The nine commissioners sent from Rome before his power there waned were scattered all over Pontus and Cappadocia, including the man Lucullus loved best in all the world now that Sulla was dead—his younger brother, Varro Lucullus. But commissioners owned no troops, and it seemed from the tone of the letters Publius Clodius carried that they would not last long in the job. Therefore, decided Lucullus, he had no choice other than to leave two of his four legions behind in Pontus to garrison it in case Mithridates tried to win back his kingdom unassisted by Tigranes. The legate he esteemed most was repairing the ravages wreaked upon the isle of Delos, and while he knew Sornatius was a good man, Lucullus wasn’t sure enough of his military capabilities to leave him without someone else at his side. The other senior legate, Marcus Fabius Hadrianus, would have to stay in Pontus too.

Having made up his mind that two of his four legions must remain in Pontus, Lucullus also knew which two legions they would have to be—not a welcome prospect. The legions belonging to the province of Cilicia would stay in Pontus. Leaving him to march south with the two legions of Fimbriani. Wonderful troops! He absolutely loathed them. They had been in the East for sixteen years now, and were sentenced never to return to Rome or Italy because their record of mutiny and murder was such that the Senate refused to allow them to go home. Perpetually on the boil, they were dangerous men, but Lucullus, who had used them off and on for many years, dealt with them by flogging them pitilessly during campaigns and indulging their every sensual whim during winter rests. Thus they soldiered for him willingly enough, even grudgingly admired him. Yet they preferred still to nominate themselves as the troops of their first commander, Fimbria, hence the Fimbriani. Lucullus was happy to have it so. Did he want them known as the Liciniani or the Luculliani? Definitely not.

*

Clodius had fallen so in love with Amisus that he decided he would elect to remain behind in Pontus with the legates Sornatius and Fabius Hadrianus; campaigning had lost its lure for Clodius the moment he heard Lucullus planned a thousand-mile march.

But it was not to be. His orders were to accompany Lucullus in his personal train. Oh well, thought Clodius, at least he would live in relative luxury! Then he discovered Lucullus’s idea of campaigning comfort. Namely, that there was none. The sybaritic Epicurean Clodius had known in Rome and Amisus had utterly vanished; Lucullus on the march at the head of the Fimbriani was no better off than any ranker soldier, and if he was no better off, nor was any member of his personal staff. They walked, they didn’t ride—the Fimbriani walked, they didn’t ride. They ate porridge and hard bread—the Fimbriani ate porridge and hard bread. They slept on the ground with a sagum for cover and earth heaped into a pillow—the Fimbriani slept on the ground with a sagum for cover and earth heaped into a pillow. They bathed in icicle-fringed streams or else chose to stink—the Fimbriani bathed in icicle-fringed streams or else chose to stink. What was good enough for the Fimbriani was good enough for Lucullus.

But not good enough for Publius Clodius, who not many days out from Amisus took advantage of his relationship with Lucullus and complained bitterly.

The General’s pale-grey eyes looked him up and down without expression, as cold as the thawing landscape the army traversed. “If you want comfort, Clodius, go home,” he said.

“I don’t want to go home, I just want comfort!” said Clodius.

“One or the other. With me, never both,” said his brother-in-law, and turned his back contemptuously.

That was the last conversation Clodius had with him. Nor did the dour little band of junior legates and military tribunes who surrounded the General encourage the kind of companionship Clodius now learned he could hardly do without. Friendship, wine, dice, women, and mischief; they were the things Clodius craved as the days turned into what seemed like years and the countryside continued as bleak and inhospitable as Lucullus.

They paused briefly in Eusebeia Mazaca, where Ariobarzanes Philoromaios, the King, donated what he could to the baggage train and wished Lucullus a doleful well. Then it was on into a landscape convulsed by chasms and gorges of every color at the warm end of the rainbow, a tumbled mass of tufa towers and boulders perched precariously on fragile stone necks. Skirting these gorges more than doubled the length of the march, but Lucullus plodded on, insisting that his army cover a minimum of thirty miles a day. That meant they marched from sunup to sundown, pitched camp in semidarkness and pulled camp in semidarkness. And every night a proper camp, dug and fortified against—whom? WHOM? Clodius wanted to shout to the pallid sky floating higher above them than any sky had a right to do. Followed by a WHY? roaring louder than the thunder of endless spring storms.

They came down at last to the Euphrates at Tomisa crossing to find its eerie milky-blue waters a seething mass of melted snows. Clodius heaved a sigh of relief. No choice now! The General would have to rest while he waited for the river to go down. But did he? No. The moment the army halted, the Euphrates began to calm and slow, turn itself into a tractable, navigable waterway. Lucullus and the Fimbriani boated it into Sophene, and the moment the last man was across, back it went to foaming torrent.

“My luck,” said Lucullus, pleased. “It is an omen.”

The route now passed through slightly kinder country, in that the mountains were somewhat lower, good grass and wild asparagus covered the slopes, and trees grew in small groves where pockets of moisture gave their roots succor. But what did that mean to Lucullus? An order that in easy terrain like this and with asparagus to chomp on, the army could move faster! Clodius had always considered himself as fit and agile as any other Roman, used to walking everywhere. Yet here was Lucullus, almost fifty years of age, walking the twenty-two-year-old Publius Clodius into the ground.

They crossed the Tigris, a minor matter after the Euphrates, for it was neither as broad nor as swift. And then, having marched over a thousand miles in two months, the army of Lucullus came in sight of Tigranocerta.

It had not existed thirty years ago. King Tigranes had built it to cater to his dreams of glory and a far vaster realm: a splendid city of stone with high walls, citadels, towers, squares and courts, hanging gardens, exquisite glazed tiles of aquamarine and acid-yellow and brazen red, immense statues of winged bulls, lions, curly-bearded kings under tall tiaras. The site had been chosen with a view to everything from ease of defense to internal sources of water and a nearby tributary of the Tigris which carried away the contents of the vast sewers Tigranes had constructed in the manner of Pergamum. Whole nations had fallen to fund its construction; wealth proclaimed itself even in the far distance as the Fimbriani came over a ridge and saw it, Tigranocerta. Vast, high, beautiful. Because he craved a Hellenized realm, the King of Kings had started out to build in the Greek fashion, but all those years of Parthian-influenced childhood and young manhood were too strong; when Doric and Ionic perfection palled, he added the gaudy glazed tiles, the winged bulls, the monolithic sovereigns. Then, still dissatisfied with all those low Greek buildings, he added the hanging gardens, the square stone towers, the pylons and the power of his Parthian upbringing.

Not in twenty-five years had anyone dared to bring King Tigranes bad news; no one wanted his head or his hands chopped off, which was the King’s reaction to the bearer of bad news. Someone, however, had to inform him that a Roman army was approaching rapidly out of the mountains to the west. Understandably, the military establishment (run by a son of Tigranes named Prince Mithrabarzanes) elected to send a very junior officer with this shockingly bad news. The King of Kings flew into a panic—but not before he had the messenger hanged. Then he fled, so hastily that he left Queen Cleopatra behind together with his other wives, his concubines, his children, his treasures, and a garrison under Mithrabarzanes. Out went the summonses from the shores of the Hyrcanian Sea to the shores of the Middle Sea, anywhere and everywhere Tigranes ruled: send him troops, send him cataphracts, send him desert Bedouins if no other soldiers could be found! For it had never occurred to Tigranes that Rome, so beleaguered, might invade Armenia to knock on the gates of his brand-new capital city.

While his father skulked in the mountains between Tigranocerta and Lake Thospitis, Mithrabarzanes led the available troops to meet the Roman invaders, assisted by some nearby tribes of Bedouins. Lucullus trounced them and sat down before Tigranocerta to besiege it, though his army was far too small to span the length of its walls; he concentrated upon the gates and vigilant patrols. As he was also extremely efficient, very little traffic passed from inside to outside of the city walls, and none the other way. Not, he was sure, that Tigranocerta could not withstand a long siege; what he was counting on was the unwillingness of Tigranocerta to withstand a long siege. The first step was to defeat the King of Kings on a battlefield. That would lead to the second step, the surrender of Tigranocerta, a place filled with people who had no love for—though great terror of—Tigranes. He had populated this new capital city far from northern Armenia and the old capital of Artaxata with Greeks imported against their will from Syria, Cappadocia, eastern Cilicia; it was a vital part of the program of Hellenization that Tigranes was determined to inflict upon his racially Median peoples. To be Greek in culture and language was to be civilized. To be Median in culture and illiterate in Greek was inferior, primitive. His answer was to kidnap Greeks.

Though the two great kings were reconciled, Mithridates was too cagey to be with Tigranes—instead, he lay with an army of a mere ten thousand men to the north and west of where Tigranes had fled; his opinion of Tigranes as a military man was not high. With him was his best general, his cousin Taxiles, and when they heard that Lucullus was besieging Tigranocerta and that Tigranes was gathering an immense force to relieve it, Mithridates sent his cousin Taxiles to see the King of Kings.

“Do not attack the Romans!” was the Mithridatic message.

