled around the base of the hill like a syrupy sea around a great rock and disappeared to the south, the thousands of wagons creaking in its wake for seven days, every German woman and child staring up at the apparently lifeless citadel as the cavalcade plodded on toward Massilia.

But the last wagon had scarcely dipped below the horizon when Marius moved with all six overstrength legions, and moved at the double. Quiet, disciplined, overjoyed at the prospect of battle at last, the Roman column skirted the Germans undetected as they pushed and jostled along the road from Arelate to Aquae Sextiae, from which point Teutobod intended to lead his warriors down to the sea. Crossing the river Ars, Marius took up a perfect position on its south bank at the top of a strong, sloping ridge surrounded by gently rolling hills, and there dug himself in, looking down on the river.

Still in the lead, thirty thousand Ambrone warriors came to the ford and looked up to find a Roman camp bristling with plumed helmets and spears. But this was an ordinary camp, easy meat; without waiting for reinforcements, the Ambrones took the shallow stream at a run and attacked. Uphill.

The Roman legionaries simply stepped over their wall along its entire front length and moved downhill to meet a shrieking horde of undisciplined barbarians. First they cast their pila with devastating effect, then they drew their swords and swung their shields around and waded into battle like the intermeshed components of one gigantic machine. Hardly an Ambrone lived to stagger back across the ford; thirty thousand Ambrone dead sprawled along the sloping ridge. Of casualties, Marius suffered almost none.

The action was over in less than half an hour; within an hour the Ambrone bodies had been piled into a denuded rampart—swords, torcs, shields, bracelets, pectorals, daggers, and helmets were thrown into the Roman camp—along the edge of the ford; the first obstacle the next wave of Germans would have to surmount was this rampart of their own dead.

The far bank of the Ars was now a roiling mass of Teutones, gazing in confusion and anger at the huge wall of dead Ambrones, and the Roman camp atop the ridge beyond lined with thousands of jeering, whistling, singing, booing, hissing, whooping soldiers, lifted out of themselves in a victory euphoria; for this was the first time a Roman army had killed great numbers of German Enemy.

It was, of course, only a preliminary engagement. The major action was yet to come. But it would come, nothing surer. To complete his plan, Marius peeled off three thousand of his best troops and sent them that evening under the command of Manius Aquillius way downstream to cross the river; they were to wait until the general engagement took place, then fall upon the Germans from behind when the battle was at its height.

Hardly a legionary slept that night, so great was the elation; but when the next day brought no aggressive move on the part of the Germans, tiredness didn’t matter. The barbarian inactivity worried Marius, who didn’t want the outcome postponed because the Germans decided not to attack. He needed a decisive victory, and he was determined to have it. But on the far bank of the river the Teutones had camped in their myriad thousands, unfortified save by sheer numbers, while Teutobod—so tall on his little Gallic horse that his dangling feet nearly brushed the ground—prowled the ford accompanied by a dozen of his thanes. Up and down and back and forth he walked his miserably overloaded steed all that day, two great flaxen braids straying across his golden breastplate, the golden wings on his helmet above each ear glittering in the sun. Even at the distance, anxiety and indecision could be discerned upon his clean-shaven face.

The following morning dawned as cloudless as the days before, promising a degree of heat which would turn the area into a seething mass of Ambrone putrefaction all too soon; it was no part of Marius’s plan to remain where he was until disease became a greater threat than the Enemy.

“All right,” he said to Quintus Sertorius, “we’ll risk it. If they won’t attack, I’ll induce the battle by coming out myself and moving to attack them. We’ll lose the advantage of their charge uphill, but even so, our chances are better here than anywhere else, and Manius Aquillius is in position. Sound the bugles, marshal the troops, and I’ll address them.”

That was standard practice; no Roman army ever went into a major action unharangued. For one thing, it gave everyone a good look at the general in his war gear; for another, it served as a morale booster; and finally, it was the general’s only opportunity to inform even the least legionary how he intended to win. The battle never went strictly according to plan—everyone understood that—but the general’s address did give the soldiers an idea of what the general wanted them to do; and if more confusion than normal reigned, it enabled the troops to think for themselves. Many a Roman army had won its battle because its soldiers knew what the general wanted of them, and did it without a tribune in earshot.

The defeat of the Ambrones had acted like a tonic. The legions were out to win, in perfect physical condition down to the last man, arms and armor polished, equipment immaculate. Massed in the open space they called their assembly forum, the ranks stood in file to listen to Gaius Marius. They would have followed him into Tartarus, of course, for they adored him.

