But the days of Asculum Picentum were numbered. Riding his Public Horse, Pompey Strabo brought his army to join that of Publius Sulpicius Rufus in October, and spread a wall of Roman soldiers all the way around the city; not even a rope let down from the ramparts could now go undetected. His next move was to sever the city from its water supply—an enormous undertaking, since the water was led off the gravel beneath the bed of the Truentius River at hundreds of different points. But Pompey Strabo displayed considerable engineering skill, and took pleasure in supervising the work himself.
In attendance upon the consul Strabo was his most despised cadet, Marcus Tullius Cicero; as Cicero could draw quite well and took a self-invented shorthand with extreme accuracy and rapidity, the consul Strabo found him very useful in situations like the one gradually depriving Asculum Picentum of water. As terrified of his commander as he was appalled at his commander’s utter indifference to the plight of those within the city, Cicero did as he was told and remained dumb.
In November the magistrates of Asculum Picentum opened the main gates and crept out to tender the city’s submission to Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo.
“Our home is now yours,” said the chief magistrate with great dignity. “All we ask is that you give us back our water.”
Pompey Strabo threw back his grizzled yellowish head and roared with laughter. “What for?” he asked ingenuously. “There won’t be anyone left to drink it!”
“We are thirsty, Gnaeus Pompeius!”
“Then stay thirsty,” said Pompey Strabo. He rode into Asculum Picentum on his Public Horse at the head of a party comprising his legates—Lucius Gellius Poplicola, Gnaeus Octavius Ruso, and Lucius Junius Brutus Damasippus—plus his tribunes of the soldiers, his cadets, and a picked contingent of troops five cohorts strong.
While the soldiers immediately spread out through the town with smooth discipline to round up every inhabitant and inspect every house, the consul Strabo proceeded to the forum-marketplace. It still bore the scars of the time when Gaius Vidacilius had occupied it; where the magistrates’ tribunal had once stood there now lay a tumbledown pile of charred log fragments, the remains of the pyre Vidacilius had climbed upon to burn himself to death.
Chewing the vicious little switch he used to chastise his Public Horse, the consul Strabo looked about him carefully, then jerked his head at Brutus Damasippus.
“Put a platform on top of that pyre—and make it quick,’’ he said to Damasippus curtly.
Within a very short time a group of soldiers had torn down doors and beams from the buildings closest by and Pompey Strabo had his platform, complete with a set of steps. Upon it was placed his ivory curule chair and a stool for his scribe.
“You, come with me,” he said to Cicero, mounted the steps and seated himself on his curule chair, still wearing his general’s cuirass and helm, but with a purple cloak depending from his shoulders instead of his red general’s cloak. Hands full of wax tablets, Cicero hastily put them on the deck next to his stool and huddled himself upon it, one tablet open on his lap, his bone stylus ready. This was, he presumed, to be an official hearing.
“Poplicola, Ruso, Damasippus, Gnaeus Pompeius Junior—join me,” said the consul with his customary abruptness.
His heart slowing a little, Cicero’s fright evaporated sufficiently for him to take in the scene while he waited to write his first official words down. Obviously the town had taken some precautions before opening its gates, for a great mound of swords, mail-shirts, spears, daggers, and any other objects which might be deemed weapons reared itself outside the city meeting hall.
The magistrates were brought forward and made to stand just beneath the makeshift tribunal. Pompey Strabo began his hearing, which consisted of his saying,
“You are all guilty of treason and murder. You are not Roman citizens. You will be flogged and beheaded. Think yourselves lucky I do not give you a slaves’ fate, and crucify you.”
Every sentence was carried out then and there at the foot of the tribunal, while the horrified Cicero, controlling his rising gorge by fixing his eyes rigidly on the tablet in his lap, made meaningless squiggles in the wax.
The magistrates disposed of, the consul Strabo proceeded to pronounce the same sentence upon every male between eighty and thirteen his soldiers could find. To expedite matters he set fifty soldiers to flog and fifty soldiers to decapitate. Other men were set to comb the mound of weaponry outside the meeting hall in search of suitable axes, but in the meantime the executioners were directed to use their swords; with practice they became so good at beheading their maimed and exhausted victims with swords that they refused the axes. However, at the end of an hour only three hundred Asculans had been dispatched, their heads fixed on spears and nailed to the battlements, their bodies tossed into a pile at one side of the forum.
“You’ll have to improve your performance,” said Pompey Strabo to his officers and men. “I want this done today, not eight days from now! Set two hundred men to flogging and two hundred more to beheading. And be quick about it. You have no teamwork and very little system. If you don’t develop both, you might find yourselves on the receiving end.”
“It would be much easier to starve them to death,” said the consul’s son, observing the carnage dispassionately.
“Easier by far. But not legal,” said his father.
Over five thousand Asculan males perished that day, a slaughter which was to live on in the memory of every Roman present, though none voiced disapproval, and none said a word against it afterward. The square was literally awash with blood; the peculiar stench of it—warm, sweetish, foetid, ferrous—rose like a mist into the sunny mountain air.
At sunset the consul rose, stretching, from his curule chair. “Back to camp, everyone,” he said laconically. “We’ll deal with the women and children tomorrow. There’s no need to set a guard inside. Just lock the gates and patrol outside.” He gave no orders as to disposal of the bodies or cleaning the blood away, so both were left to lie undisturbed.