Tigranes was inclined to heed this advice, even after he had assembled one hundred and twenty thousand infantry from places as far apart as Syria and the Caucasus, and twenty-five thousand of the awesome cavalry known as cataphracts, horses and riders clad from head to foot in chain mail. He lay some fifty miles from his capital in a cozy valley, but he needed to move. Most of his supplies were in Tigranocertan granaries and storehouses, so he knew he must establish fortified contact with the city if his vast forces were to eat. And that, he reasoned, should not be too difficult if indeed, as his spies had reported to him, the Roman army did not have the strength to embrace the entire perimeter of so great a place as Tigranocerta.

He had not, however, believed the reports which said the Roman army was minute. Until he himself rode to the top of a high hill behind his capital and actually saw for himself what gnat was impudent enough to sting him.

“Too large to be an embassage, but too small to be an army” was how he put it, and issued orders to attack.

But vast eastern armies were not entities a Marius or a Sulla would have desired for one moment, even had those two Roman generals ever had such military largesse offered to them. Forces must be small, flexible, maneuverable—easily supplied, easily controlled, easily deployed. Lucullus had two legions of superb if disreputable soldiers who knew his tactics as well as he did, plus a very neat contingent of twenty-seven hundred horsemen from Galatia who had been with him for years.

The siege had not been without Roman losses, chiefly because of a mysterious Zoroastrian fire King Tigranes possessed. It was called naphtha by the Greeks, and it came from a Persian fastness somewhere on the southwest of the Hyrcanian Sea. Small light lumps of it lobbed onto the siege towers and shelter sheds roared through the air ablaze and splattered as they landed, flaring up so hot and so incandescent that nothing could extinguish them or the fires which spread from them. They burned and maimed—but worse than that, they terrified. No one had ever experienced anything like them before.

Thus when Tigranes moved his mighty force to attack the gnat, he failed to understand what a difference mood could make to the gnat. Every Roman in that tiny army was fed up—fed up with a monotonous diet, Zoroastrian fire, no women, cataphracts lumbering on their huge Nesaean horses to badger foraging parties, Armenia in general and Tigranocerta in particular. From Lucullus to the Fimbriani to the Galatian cavalry, all of them hungered for a battle. And cheered themselves hoarse when the scouts reported that King Tigranes was in the offing at last.

Promising Mars Invictus a special sacrifice, Lucullus girded his loins for the fray at dawn on the sixth day of Roman October. Siege lines abandoned, the General occupied a hill which intervened between the advancing Armenian giant and the city, and made his dispositions. Though he couldn’t know that Mithridates had sent Taxiles to warn the King of Kings not to engage the Romans, Lucullus did know exactly how to tempt Tigranes into an engagement: huddle his little force together and appear to be terrified by the size of the Armenian giant. Since all the eastern kings were convinced an army’s strength was in numbers, Tigranes would attack.

Tigranes did attack. What developed was a debacle. No one on the Armenian side, including Taxiles, seemed to comprehend the value of high ground. Nor, so much was clear to Lucullus as the seething host flowed up his hill, had anyone in the Armenian chain of command thought to develop tactics or a strategy. The monster was unleashed; no more was necessary.

Taking his time, Lucullus dealt out frightful punishment from the top of his hill, worried only that the mountains of dead would end in hemming him in, foil a complete victory. But when he put his Galatian cavalry to clearing lines through the Armenian fallen, the Fimbriani spread outward and downward like scythes through a field of wheat. The Armenian front disintegrated, pushing thousands of Syrian and Caucasian foot soldiers into the ranks of the mailed cataphracts until horses and riders fell, or they themselves were crushed. More of the Armenian host died that way than the berserk Fimbriani had the numbers to kill.

Said Lucullus in his report to the Senate in Rome: “Over one hundred thousand Armenian dead, and five Roman dead.”

King Tigranes fled a second time, so certain he would be captured that he gave his tiara and diadem to one of his sons to keep, exhorting the princeling to gallop faster because he was younger and lighter. But the youth entrusted tiara and diadem to an obscure-looking slave, with the result that the Armenian symbols of sovereignty came into the possession of Lucullus two days later.

The Greeks forced to live in Tigranocerta opened the gates of the city, so overjoyed that they carried Lucullus shoulder-high. Privation was a thing of the past; the Fimbriani dived with equal glee into soft arms and soft beds, ate and drank, wenched and pillaged. The booty was staggering. Eight thousand talents of gold and silver, thirty million medimni of wheat, untold treasures and art works.

And the General became human! Fascinated, Publius Clodius saw the Lucullus he had known in Rome emerge out of the hard-bitten, coldly ruthless man of months past. Manuscripts were piled up for his delectation alongside exquisite children he retained for his own pleasure, never happier than when he could sexually initiate girls just flowering into puberty. Median girls, not Greek! The spoils were divided at a ceremony in the marketplace with Lucullan fairness: each of the fifteen thousand men received at least thirty thousand sesterces in money, though of course it would not be paid over until the loot had been converted into cold, hard Roman cash. The wheat fetched twelve thousand talents; canny Lucullus sold the bulk of it to King Phraates of the Parthians.

Publius Clodius was not about to forgive Lucullus for those months of footslogging and living hard, even when his own share of the booty came in at a hundred thousand sesterces. Somewhere between Eusebeia Mazaca and the crossing at Tomisa he added his brother-in-law’s name to the list he kept of those who would pay for offending him. Catilina. Cicero the small fish. Fabia. And now Lucullus. Having seen the gold and silver piled in the vaults—indeed, having assisted in counting it—Clodius concentrated at first upon working out how Lucullus had managed to cheat everyone when the spoils were divided. A mere thirty thousand for each legionary, each cavalryman? Ridiculous! Until his abacus told him that eight thousand talents divided by fifteen thousand men yielded only thirteen thousand sesterces each—so where had the other seventeen thousand come from? Sale of the wheat, said the General laconically when Clodius applied to him for elucidation.

This wasted exercise in arithmetic did give Clodius an idea, however. If he had assumed Lucullus was cheating his men, what would they think if someone sowed a seed or two of discontent?

Until Tigranocerta had been occupied, Clodius had been given no chance to cultivate the acquaintance of anyone outside the small and untalkative group of legates and tribunes around the General. Lucullus was a stickler for protocol, disapproved of fraternization between ranker soldiers and his staff. But now, with winter setting in and this new Lucullus prepared to give all who served him the time of their lives, supervision ceased. Oh, there were jobs to do: Lucullus ordered every actor and dancer rounded up, for example, and forced them to perform for his army. A circus holiday far from home for men who would never see home again. Entertainments were plentiful. So was wine.

The leader of the Fimbriani was a primus pilus centurion who headed the senior of the two Fimbriani legions. His name was Marcus Silius, and like the rest he had marched, an ordinary legionary not yet old enough to shave, east across Macedonia with Flaccus and Fimbria seventeen years before. When Fimbria won the struggle for supremacy, Marcus Silius had applauded the murder of Flaccus at Byzantium. He had crossed into Asia, fought against King Mithridates, been handed over to Sulla when Fimbria fell from power and suicided, and fought for Sulla, for Murena, and then for Lucullus. With the others he had gone to besiege Mitylene, by which time his rank was pilus prior, very high in the tortuous gradations of centurions. Year had succeeded year; fight had succeeded fight. They had all been mere striplings when they left Italy, for Italy by then was exhausted of seasoned troops; now in Tigranocerta they had been under the eagles for half of the years they had lived, and petition after petition for an honorable discharge had been denied them. Marcus Silius, their leader, was a bitter man of thirty-four who just wanted to go home.

It hadn’t been necessary for Clodius to ascertain this information now; even legates as sour as Sextilius did speak from time to time, and usually about Silius or the primus pilus centurion of the other Fimbriani legion, Lucius Cornificius, who was not of the rising family with that name.

Nor was it hard to find Silius’s lair inside Tigranocerta; he and Cornificius had commandeered a minor palace which had belonged to a Tigranic son, and moved in together with some very delectable women and enough slaves to serve a cohort.

Publius Clodius, patrician member of an august clan, went visiting, and like the Greeks before Troy, he bore gifts. Oh, not the size of wooden horses! Clodius brought a little bag of mushrooms Lucullus (who liked to experiment with such substances) had given him, and a flagon of superlative wine so large it took three servants to manhandle it.

His reception was wary. Both the centurions knew well enough who he was; what relationship he bore to Lucullus; how he had done on the march, in the camp before the city, during the battle. None of which impressed them any more than the person of Clodius did, for he was of no more than average size and far too mediocre of physique to stand out in any crowd. What they did admire was his gall: he barged in as if he owned the place, ensconced himself chattily on a big tapestry cushion between the couches where each man lay wrapped around his woman of the moment, produced his bag of mushrooms and proceeded to tell them what was going to happen when they partook of this unusual fare.

“Amazing stuff!” said Clodius, mobile brows flying up and down in a comical manner. “Do have some, but chew it very slowly and don’t expect anything to happen for quite a long time.”

Silius made no attempt to avail himself of this invitation; nor, he was quick to note, did Clodius set an example by chewing one of the shrunken little caps, slowly or otherwise.

“What do you want?” he asked curtly.