“All right, you cunni, today’s the day!” Marius shouted from his makeshift rostra. “We were too good, that’s our trouble! Now they don’t want to fight! So we’re going to make them so hopping mad they’d fight the legions of the dragon’s teeth! We’re going across our wall and down the slope, and then we’re going to start pushing dead bodies around! We’re going to kick their dead, spit on their dead, piss on their dead if we have to! And make no mistake, they’re going to come across that ford in more thousands than you ignorant mentulae can count in units! And we won’t have the advantage of sitting up here like cocks on a fence; we’re going to have to take them on eye to eye—and that means looking up! Because they’re bigger than us! They’re giants! Does that worry us? Does it?”

“No!” they roared with one voice. “No, no, no!”

“No!” echoed Marius. “And why? Because we’re the legions of Rome! We’re following the silver eagles to death or glory! Romans are the best soldiers the world has ever seen! And you—Gaius Marius’s own soldiers of the Head Count—are the best soldiers Rome has ever seen!”

They cheered him for what seemed an eternity, hysterical with pride, tears running down their faces, every fiber of their beings geared to an unbearable pitch of readiness.

“All right, then! We’re going over the wall and we’re going into a slogging match! There’s no other way to win this war than to beat those mad-eyed savages to their knees! It’s fight, men! It’s keep going until there’s not one mad-eyed savage left on his gigantic feet!” He turned to where six men wrapped in lion skins—fanged muzzles engulfing their helmets, empty clawed paws knotted across their mail-shirted chests—stood with their hands clasped about the polished silver shafts of standards bearing six open-winged silver eagles. “There they are, your silver eagles! Emblems of courage! Emblems of Rome! Emblems of my legions! Follow the eagles for the glory of Rome!”

Even in the midst of such exaltation there was no loss of discipline; ordered and unhurried, Marius’s six legions moved out of the camp and down the slope, turning to protect their own flanks, as this was not a site for cavalry. Like a sickle they presented their ranks to the Germans, who made up King Teutobod’s mind for him at the first demonstration of Roman contempt for the Ambrone dead. Through the ford they came, into the Roman front, which didn’t even falter. Those in the German forefront fell to a volley of pila thrown with stunning accuracy; for Marius’s troops had been practising for over two years against this day.

The battle was long and grueling, but the Roman lines could not be broken, nor the silver eagles borne by their six aquiliferi be taken. The German dead piled up and up, joining their Ambrone fellows, and still more Germans kept coming across the ford to replace the fallen. Until Manius Aquillius and his three thousand soldiers descended upon the German rear, and slaughtered it.

By the middle of the afternoon, the Teutones were no more. Fueled by the military tradition and glory of Rome and led by a superb general, thirty-seven thousand properly trained and properly equipped Roman legionaries made military history at Aquae Sextiae by defeating well over a hundred thousand German warriors in two engagements. Eighty thousand corpses joined the thirty thousand Ambrones along the river Ars; very few of the Teutones had elected to live, preferring to die with pride and honor intact. Among the fallen was Teutobod. And to the victors went the spoils, many thousands of Teutonic women and children, and seventeen thousand surviving warriors. When the slave traders swarmed up from Massilia to buy the spoils, Marius donated the proceeds to his soldiers and officers, though by tradition money from the sale of slave-prisoners belonged solely to the general.

“I don’t need the money, and they earned it,” he said. He grinned, remembering the colossal sum the Massiliotes had charged Marcus Aurelius Cotta for a single ship to take him to Rome bearing the news of Arausio. “I see the magistrates of Massilia have sent us a vote of thanks for saving their fair city. I think I’ll send them a bill for saving it.”

To Manius Aquillius he gave his report to the Senate, and sent him at the gallop for Rome.

“You can bring the news, and stand for the consulship,” he said. “Only don’t delay!”

Manius Aquillius didn’t delay, reaching Rome by road in seven days. The letter was handed to the junior consul, Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar, to read out to the assembled Senate, a wooden Manius Aquillius having refused to say a word.

I, Gaius Marius, senior consul, find it my duty to report to the Senate and People of Rome that this day on the field of Aquae Sextiae in the Roman province of Gaul-across-the-Alps, the legions under my command have defeated the entire nation of the German Teutones. The German dead are numbered at one hundred and thirteen thousand, the German captives at seventeen thousand men, and one hundred and thirty thousand women and children. Of wagons there are thirty-two thousand, of horses forty-one thousand, of cattle two hundred thousand. I have decreed that all the spoils including those sold into slavery are to be divided up in the correct proportions among my men. Long live Rome!

The whole of Rome went mad with joy, its streets filled with weeping, dancing, cheering, embracing hordes of people, from slaves to the most august. And Gaius Marius was voted senior consul for the next year in absentia, with Manius Aquillius his junior colleague. The Senate voted him a thanksgiving of three days, and the People two days more..

“Sulla referred to it,” Catulus Caesar remarked to Metellus Numidicus after the fuss died down.

“Oho! You “don’t like our Lucius Cornelius! ‘Sulla,’ eh? What did he refer to?”