On the morrow the consul returned to his tribunal, unmoved by the prospect he viewed, while his soldiers held those still alive in groups just outside the perimeter of the forum. His sentence was the same for all:
“Leave this place immediately, taking only what you wear with you. No food, no money, no valuables, no keepsakes.”
Two years of siege had left Asculum Picentum a pitifully poor place; of money there was little, of valuables less. But before the banished were allowed to leave the city they were searched, and none was permitted to return to her home from whence she had been shepherded; each group of women and children was simply driven through the gates like sheep and pushed then through the lines of Pompey Strabo’s army into lands stripped completely bare by occupying legions. No cry for help, no weeping crone or howling child was succored; Pompey Strabo’s troops knew better than that. Those women of beauty went to the officers and centurions, those women with any kind of appeal went to the soldiers; and when they were finished with, those who still lived were driven out into the devastated countryside a day or two behind their mothers and children.
“There’s nothing worth taking to Rome for my triumph,” said the consul when it was all done and he could get up from his curule chair. “Give what there is to my men.”
Cicero followed his general down off the tribunal and gazed gape-mouthed at what seemed the world’s vastest slaughteryard, beyond nausea now, beyond compassion, beyond all feeling. If this is war, he thought, may I never know another one. And yet his friend Pompey, whom he adored and knew to be so kind, could toss his beautiful mane of yellow hair unconcernedly back from his temples and whistle happily through his teeth as he picked his way between the deep congealed pools of flyblown blood in the square, his beautiful blue eyes containing nothing save approval as they roamed across the literal hills of headless bodies all around him.
“I had Poplicola save two very delectable women for us cadets,” said Pompey as he fell behind to make sure Cicero didn’t trip into a bath of blood. “Oh, we’ll have a good time! Have you ever watched anyone do it? Well, if you haven’t, tonight’s the night!”
Cicero drew in a sobbing breath. “Gnaeus Pompeius, I do not lack backbone,” he said heroically, “but I have neither the stomach nor the heart for war. After witnessing what’s happened here during the past two days, I couldn’t become excited if I watched Paris doing it to Helen! As for Asculan women—just leave me out of the whole thing, please! I’ll sleep in a tree.”
Pompey laughed, threw his arm about his friend’s thin bent shoulders. “Oh, Marcus Tullius, you are the most desiccated old Vestal I’ve ever met!” he said, still chuckling. “The enemy is the enemy! You can’t possibly feel sorry for people who not only defied Rome, but murdered a Roman praetor and hundreds of other Roman men and women and children by tearing them apart! Literally! However, go and sleep in your tree if you must. I’ll take your poke myself.”
They passed out of the square and walked down a short wide street to the main gates. And there it all was again. A row of grisly trophies with tattered necks and bird-pecked faces that marched across the battlements as far as the eye could see in either direction. Cicero gagged, but had acquired so much experience in keeping from disgracing himself forever in the eyes of the consul Strabo that he did not now disgrace himself in front of his friend, who rattled on, oblivious.
“There was nothing here worth displaying in a triumph,” Pompey was saying, “but I found a really splendid net for trapping wild game birds. And my father gave me several buckets of books—an edition of my great-uncle Lucilius neither of us has ever seen. We think it must be the work of a local copyist, which makes it well worth having. Quite beautiful.”
“They have no food and no warm clothes,” said Cicero.
“Who?”
“The women and children banished from this place.”
“I should hope not!”
“And what happens to that mess inside?”
“The bodies, you mean?”
“ Yes, I mean the bodies. And the blood. And the heads.’’
“They’ll rot away in time.”
“And bring disease.”
“Disease to whom? When my father has the gates nailed shut forever, there won’t be a single living person left inside Asculum Picentum. If any of the women and children sneak back after we leave, they won’t be able to get in. Asculum Picentum is finished. No one will ever live in it again,” said Pompey.
“I see why they call your father The Butcher,” said Cicero, beyond caring whether what he said offended.
Pompey actually took it as a compliment; he had odd gaps in his intelligence where his personal beliefs were too strong to tickle, let alone undermine. “Good name, isn’t it?” he said gruffly, afraid that the strength of his love for his father was becoming a weakness. He picked up his pace. “Please, Marcus Tullius, do get a move on! I don’t want those other cunni starting without me when it was I had the clout to get us the women in the first place.”
Cicero hurried. But hadn’t finished. “Gnaeus Pompeius, I have something to tell you,” he said, beginning to pant.
“Oh, yes?” asked Pompey, mind clearly elsewhere.
“I applied for a transfer to Capua, where I think my talents will prove of better use in the winding up of this war. I wrote to Quintus Lutatius, and I’ve had an answer. He says he will be very glad of my services. Or Lucius Cornelius Sulla will.”
Pompey had stopped, staring at Cicero in amazement. “What did you want to do that for?” he demanded.
“The staff of Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo is soldierly, Gnaeus Pompeius. I am not soldierly.” His brown eyes gazed with great earnestness and softness into the face of his puzzled mentor, who was not quite sure whether to laugh or lose his temper. “Please, let me go! I shall always be grateful to you, and I shall never forget how much you’ve helped me. But you’re not a fool, Gnaeus Pompeius. The staff of your father isn’t the right place for me.”
The storm clouds cleared, Pompey’s blue eyes glittered happily. “Have it your own way, Marcus Tullius!” he said. Then sighed. “Do you know, I shall miss you?”