“To talk,” said Clodius, and smiled for the first time.

That was always a shock for those who had never seen the smiling Publius Clodius; it transformed what was otherwise a rather tense and anxious face into something suddenly so likable, so appealing, that smiles tended to break out all around. As smiles did in the moment Clodius triggered his, from Silius, Cornificius, both the women.

But a Fimbrianus was not to be caught so easily. Clodius was the Enemy, a far more serious enemy than any Armenian or Syrian or Caucasian. So after his smile died, Silius maintained his independence of mind, remained skeptical of Clodius’s motives.

All of which Clodius half expected, had planned for. It had come to his notice during those four humiliating years he had slunk around Rome that anyone highborn was going to be viewed with extreme suspicion by those beneath him, and that on the whole those beneath him could find absolutely no reasonable reason why someone highborn would want to slum it. Rudderless, ostracized by his peers, and desperate for something to do, Clodius set out to remove mistrust among his inferiors. The thrill of victory when he succeeded was warming, but he had also found a genuine pleasure in low company; he liked being better educated and more intelligent than anyone else in the room, it gave him an advantage he would never have among his peers. He felt a giant. And he transmitted a message to his inferiors that here was a highborn chap who really did care, who really was attracted to simpler people, simpler circumstances. He learned to wriggle in and make himself at home. He basked in a new kind of adulation.

His technique consisted in talk. No big words, no inadvertent allusions to obscure Greek dramatists or poets, not one indication that his company or his drink or his surroundings did not please him tremendously. And while he talked, he plied his audience with wine and pretended to consume huge amounts of it himself—yet made sure that at the end he was the soberest man in the room. Not that he looked it; he was adept at collapsing under the table, falling off his stool, bolting outside to vomit. The first time he worked on his chosen quarry they preserved a measure of skepticism, but he’d be back to try again, then be back a third and a fourth time, until eventually even the wariest man present had to admit that Publius Clodius was a truly wonderful fellow, someone ordinary who had been unfortunate enough to be born into the wrong sphere. After trust was established, he discovered he could manipulate everyone to his heart’s content provided that he never betrayed his inner thoughts and feelings. The lowly he courted, he soon decided, were urban hayseeds, uncouth, ignorant, unread—desperately eager to be esteemed by their betters, longing for approval. And just waiting to be shaped.

Marcus Silius and Lucius Cornificius were no different from any tavernload of Roman urban lowly, even if they had left Italy at seventeen. Hard they were, cruel they were, ruthless they were. But to Publius Clodius the two centurions seemed as malleable as clay in the hands of a master sculptor. Easy game. Easy…

Once Silius and Cornificius admitted to themselves that they liked him, that he amused them, then Clodius began to defer to them, to ask their opinions on this and that—always choosing things they knew, could feel authoritative about. And after that he let them see that he admired them—their toughness, their stamina in their job, which was soldiering, and therefore of paramount importance to Rome. Finally he became their equal as well as their friend, one of the boys, a light in the darkness; he was one of Them, but as one of Us he was in a position to bring every plight he saw to the attention of Them in Senate and Comitia, on Palatine and Carinae. Oh, he was young, still a bit of a boy! But boys grew up, and when he turned thirty Publius Clodius would enter the hallowed portals of the Senate; he would ascend the cursus honorum as smoothly as water flowing over polished marble. After all, he was a Claudian, a member of a clan which had never skipped the consulship through all the many generations of the Republic. One of Them. Yet one of Us.

It was not until his fifth visit that Clodius got around to the subject of booty and Lucullus’s division of the spoils.

“Miserable skinflint!” said Clodius, slurring his words.

“Eh?” asked Silius, pricking up his ears.

“My esteemed brother-in-law Lucullus. Palming off troops like your chaps with a pittance. Thirty thousand sesterces each when there were eight thousand talents in Tigranocerta!”

“Did he palm us off?’’ asked Cornificius, astonished. “He has always said he preferred to divide the spoils on the field instead of after his triumph because the Treasury couldn’t cheat us!”

“That’s what he intends you to think,” said Clodius, his cup of wine slopping drunkenly. “Can you do sums?”

“Sums?”

“You know, add and subtract and multiply and divide.”

“Oh. A bit,” said Silius, not wanting to seem untutored.

“Well, one of the advantages of having your own pedagogue when you’re young is that you have to do sum after sum after sum after sum. Flogged raw if you don’t!” Clodius giggled. “So I sat down and did a few sums, like multiplying talents into good old Roman sesterces, then dividing by fifteen thousand. And I can tell you, Marcus Silius, that the men in your two legions should have got ten times thirty thousand sesterces each! That supercilious, haughty mentula of a brother-in-law of mine went out into that marketplace looking generous and proceeded to shove his fist right up every Fimbrianus arse!” Clodius smacked his right fist into his left palm. “Hear that? Well, that’s soft compared to Lucullus’s fist up your arses!”

They believed him not only because they wanted to believe him, but also because he spoke with such absolute authority, then proceeded to reel off one set of figures after another as quickly as he could blink, a litany of Lucullus’s peculations since he had come east six years before to take command of the Fimbriani yet again. How could anyone who knew so much be wrong? And what was in it for him to lie? Silius and Cornificius believed him.

After that it was easy. While the Fimbriani roistered their way through winter in Tigranocerta, Publius Clodius whispered in the ears of their centurions, and their centurions whispered in the ears of the rankers, and the rankers whispered in the ears of the Galatian troopers. Some of the men had left women behind in Amisus, and when the two Cilician legions under Sornatius and Fabius Hadrianus marched from Amisus to Zela, the women trailed behind as soldiers’ women always do. Hardly anyone could write, and yet the word spread all the way from Tigranocerta to Pontus that Lucullus had consistently cheated the army of its proper share in the booty. Nor did anyone bother to check Clodius’s arithmetic. It was preferable to believe they had been cheated when the reward for thinking so was ten times what Lucullus said they were to get. Besides which, Clodius was so brilliant! He was incapable of making an arithmetical or statistical mistake! What Clodius said was sure to be right! Clever Clodius. He had learned the secret of demagoguery: tell people what they want most to hear, never tell them what they don’t want to hear.

*

In the meantime Lucullus had not been idle, despite voyages into rare manuscripts and underaged girls. He had made quick trips to Syria, and sent all the displaced Greeks back to their homes. The southern empire of Tigranes was disintegrating, and Lucullus intended to be sure that Rome inherited. For there was a third eastern king who represented a threat to Rome, King Phraates of the Parthians. Sulla had concluded a treaty with his father giving everything west of the Euphrates to Rome, and everything east of the Euphrates to the Kingdom of the Parthians.

When Lucullus sold the thirty million medimni of wheat he found in Tigranocerta to the Parthians, he had done so to prevent its filling Armenian bellies. But as barge after barge sped down the Tigris toward Mesopotamia and the Kingdom of the Parthians, King Phraates sent him a message asking for a fresh treaty with Rome along the same lines: everything west of the Euphrates to be Rome’s, everything east to belong to King Phraates. Then Lucullus learned that Phraates was also treating with the refugee Tigranes, who was promising to hand back those seventy valleys in Media Atropatene in return for Parthian aid against Rome. They were devious, these eastern kings, and never to be trusted; they owned eastern values, and eastern values shifted about like sand.

At which point visions of wealth beyond any Roman dream suddenly popped into Lucullus’s mind. Imagine what would be found in Seleuceia-on-Tigris, in Ctesiphon, in Babylonia, in Susa! If two Roman legions and fewer than three thousand Galatian cavalrymen could virtually eliminate an Armenian grand army, four Roman legions and the Galatian horse could conquer all the way down Mesopotamia to the Mare Erythraeum! What could the Parthians offer by way of resistance that Tigranes had not? From cataphracts to Zoroastrian fire, the army of Lucullus had dealt with everything. All he needed to do was fetch the two Cilician legions from Pontus.

Lucullus made up his mind within moments. In the spring he would invade Mesopotamia and crush the Kingdom of the Parthians. What a shock that would be for the knights of the Ordo Equester and their senatorial partisans! Lucius Licinius Lucullus would show them. And show the entire world.

Off went a summons to Sornatius in Zela: bring the Cilician legions to Tigranocerta immediately. We march for Babylonia and Elymais. We will be immortal. We will drag the whole of the East into the province of Rome and eliminate the last of her enemies.

Naturally Publius Clodius heard all about these plans when he visited the wing of the main palace wherein Lucullus had set up his residence. In fact, Lucullus was feeling more kindly disposed toward his young brother-in-law these days, for Clodius had kept out of his way and hadn’t tried to make mischief among the junior military tribunes, a habit he had fallen into on the march from Pontus the year before.

“I’ll make Rome richer than she’s ever been,” said Lucullus happily, his long face softer these days. “Marcus Crassus prates on about the wealth to be had for the taking in Egypt, but the Kingdom of the Parthians makes Egypt look impoverished. From the Indus to the Euphrates, King Phraates exacts tribute. But after I’m done with Phraates, all that tribute will flow into our dear Rome. We’ll have to build a new Treasury to hold it!”

Clodius hastened to see Silius and Cornificius.