“He said something to the effect that the tallest tree in the world couldn’t be cut down by anyone. He has all the luck, Gaius Marius. I couldn’t persuade my army to fight, while he defeats a whole nation and hardly loses a man doing it,” said Catulus Caesar gloomily.

“He’s always had the luck,” said Metellus Numidicus.

“Luck, nothing!” said the eavesdropping Publius Rutilius Rufus vigorously. “Give credit where credit’s due!”

Which left them with little more to say [wrote Rutilius Rufus to Gaius Marius]. As you well know, I cannot condone all these consecutive consulships, nor some of your more wolfy friends. But I do confess to exasperated annoyance when I am faced with envy and spite from men who ought to be big enough to be magnanimous. Aesop summed them up nicely—sour grapes, Gaius Marius. Did you ever hear such nonsense as attributing your success and their lack of success to luck? A man makes his luck, and that’s the truth of it. I could spit when I hear them depreciating your wonderful victory.

Enough about that, I’ll give myself an apoplexy. Speaking of your more wolfy friends, Gaius Servilius Glaucia—having entered into his tribunate of the plebs eight days ago—is already stirring up a nice little storm in the Comitia. He has called his first contio to discuss a new law he proposes to promulgate, his intent being to undo the work of that hero of Tolosa, Quintus Servilius Caepio, may his exile in Smyrna last forever. I do not like that man; I never did like that man! Glaucia is going to give the extortion court back to the knights, with all sorts of frills attached to it too. From now on—if the law is passed, which I suppose it will be— the State will be able to recover damages or misappropriated property or peculated funds from their ultimate recipients as well as from the original culprits. So where before a rapacious governor could sign his ill-gotten gains over to his Auntie Liccy or his wife’s tata Lucius Tiddlypuss or even someone as obvious as his son, under Glaucia’s new law Auntie Liccy and Lucius Tiddlypuss and the son will have to cough up as well.

I suppose there is some justice in it, but where does legislation like this lead, Gaius Marius? It gives the State too much power, not to mention too much money! It breeds demagogues and bureaucrats, that’s what! There is something terribly reassuring about being in politics to enrich oneself. It’s normal. It’s human. It’s forgivable. It’s understandable. The ones to watch are the ones who are in politics to change the world. They do the real damage, the power-men and the altruists. It isn’t healthy to think about other people ahead of oneself. Other people are not as deserving. Did I tell you I was a Skeptic? Well, I am. Though sometimes— just sometimes!—I wonder if I’m not becoming a little bit of a Cynic too.

We hear that you’ll be back in Rome briefly. I cannot wait! I want to see Piggle-wiggle’s face at the instant he first sets eyes on you. Catulus Caesar has been made proconsul of Italian Gaul, as you might have expected, and has already gone to rejoin his army in Placentia. Watch him, he’ll try to take the credit of the next victory off you if he can. I hope your Lucius Cornelius Sulla is as loyal as he used to be, now Julilla’s dead.

On the diplomatic front, Battaces and his priests have finally seen fit to go home, and the wails from various highborn ladies can be heard at least as far as Brundisium. Now we are playing host to a much less awesome and infinitely more ominous embassage. It’s come from none other than that very dangerous young man who has managed to collar most of the territory around the Euxine Sea—King Mithridates of Pontus. He’s asking for a treaty of friendship and alliance. Scaurus is not in favor. I wonder why? Could it possibly have something to do with the fierce lobbying of the agents of King Nicomedes of our friendly allied Bithynia? Edepol, edepol, there goes that dreadful Skeptic streak again! No, Gaius Marius, it is not a Cynical streak! Not yet, anyway.

To conclude, a little gossip and personal news. The Conscript Father Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus has a little son and heir, giving rise to great expressions of joy on the part of various Domitii Ahenobarbi and Servilii Caepiones, though I note the Calpurnii Pisones have managed to maintain their air of indifference. And while it may be the fate of some venerable elders to marry schoolgirls, it is a more usual fate to yield to the arms of Death. Our very own literary giant Gaius Lucilius is dead. I’m quite sorry about it, really. He was a horrible bore in the flesh, but oh he was witty on paper! I am also sorry—and with deep sincerity this time—that your old Syrian seer Martha is dead. No news to you, I know Julia wrote, but I shall miss the old harridan. Piggle-wiggle used to foam at the mouth whenever he saw her being toted around Rome in her lurid purple litter. Your dear wonderful Julia vows she’ll miss Martha too. I hope you appreciate the treasure you married, by the way. It isn’t every wife I know would grieve at the passing of a houseguest who came for a month and stayed for the duration, especially a houseguest who thought it etiquette to spit on the floor and piss in the fishpond.I close by echoing your own remark. How could you, Gaius Marius? “Long live Rome!” indeed! What a conceit!