“What do you think of his idea?” asked Clodius prettily.

The two centurions thought very little of it, as they made clear through Silius.

“You don’t know the plains,” he said to Clodius, “but we do. We’ve been everywhere. A summer campaign working down the Tigris all the way to Elymais? In that kind of heat and humidity? Parthians grow up in heat and humidity. Whereas we’ll die.”

Clodius’s mind had been on plunder, not climate, but he thought of climate now. A march into sunstroke and sweat cramps under Lucullus? Worse than anything he had endured so far!

“All right,” he said briskly, “then we had better make sure the campaign never happens.”

“The Cilician legions!” said Silius instantly. “Without them we can’t march into country as flat as a board. Lucullus knows that. Four legions to form a perfect defensive square.”

“He’s sent off to Sornatius already,” said Clodius, frowning.

“His messenger will travel like the wind, but Sornatius won’t muster for a march in under a month,” said Cornificius confidently. “He’s on his own in Zela, Fabius Hadrianus went off to Pergamum.”

“How do you know that?” asked Clodius, curious.

“We got our sources,” said Silius grinning. “What we have to do is send someone of our own to Zela.”

“To do what?”

“To tell the Cilicians to stay where they are. Once they hear where the army’s going, they’ll down tools and refuse to budge. If Lucullus was there he’d manage to shift them, but Sornatius don’t have the clout or the gumption to deal with mutiny.”

Clodius pretended to look horrified. “Mutiny?” he squeaked.

“Not really proper mutiny,” soothed Silius. “Those chaps will be happy to fight for Rome—provided they does it in Pontus. So how can it be classified as a proper mutiny?”

“True,” said Clodius, appearing relieved. “Whom can you send to Zela?” he asked.

“My own batman,” said Cornificius, rising to his feet. “No time to waste, I’ll get him started now.”

Which left Clodius and Silius alone.

“You’ve been a terrific help to us,” said Silius gratefully. “We’re real glad to know you, Publius Clodius.”

“Not as glad as I am to know you, Marcus Silius.”

“Knew another young patrician real well once,” said Silius, reflectively turning his golden goblet between his hands.

“Did you?’’ asked Clodius, genuinely interested; one never knew where such conversations led, what might emerge to become grist in a Clodian mill. “Who? When?”

“Mitylene, a good eleven or twelve years ago.” Silius spat on the marble floor. “Another Lucullus campaign! Never seem to get rid of him. We was herded together into one cohort, the chaps Lucullus decided were too dangerous to be reliable—we still thought a lot about Fimbria in those days. So Lucullus decided to throw us to the arrows, and put this pretty baby in command. Twenty, I think he was. Gaius Julius Caesar.”

“Caesar?” Clodius sat up alertly. “I know him—well, I know of him, anyway. Lucullus hates him.”

“Did then too. That’s why he was thrown to the arrows along with us. But it didn’t work out that way. Talk about cool! He was like ice. And fight? Jupiter, he could fight! Never stopped thinking, that was what made him so good. Saved my life in that battle, not to mention everyone else’s. But mine was personal. Still don’t know how he managed to do it. I thought I was ashes on the fire, Publius Clodius, ashes on the fire.”

“He won a Civic Crown,” said Clodius. “That’s how I remember him so well. There aren’t too many advocates appear in a court wearing a crown of oak leaves on their heads. Sulla’s nephew.”

“And Gaius Marius’s nephew,” said Silius. “Told us that at the start of the battle.”

“That’s right, one of his aunts married Marius and the other one married Sulla.” Clodius looked pleased. “Well, he’s some sort of cousin of mine, Marcus Silius, so that accounts for it.”

“Accounts for what?”

“His bravery and the fact you liked him!”

“Did like him too. Was sorry when he went back to Rome with Thermus and the Asian soldiers.”

“And the poor old Fimbriani had to stay behind as always,” said Clodius softly. “Well, be of good cheer! I’m writing to everyone I know in Rome to get that senatorial decree lifted!”

“You,” said Silius, his eyes filling with tears, “are the Soldiers’ Friend, Publius Clodius. We won’t forget.”

Clodius looked thrilled. “The Soldiers’ Friend? Is that what you call me?”

“That’s what we call you.”

“I won’t forget either, Marcus Silius.”

*

Halfway through March a frostbitten and exhausted messenger arrived from Pontus to inform Lucullus that the Cilician legions had refused to move from Zela. Sornatius and Fabius Hadrianus had done everything they could think of, but the Cilicians would not budge, even after Governor Dolabella sent a stern warning. Nor was that the only unsettling news from Zela. Somehow, wrote Sornatius, the troops of the two Cilician legions had been led to believe that Lucullus had cheated them of their fair share in all booty divided since Lucullus had returned to the East six years earlier. It was undoubtedly the prospect of the heat along the Tigris had caused the mutiny, but the myth that Lucullus was a cheat and a liar had not helped.

The window at which Lucullus sat looked out across the city in the direction of Mesopotamia; Lucullus stared blindly toward the distant horizon of low mountains and tried to cope with the dissolution of what had become a possible, tangible dream. The fools, the idiots! He, a Licinius Lucullus, to exact petty sums from men under his command? He, a Licinius Lucullus, to descend to the level of those grasping get-rich-quick publicani in Rome? Who had done that? Who had spread a rumor like that? And why hadn’t they been able to see for themselves that it was untrue? A few simple calculations, that was all it would have taken.

His dream of conquering the Kingdom of the Parthians was over. To take fewer than four legions into absolutely flat country would be suicide, and Lucullus was not suicidal. Sighing, he rose to his feet, went to find Sextilius and Fannius, the most senior legates with him in Tigranocerta.

“What will you do, then?” asked Sextilius, stunned.

“I’ll do what lies in my power with the forces I have,” said Lucullus, the stiffness growing in every moment. “I’ll go north after Tigranes and Mithridates. I’ll force them to retreat ahead of me, pen them into Artaxata, and break them into little pieces.”

“It’s too early in the year to go so far north,” said Lucius Fannius, looking worried. “We won’t be able to leave until—oh, Sextilis by the calendar. Then all we’ll have is four months. They say there’s no land under five thousand feet, and the growing season lasts a bare summer. Nor will we be able to take much with us in supplies—I believe the terrain is solid mountain. But you will go west of Lake Thospitis, of course.”

“No, I will go east of Lake Thospitis,” Lucullus answered, now fully encased in his icy campaigning shell. “If four months is all we have, we can’t afford to detour two hundred miles just because the going is a trifle easier.”

His legates looked upset, but neither argued. Long accustomed to that look on Lucullus’s face, they didn’t think any argument would sway him. “In the meantime what will you do?” asked Fannius.

“Leave the Fimbriani here to wallow,” said Lucullus with contempt. “They’ll be pleased enough at that news!”

*

Thus it was that early in the month of Sextilis the army of Lucullus finally left Tigranocerta, but not to march south into the heat. This new direction (as Clodius learned from Silius and Cornificius) did not precisely please the Fimbriani, who would have preferred to loiter in Tigranocerta pretending to be on garrison duty. But at least the weather would be bearable, and there wasn’t a mountain in all of Asia could daunt a Fimbrianus! They had climbed them all, said Silius complacently. Besides which, four months meant a nice short campaign. They’d be back in snug Tigranocerta by winter.

Lucullus himself led the march in stony silence, for he had discovered on a visit to Antioch that he was removed from his governorship of Cilicia; the province was to be given to Quintus Marcius Rex, senior consul of the year, and Rex was anxious to leave for the East during his consulship. With, Lucullus was outraged to hear, three brand-new legions accompanying him! Yet he, Lucullus, couldn’t prise a legion out of Rome when his very life had depended on it!

“All right for me,” said Publius Clodius smugly. “Rex is my brother-in-law too, don’t forget. I’m just like a cat—land on my feet every time! If you don’t want me, Lucullus, I’ll take myself off to join Rex in Tarsus.”

“Don’t hurry!” snarled Lucullus. “What I failed to tell you is that Rex can’t start for the East as early as he planned. The junior consul died, then the suffect consul died; Rex is glued to Rome until his consulship is over.”

“Oh!” said Clodius, and took himself off.

Once the march began it had become impossible for Clodius to seek out Silius or Cornificius without being noticed; during this initial stage he lay low among the military tribunes, said and did nothing. He had a feeling that as time went on opportunity would arrive, for his bones said Lucullus had lost his luck. Nor was he alone in thinking this; the tribunes and even the legates were also beginning to mutter about Lucullus’s bad luck.

His guides had advised that he march up the Canirites, the branch of the Tigris which ran close to Tigranocerta and rose in the massif southeast of Lake Thospitis. But his guides were all Arabs from the lowlands; search as he would, Lucullus had found no one in the region of Tigranocerta who hailed from that massif southeast of Lake Thospitis. Which should have told him something about the country he was venturing into, but didn’t because his spirit was so bruised by the failure of the Cilician legions that he wasn’t capable of detachment. He did, however, retain enough coolness of mind to send some of his Galatian horsemen ahead. They returned within a market interval to inform him that the Canirites had a short course which ended in a sheer wall of alp no army could possibly cross, even on foot.

“We did see one nomad shepherd,” said the leader of the patrol, “and he suggested we march for the Lycus, the next big Tigris tributary south. Its course is long, and winds between the same mountain wall. He thinks its source is kinder, that we should be able to cross to some of the lower land around Lake Thospitis. And from there, he says, the going will be easier.”

Lucullus frowned direfully at the delay, and sent his Arabs packing. When he asked to see the shepherd with a view to making him the guide, his Galatians informed him sadly that the rascal had slipped away with his sheep and could not be found.

“Very well, we march for the Lycus,” said the General.

“We’ve lost eighteen days,” said Sextilius timidly.

“I am aware of that.”

And so, having found the Lycus, the Fimbriani and the cavalry began to follow it into ever-increasing heights, an ever-decreasing valley. None of them had been with Pompey when he blazed a new route across the western Alps, but if one had been, he could have told the rest that Pompey’s path was infant’s work compared to this. And the army was climbing, struggling between great boulders thrown out by the river, now a roaring torrent impossible to ford, growing narrower, deeper, wilder.

They rounded a corner and emerged onto a fairly grassy shoulder which sat like a park, not quite a bowl but at least offering some grazing for the horses, growing thin and hungry. But it couldn’t cheer them, for its far end—it was apparently the watershed—was appalling. Nor would Lucullus permit them to tarry longer than three days; they had been over a month on their way, and were actually very little further north than Tigranocerta.

The mountain on their right as they started out into this frightful wilderness was a sixteen-thousand-foot giant, and they were ten thousand feet up its side, gasping at the weight of their packs, wondering why their heads ached, why they could never seem to fill their chests with precious air. A new little stream was their only way out, and the walls rose on either side of it so sheer even snow could not find a foothold. Sometimes it took a whole day to negotiate less than a mile, scrambling up and over rocks, clinging to the edge of the boiling cataract they followed, trying desperately not to fall in to be bashed and mashed to pulp.

No one saw the beauty; the going was too dreadful. And it never seemed to grow less dreadful as the days dragged on and the cataract never calmed, just widened and deepened. At night it was perishing, though full summer was here, and during the day they never felt the sun, so enormous were the mountain walls which hemmed them in. Nothing could be worse, nothing.

Until they saw the bloodstained snow, just when the gorge they had been traversing started to widen a trifle, and the horses managed to nibble at a little grass. Less vertical now, if almost as tall, the mountains held sheets and rivers of snow in their crevices. Snow which looked exactly as snow did on a battlefield after the slaughter was over, brownish pink with blood.

Clodius bolted for Cornificius, whose legion preceded the senior legion under Silius.

“What does it mean?” cried Clodius, terrified.

“It means we’re going to certain death,” said Cornificius.

“Have you never seen it before?”

“How could we have seen it before, when it’s here as an omen for the lot of us?’’

“We must turn back!” shivered Clodius.

“Too late for that,” said Cornificius.

So they struggled on, a little more easily now because the river had managed to carve two verges for itself, and the altitude was decreasing. But Lucullus announced they were too far east, so the army, still staring at the bloodstained snow all around them on the heights, turned to climb once more. Nowhere had they found evidence of life, though everyone had been ordered to capture any nomad who might appear. How could anyone live looking at bloodstained snow?

Twice they climbed up to ten and eleven thousand feet, twice they stumbled downward, but the second pass was more welcome, for the bloodstained snow disappeared, became ordinary beautiful white snow, and on top of the second pass they looked across the distance to see Lake Thospitis dreaming exquisitely blue in the sun.

Weak at the knees, the army descended to what seemed the Elysian Fields, though the altitude still lay at five thousand feet and of harvest there was none, for no one lived to plough soil which remained frozen until summer, and froze again with the first breath of autumn wind. Of trees there were none, but grass grew; the horses fattened if the men didn’t, and at least there was wild asparagus again.

Lucullus pressed on, understanding that in two months he had not managed to get more than sixty miles north of Tigranocerta. Still, the worst was over; he could move faster now. Skirting the lake, he found a small village of nomads who had planted grain, and he took every ear of it to augment his shrinking supplies. Some few miles further on he found more grain, took that too, along with every sheep his army discovered. By this time the air didn’t feel as thin—not because it wasn’t as thin, but because everyone had grown used to the altitude.

The river which ran out of more snowcapped peaks to the north into the lake was a good one, fairly wide and placid, and it headed in the direction Lucullus wanted to go. The villagers, who spoke a distorted Median, had told him through his captive Median interpreter that there was only one more ridge of mountains left between him and the valley of the Araxes River, where Artaxata lay. Bad mountains? he asked. Not as bad as those from which this strange army had issued, was the reply.

Then as the Fimbriani left the river valley to climb into fairly rolling uplands, much happier at this terrain, a troop of cataphracts bore down on them. Since the Fimbriani felt like a good fight, they rolled the massive mailed men and horses into confusion without the help of the Galatians. After that it was the turn of the Galatians, who dealt capably with a second troop of cataphracts. And watched and waited for more.

More did not come. Within a day’s march they understood why. The land was quite flat, but as far as the eye could see in every direction it consisted of a new obstacle, something so weird and horrific they wondered what gods they had offended, to curse them with such a nightmare. And the bloodstains were back—not in snow this time, but smeared across the landscape.

What they looked at were rocks. Razor-edged rocks ten to fifty feet high, tumbled remorselessly without interruption on top of each other and against each other, leaning every way, no reason or logic or pattern to their distribution.

Silius and Cornificius sought an interview with the General.

“We can’t cross those rocks,” said Silius flatly.

“This army can cross anything, it’s already proved that,” Lucullus answered, very displeased at their protest.

“There’s no path,” said Silius.

“Then we will make one,” said Lucullus.

“Not through those rocks we won’t,” said Cornificius. “I know, because I had some of the men try. Whatever those rocks are made of is harder than our dolabrae.”

“Then we will simply climb over them,” said Lucullus.

He would not bend. The third month was drawing to a finish; he had to reach Artaxata. So his little army entered the lava field fractured by an inland sea in some remote past age. And shivered in fear because “those rocks” were daubed with blood-red lichen. It was painfully slow work, ants toiling across a plain of broken pots. Only men were not ants; “those rocks” cut, bruised, punished cruelly. Nor was there any way around them, for in every direction more snowy mountains reared on the horizon, sometimes nearer, sometimes farther away, always hemming them into this terrible travail.

Clodius had decided somewhere just to the north of Lake Thospitis that he didn’t care what Lucullus said or did, he was going to travel with Silius. And when (learning from Sextilius that Clodius had deserted to fraternize with a centurion) the General ordered him back to the front of the march, Clodius refused.

“Tell my brother-in-law,” he said to the tribune dispatched to fetch him home, “that I am happy where I am. If he wants me up front, then he’ll have to clap me in irons.”

A reply which Lucullus deemed it wiser to ignore. In truth the staff was delighted to be rid of the whining, trouble-making Clodius. As yet no suspicion existed of Clodius’s part in the mutiny of the Cilician legions, and as the Fimbriani had confined their protest about “those rocks” to an official one delivered by their head centurions, no suspicion existed of a Fimbriani mutiny.

Perhaps there never would have been a Fimbriani mutiny had it not been for Mount Ararat. For fifty miles the army suffered the fragmented lava field, then emerged from it onto grass again. Bliss! Except that from east to west across their path loomed a mountain the like of which no one had ever seen. Eighteen thousand feet of solid snow, the most beautiful and terrible mountain in the world, with another cone, smaller yet no less horrifying, on its eastern flank.

The Fimbriani lay down their shields and spears and looked. And wept.

This time it was Clodius who led the deputation to the General, and Clodius was not about to be cowed.

“We absolutely refuse to march another step,” he said, Silius and Cornificius nodding behind him.

It was when Lucullus saw Bogitarus step into the tent that he knew himself beaten, for Bogitarus was the leader of his Galatian horsemen, a man whose loyalty he could not question.

“Are you of the same mind, Bogitarus?” Lucullus asked.

“I am, Lucius Licinius. My horses can’t cross a mountain like that, not after the rocks. Their feet are bruised to the hocks, they’ve cast shoes faster than my smiths can cope with, and I’m running out of steel. Not to mention that we’ve had no charcoal since we left Tigranocerta, so I have no charcoal left either. We would follow you into Hades, Lucius Licinius, but we will not follow you onto that mountain,” said Bogitarus.

“Thank you, Bogitarus,” said Lucullus. “Go. You Fimbriani can go too. I want to speak to Publius Clodius.”

“Does that mean we turn back?” asked Silius suspiciously.

“Not back, Marcus Silius, unless you want more rocks. We’ll turn west to the Arsanias, and find grain.”

Bogitarus had already gone; now the two Fimbriani centurions followed him, leaving Lucullus alone with Clodius.

“How much have you had to do with all this?” asked Lucullus.

Bright-eyed and gleeful, Clodius eyed the General up and down contemptuously. How worn he looked! Not hard to believe now that he was fifty. And the gaze had lost something, a cold fixity which had carried him through everything. What Clodius saw was a crust of weariness, and behind it a knowledge of defeat.

“What have I had to do with all this?’’ he asked, and laughed. “My dear Lucullus, I am its perpetrator! Do you really think any of those fellows have such foresight? Or the gall? All this is my doing, and nobody else’s.”

“The Cilician legions,” said Lucullus slowly.

“Them too. My doing.” Clodius bounced up and down on his toes. “You won’t want me after this, so I’ll go. By the time I get to Tarsus, my brother-in-law Rex ought to be there.”

“You’re going nowhere except back to mess with your Fimbriani minions,” said Lucullus, and smiled dourly. “I am your commander, and I hold a proconsular imperium to fight Mithridates and Tigranes. I do not give you leave to go, and without it you cannot go. You will remain with me until the sight of you makes me vomit.’”’

Not the answer Clodius wanted, or had expected. He threw Lucullus a furious glare, and stormed out.

*

The winds and snow began even as Lucullus turned west, for the campaigning season was over. He had used up his time of grace getting as far as Ararat, not more than two hundred miles from Tigranocerta as a bird would have flown. When he touched the course of the Arsanias, the biggest of the northern tributaries of the Euphrates, he found the grain already harvested and the sparse populace fled to hide in their troglodyte houses dug out of tufa rock, together with every morsel of any kind of food. Defeated by his own troops Lucullus may have been, but adversity was something he had come to know well, and he was not about to stop here where Mithridates and Tigranes could find him all too easily when spring arrived.

He headed for Tigranocerta, where there were supplies and friends, but if the Fimbriani had expected to winter there, they were soon disillusioned. The city was quiet and seemed contented under the man he had left there to govern, Lucius Fannius. Having picked up grain and other foodstuffs, Lucullus marched south to besiege the city of Nisibis, situated on the river Mygdonius, and in drier, flatter country.

Nisibis fell on a black and rainy night in November, yielding much plunder as well as a wealth of good living. Ecstatic, the Fimbriani settled down with Clodius as their mascot, their good-luck charm, to spend a delightful winter beneath the snow line. And when Lucius Fannius materialized not a month later to inform his commander that Tigranocerta was once more in the hands of King Tigranes, the Fimbriani carried an ivy-decked Clodius shoulder-high around the Nisibis marketplace, attributing their good fortune to him; here they were safe, spared a siege at Tigranocerta.

In April, with winter nearing its end and the prospect of a new campaign against Tigranes some comfort, Lucullus learned that he had been stripped of everything save an empty title, commander in the war against the two kings. The knights had used the Plebeian Assembly to take away his last provinces, Bithynia and Pontus, and then deprived him of all four of his legions. The Fimbriani were to go home at last, and Manius Acilius Glabrio, the new governor of Bithynia-Pontus, was to have the Cilician troops. The commander in the war against the two kings had no army with which to continue his fight. All he had was his imperium.

Whereupon Lucullus resolved to keep the news of their fully honorable discharge from the Fimbriani. What they didn’t know couldn’t bother them. But of course the Fimbriani knew they were free to go home; Clodius had intercepted the official letters and discovered their contents before they reached Lucullus. Hard on the heels of the letter from Rome came letters from Pontus informing him that King Mithridates had invaded. Glabrio wouldn’t inherit the Cilician legions after all; they had been annihilated at Zela.

When orders went out to march for Pontus, Clodius came to see Lucullus. “The army refuses to move out of Nisibis,” he announced.

“The army will march for Pontus, Publius Clodius, to rescue those of its compatriots left alive,” said Lucullus.

“Ah, but it isn’t your army to command anymore!” crowed the jubilant Clodius. “The Fimbriani have finished their service under the eagles, they’re free to go home as soon as you produce their discharge papers. Which you’ll do right here in Nisibis. That way, you can’t cheat them when the spoils of Nisibis are divided.”

At which moment Lucullus understood everything. His breath hissed, he bared his teeth and advanced on Clodius with murder in his eyes. Clodius dodged behind a table, and made sure he was closer to the door than Lucullus.

“Don’t you lay a finger on me!” he shouted. “Touch me and they’ll lynch you!”

Lucullus stopped. “Do they love you so much?” he asked, hardly able to believe that even ignoramuses like Silius and the rest of the Fimbriani centurions could be so gullible.

“They love me to death. I am the Soldiers’ Friend.”

“You’re a trollop, Clodius, you’d sell yourself to the lowest scum on the face of this globe if that meant you’d be loved,” said Lucullus, his contempt naked.

Why exactly it occurred to him at that moment, and in the midst of so much anger, Clodius never afterward understood. But it popped into his head, and he said it gleefully, spitefully: “I’m a trollop? Not as big a trollop as your wife, Lucullus! My darling little sister Clodilla, whom I love as much as I hate you! But she is a trollop, Lucullus. I think that’s why I love her so desperately. Thought you had her first, didn’t you, all of fifteen years old when she married you? Lucullus the pederast, despoiler of the little girls and little boys! Thought you got to Clodilla first, eh? Well, you didn’t!” screamed Clodius, so carried away that foam gathered at the corners of his mouth.

Lucullus was grey. “What do you mean?” he whispered.

“I mean that I had her first, high and mighty Lucius Licinius Lucullus! I had her first, and long before you! I had Clodia first too. We used to sleep together, but we did more than just sleep! We played a lot, Lucullus, and the play grew greater as I grew greater! I had them both, I had them hundreds of times, I paddled my fingers inside them and then I paddled something else inside them! I sucked on them, I nibbled at them, I did things you can’t imagine with them! And guess what?” he asked, laughing. “Clodilla deems you a poor substitute for her little brother!”

There was a chair beside the table separating Clodius from Clodilla’s husband; Lucullus seemed suddenly to lose all the life in him and fell against it, into it. He gagged audibly.

“I dismiss you from my service, Soldiers’ Friend, because the time has come to vomit. I curse you! Go to Rex in Cilicia!”

*

After a tearful parting from Silius and Cornificius, Clodius went. Of course the Fimbriani centurions loaded their Friend down with gifts, some of them very precious, all useful. He jogged off on the back of an exquisite small horse, his retinue of servants equally well mounted, and with several dozen mules bearing the booty. Thinking himself headed in a direction minus danger, he declined Silius’s offer of an escort.

All went well until he crossed the Euphrates at Zeugma, his destination Cilicia Pedia and then Tarsus. But between him and Cilicia Pedia’s flat and fertile river plains lay the Amanus Mountains, a piddling coastal range after the massifs Clodius had recently struggled across; he regarded them with contempt. Until a band of Arab brigands waylaid him down a dry gulch and filched all his gifts, his bags of money, his exquisite small horses. Clodius finished his journey alone and on the back of a mule, though the Arabs (who thought him terrifically funny) had given him enough coins to complete his journey to Tarsus.

Where he found his brother-in-law Rex had not yet arrived! Clodius usurped a suite in the governor’s palace and sat down to review his hate list: Catilina, Cicero, Fabia, Lucullus—and now Arabs. The Arabs would pay too.

It was the end of Quinctilis before Quintus Marcius Rex and his three new legions arrived in Tarsus. He had traveled with Glabrio to the Hellespont, then elected to march down through Anatolia rather than sail a coast notorious for pirates. In Lycaonia, he was able to tell an avid Clodius, he had received a plea of help from none other than Lucullus, who had managed to get the Fimbriani moving after the Soldiers’ Friend departed, and set off for Pontus. At Talaura, well on his way, Lucullus was attacked by a son-in-law of Tigranes named Mithradates, and learned that the two kings were rapidly bearing down on him.

“And would you believe he had the temerity to send to me for help?” asked Rex.

“He’s your brother-in-law too,” said Clodius mischievously.

“He’s persona non grata in Rome, so naturally I refused. He had also sent to Glabrio for help, I believe, but I imagine he was refused in that quarter as well. The last I heard, he was in retreat and intending to return to Nisibis.”

“He never got there,” said Clodius, better informed about the end of Lucullus’s march than about events in Talaura. “When he reached the crossing at Samosata, the Fimbriani baulked. The last we’ve heard in Tarsus is that he’s now marching for Cappadocia, and from there he intends to go to Pergamum.”

Of course Clodius had discovered from reading Lucullus’s mail that Pompey the Great was the recipient of an unlimited imperium to clear the pirates from the Middle Sea, so he left the subject of Lucullus and proceeded to the subject of Pompey.

“And what do you have to do to help the obnoxious Pompeius Magnus sweep up his pirates?” he asked.

Quintus Marcius Rex sniffed. “Nothing, it appears. Cilician waters are under the command of our mutual brother-in-law Celer’s brother, your cousin Nepos, barely old enough to be in the Senate. I am to govern my province and keep out of the way.”

“Hoity-toity!” gasped Clodius, seeing more mischief.

“Absolutely,” said Rex stiffly.

“I haven’t seen Nepos in Tarsus.”

“You will. In time. The fleets are ready for him. Cilicia is the ultimate destination of Pompeius’s campaign, it seems.”

“Then I think,” said Clodius, “that we ought to do a little good work in Cilician waters before Nepos gets here, don’t you?”

“How?” asked Claudia’s husband, who knew Clodius, but still lived in ignorance of Clodius’s ability to wreak havoc. What flaws he saw in Clodius, Rex dismissed as youthful folly.

“I could take out a neat little fleet and go to war on the pirates in your name,” said Clodius.

“Well…”

“Oh, go on!”

“I can’t see any harm in it,” said Rex, wavering.

“Let me, please!”

“All right then. But don’t annoy anyone except pirates!”

“I won’t, I promise I won’t,” said Clodius, who was seeing in his mind’s eye enough pirate booty to replace what he had lost to those wretched Arab brigands in the Amanus.

*

Within a market interval of eight days, Clodius the admiral set sail at the head of a flotilla rather than a fleet, some ten well-manned and properly decked biremes which neither Rex nor Clodius thought Metellus Nepos would miss when he turned up in Tarsus.

What Clodius didn’t take into account was the fact that Pompey’s broom had been sweeping so energetically that the waters off Cyprus and Cilicia Tracheia (which was the rugged western end of that province, wherein so many pirates had their land bases) swarmed with refugee pirate fleets of far larger size than ten biremes. He hadn’t been at sea for five days when one such fleet hove in sight, surrounded his flotilla, and captured it. Together with Publius Clodius, a very short-lived admiral.

And off he was hied to a base in Cyprus that was not very far from Paphos, its capital and the seat of its regent, that Ptolemy known as the Cyprian. Of course Clodius had heard the story of Caesar and his pirates, and at the time had thought it brilliant. Well, if Caesar could do that sort of thing, so too could Publius Clodius! He began by informing his captors in a lordly voice that his ransom was to be set at ten talents rather than the two talents custom and pirate scales said was the right ransom for a young nobleman like Clodius. And the pirates, who knew more of the Caesar story than Clodius did, solemnly agreed to ask for a ransom of ten talents.

“Who is to ransom me?” asked Clodius grandly.

“In these waters, Ptolemy the Cyprian” was the answer.

He tried to play Caesar’s role around the pirate base, but he lacked Caesar’s physical impressiveness; his loud boasts and threats somehow came out ludicrously, and while he knew Caesar’s captors had also laughed, he was quite acute enough to divine that this lot absolutely refused to believe him even after the revenge Caesar had taken. So he abandoned that tack, and began instead to do what none did better: he went to work to win the humble folk to his side, create trouble at home. And no doubt he would have succeeded—had the pirate chieftains, all ten of them, not heard what was going on. Their response was to throw him into a cell and leave him with no audience beyond the rats which tried to steal his bread and water.

He had been captured early in Sextilis, and wound up in that cell not sixteen days later. And in that cell he lived with his ratty companions for three months. When finally he was released it was because the Pompeian broom was so imminent that the settlement had no alternative than to disband. And he also discovered that Ptolemy the Cyprian, on hearing what ransom Clodius thought himself worth, had laughed merrily and sent a mere two talents—which was all, said Ptolemy the Cyprian, Publius Clodius was really worth. And all he was prepared to pay.

Under ordinary circumstances the pirates would have killed Clodius, but Pompey and Metellus Nepos were too near to risk a death sentence: word had got out that capture did not mean an automatic crucifixion, that Pompey preferred to be clement. So Publius Clodius was simply abandoned when the fleet and its horde of hangers-on departed. Several days later one of Metellus Nepos’s fleets swept past; Publius Clodius was rescued, returned to Tarsus and Quintus Marcius Rex.

The first thing he did once he’d had a bath and a good meal was to review his hate list: Catilina, Cicero, Fabia, Lucullus, Arabs, and now Ptolemy the Cyprian. Sooner or later they’d all bite the dust—nor did it matter when, how long he would have to wait. Revenge was such a delicious prospect that the when of it hardly mattered. The only important thing to Clodius was that it should happen. Would happen.

He found Quintus Marcius Rex in an ill humor, but not at his, Clodius’s, failure. To Rex, the failure was his own. Pompey and Metellus Nepos had utterly eclipsed him, had commandeered his fleets and left him to twiddle his thumbs in Tarsus. Now they were mopping up rather than sweeping; the pirate war was over and all the pickings had gone elsewhere.

“I understand,” said Rex savagely to Clodius, “that after he’s made a grand tour of Asia Province he is to come here to Cilicia and ‘tour the dispositions,’ was how he put it.”

“Pompeius or Metellus Nepos?” asked Clodius, bewildered.

“Pompeius, of course! And as his imperium outranks mine even in my own province, I’ll have to follow him around with a sponge in one hand and a chamber pot in the other!”

“What a prospect,” said Clodius clinically.

“It’s a prospect I cannot abide!” snarled Rex. “Therefore Pompeius will not find me in Cilicia. Now that Tigranes is incapable of holding anywhere southwest of the Euphrates, I am going to invade Syria. It pleased Lucullus to set up a Lucullan puppet on the Syrian throne—Antiochus Asiaticus, he calls himself! Well, we shall see what we shall see. Syria belongs in the domain of the governor of Cilicia, so I shall make it my domain.”

“May I come with you?” asked Clodius eagerly.

“I don’t see why not.” The governor smiled. “After all, Appius Claudius created a furor while he kicked his heels in Antioch waiting for Tigranes to give him an audience. I imagine that the advent of his little brother will be most welcome.”

*

It wasn’t until Quintus Marcius Rex arrived in Antioch that Clodius began to see one revenge was at hand. “Invasion” was the term Rex had employed, but of fighting there was none; Lucullus’s puppet Antiochus Asiaticus fled, leaving Rex—King—to do his own kingmaking by installing one Philippus on the throne. Syria was in turmoil, not least because Lucullus had released many, many thousands of Greeks, all of whom had flocked home. But some came home to discover that their businesses and houses had been taken over by the Arabs whom Tigranes had winkled out of the desert, and to whom he had bequeathed the vacancies created by the Greeks he had kidnapped to Hellenize his Median Armenia. To Rex it mattered little who owned what in Antioch, in Zeugma, in Samosata, in Damascus. But to his brother-in-law Clodius it came to matter greatly. Arabs, he hated Arabs!

To work went Clodius, on the one hand by whispering in Rex’s ear about the perfidies of the Arabs who had usurped Greek jobs and Greek houses, and on the other hand by visiting every single discontented and dispossessed Greek man of influence he could find. In Antioch, in Zeugma, in Samosata, in Damascus. Not an Arab ought to remain in civilized Syria, he declared. Let them go back to the desert and the desert trade routes, where they belonged!

It was a very successful campaign. Soon murdered Arabs began to appear in gutters from Antioch to Damascus, or floated down the broad Euphrates with their outlandish garb billowing about them. When a deputation of Arabs came to see Rex in Antioch, he rebuffed them curtly; Clodius’s whispering campaign had succeeded.

“Blame King Tigranes,” Rex said. “Syria has been inhabited by Greeks in all its fertile and settled parts for six hundred years. Before that, the people were Phoenician. You’re Skenites from east of the Euphrates, you don’t belong on the shores of Our Sea. King Tigranes has gone forever. In future Syria will be in the domain of Rome.”

“We know,” said the leader of this delegation, a young Skenite Arab who called himself Abgarus; what Rex failed to understand was that this was the hereditary title of the Skenite King. “All we ask is that Syria’s new master should accord us what has become ours. We did not ask to be sent here, or to be toll collectors along the Euphrates, or inhabit Damascus. We too have been uprooted, and ours was a crueler fate than the Greeks’.”

Quintus Marcius Rex looked haughty. “I fail to see how.”

“Great governor, the Greeks went from one kindness to another. They were honored and paid well in Tigranocerta, in Nisibis, in Amida, in Singara, everywhere. But we came from a land so hard and harsh, so stung by sand and barren that the only way we could keep warm at night was between the bodies of our sheep or before the smoky fire given off by a wheel of dried dung. And all that happened twenty years ago. Now we have seen grass growing, we have consumed fine wheaten bread every day, we have drunk clear water, we have bathed in luxury, we have slept in beds and we have learned to speak Greek. To send us back to the desert is a needless cruelty. There is prosperity enough for all to share here in Syria! Let us stay, that is all we ask. And let those Greeks who persecute us know that you, great governor, will not condone a barbarity unworthy of any man who calls himself Greek,” said Abgarus with simple dignity.

“I really can’t do anything to help you,” said Rex, unmoved. “I’m not issuing orders to ship all of you back to the desert, but I will have peace in Syria. I suggest you find the worst of the Greek troublemakers and sit down with them to parley.”

Abgarus and his fellow delegates took part of that advice, though Abgarus himself never forgot Roman duplicity, Roman connivance at the murder of his people. Rather than seek out the Greek ringleaders, the Skenite Arabs first of all organized themselves into well-protected groups, and then set about discovering the ultimate source of growing discontent among the Greeks. For it was bruited about that the real culprit was not Greek, but Roman.

Learning a name, Publius Clodius, they then found out that this young man was the brother-in-law of the governor, came from one of Rome’s oldest and most august families, and was a cousin by marriage of the conqueror of the pirates, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. Therefore he could not be killed. Secrecy was possible in the desert wastes, but not in Antioch; someone would sniff the plot out and tell.

“We will not kill him,” said Abgarus. “We will teach him a severe lesson.”

Further enquiries revealed that Publius Clodius was a very strange Roman nobleman indeed. He lived, it turned out, in an ordinary house among the slums of Antioch, and he frequented the kind of places Roman noblemen usually avoided. But that of course made him accessible. Abgarus pounced.

Bound, gagged and blindfolded, Publius Clodius was carried to a room without windows, a room without murals or decorations or differences from half a million such rooms in Antioch. Nor was Publius Clodius allowed to see beyond a glimpse as the cloth over his eyes was removed along with his gag, for a sack was slipped over his head and secured around his throat. Bare walls, brown hands, they were all he managed to take in before a less complete blindness descended; he could distinguish vague shapes moving through the rough weave of the bag, but nothing more.

His heart tripped faster than the heart of a bird; the sweat rolled off him; his breath came short and shallow and gasping. Never in all his life had Clodius been so terrified, so sure he was going to die. But at whose hands? What had he done?

The voice when it came spoke Greek with an accent he now recognized as Arabic; Clodius knew then that he would indeed die.

“Publius Clodius of the great Claudius Pulcher family,” said the voice, “we would dearly love to kill you, but we realize that is not possible. Unless, that is, after we free you, you seek vengeance for what will be done here tonight. If you do try to seek vengeance, we will understand that we have nothing to lose by killing you, and I swear by all our gods that we will kill you. Be wise, then, and quit Syria after we free you. Quit Syria, and never come back as long as you live.”

“What—you—do?’’ Clodius managed to say, knowing that whatever it was could not be less than torture and flogging.

“Why, Publius Clodius,” said the voice, unmistakably amused, “we are going to make you into one of us. We are going to turn you into an Arab.”

Hands lifted the hem of his tunic (Clodius wore no toga in Antioch; it cramped his style too much) and removed the loincloth Romans wore when out and about the streets clad only in a tunic. He fought, not understanding, but many hands lifted him onto a flat hard surface, held his legs, his arms, his feet.

“Do not struggle, Publius Clodius,” said the voice, still amused. “It isn’t often our priest has something this large to work on, so the job will be easy. But if you move, he might cut off more than he intends to.”

Hands again, pulling at his penis, stretching it out—what was happening? At first Clodius thought of castration, wet himself and shit himself, all amid outright laughter from the other side of the bag depriving him of sight; after which he lay perfectly still and shrieked, screamed, babbled, begged, howled. Where was he, that they didn’t need to gag him?

They didn’t castrate him, though what they did was hideously painful, something to the tip of his penis.

“There!” said the voice. “What a good boy you are, Publius Clodius! One of us forever. You should heal very well if you don’t dip your wick in anything noxious for a few days.”

On went the loincloth over the shit, on went the tunic, and then Clodius knew no more, though afterward he never knew whether his captors had knocked him out or whether he had fainted.

He woke up in his own house, in his own bed, with an aching head and something so sore between his legs that it was the pain registered first, before he remembered what had happened. Pain forgotten, he leaped from the bed and, gasping with terror that perhaps nothing remained, he put his hands beneath his penis and cradled it to see what was there, how much was left. All of it, it seemed, except that something odd glistened purply between crusted streaks of blood. Something he usually saw only when he was erect. Even then he didn’t really understand, for though he had heard of it, he knew no people save for Jews and Egyptians who were said to do it, and he knew no Jews or Egyptians. The realization dawned very slowly, but when it did Publius Clodius wept. The Arabs did it too, for they had made him into one of them. They had circumcised him, cut off his foreskin.

*

Publius Clodius left on the next available ship for Tarsus, sailing serenely through waters free at last from pirates thanks to Pompey the Great. In Tarsus he took ship for Rhodus, and in Rhodus for Athens. By then he had healed so beautifully that it was only when he held himself to urinate that he remembered what the Arabs had done to him. It was autumn, but he beat the gales across the Aegaean Sea, landed in Athens. From there he rode to Patrae, crossed to Tarentum, and faced the fact that he was almost home. He, a circumcised Roman.

The journey up the Via Appia was the worst leg of his trip, for he understood how brilliantly the Arabs had dealt with him. As long as he lived, he could never let anyone see his penis; if anyone did, the story would get out and he would become a laughingstock, an object of such ridicule and merriment that he would never be able to brazen it out. Urinating and defaecating he could manage; he would just have to learn to control himself until absolute privacy was at hand. But sexual solace? That was a thing of the past. Never again could he frolic in some woman’s arms unless he bought her but didn’t know her, used her in the darkness and kicked her out lightless.

Early in February he arrived home, which was the house big brother Appius Claudius owned on the Palatine, thanks to his wife’s money. When he walked in, big brother Appius burst into tears at sight of him, so much older and wearier did he seem; the littlest one of the family had grown up, and clearly not without pain. Naturally Clodius wept too, so that some time went by before his tale of misadventure and penury tumbled out. After three years in the East, he returned more impoverished than when he had left; to get home, he had had to borrow from Quintus Marcius Rex, who had not been pleased, either at this summary, inexplicable desertion or at Clodius’s insolvency.

“I had so much!” mourned Clodius. “Two hundred thousand in cash, jewels, gold plate, horses I could have sold in Rome for fifty thousand each—all gone! Snaffled by a parcel of filthy, stinking Arabs!”

Big brother Appius patted Clodius’s shoulder, stunned at the amount of booty: he hadn’t done half as well out of Lucullus! But of course he didn’t know of Clodius’s relationship with the Fimbriani centurions, or that that was how most of Clodius’s haul had been acquired. He himself was now in the Senate and thoroughly at ease with his life, both domestically and politically. His term as quaestor for Brundisium and Tarentum had been officially commended, a great start to what he hoped would be a great career. And he was also the bearer of great news for Publius Clodius, news he revealed as soon as the emotion of meeting calmed down.

“There’s no need to worry about being penniless, my dearest little brother,” said Appius Claudius warmly. “You’ll never be penniless again!”

“I won’t? What do you mean?” asked Clodius, bewildered.

“I’ve been offered a marriage for you—such a marriage! In all my days I never dreamed of it, I wouldn’t have looked in that direction without Apollo’s appearing to me in my sleep—and Apollo didn’t. Little Publius, it’s wonderful! Incredible!”

When Clodius turned white at this marvelous news, Appius Claudius put the reaction down to happy shock, not terror.

“Who is it?” Clodius managed to say. Then, “Why me?”

“Fulvia!” big brother Appius trumpeted. “Fulvia! Heiress of the Gracchi and the Fulvii; daughter of Sempronia, the only child of Gaius Gracchus; great-granddaughter of Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi; related to the Aemilii, the Cornelii Scipiones—”

“Fulvia? Do I know her?” asked Clodius, looking stupefied.

“Well, you may not have noticed her, but she’s seen you,” said Appius Claudius. “It was when you prosecuted the Vestals. She couldn’t have been more than ten years old—she’s eighteen now.”

“Ye gods! Sempronia and Fulvius Bambalio are the most remote pair in Rome,” said Clodius, dazed. “They can pick and choose from anyone. So why me?”

“You’ll understand better when you meet Fulvia,” said Appius Claudius, grinning. “She’s not the granddaughter of Gaius Gracchus for nothing! Not all Rome’s legions could make Fulvia do something Fulvia doesn’t want to do. Fulvia picked you herself.”

“Who inherits all the money?” asked Clodius, beginning to recover—and beginning to hope that he could manage to talk this divine plum off the tree and into his lap. His circumcised lap.

“Fulvia inherits. The fortune’s bigger than Marcus Crassus’s.”

“But the lex Voconia—she can’t inherit!”

“My dear Publius, of course she can!” said Appius Claudius. “Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi procured a senatorial exemption from the lex Voconia for Sempronia, and Sempronia and Fulvius Bambalio procured another one for Fulvia. Why do you think Gaius Cornelius, the tribune of the plebs, tried so hard to strip the Senate of the right to grant personal exemptions from laws? One of his biggest grudges was against Sempronia and Fulvius Bambalio for asking the Senate to allow Fulvia to inherit.”

“Did he? Who?” asked Clodius, more and more bewildered.

“Oh, of course! You were in the East when it happened, and too busy to pay attention to Rome,” said Appius Claudius, beaming fatuously. “It happened two years ago.”

“So Fulvia inherits the lot,” said Clodius slowly.

“Fulvia inherits the lot. And you, dearest little brother, are going to inherit Fulvia.”

*

But was he going to inherit Fulvia? Dressing with careful attention to the way his toga was draped and his hair was combed, making sure his shave was perfect, Publius Clodius set off the next morning to the house of Sempronia and her husband, who was the last member of that clan of Fulvii who had so ardently supported Gaius Sempronius Gracchus. It was, Clodius discovered as an aged steward conducted him to the atrium, not a particularly large or expensive or even beautiful house, nor was it located in the best part of the Carinae. The temple of Tellus (a dingy old structure being let go to rack and ruin) excluded it from the view across the Palus Ceroliae toward the mount of the Aventine, and the insulae of the Esquiline reared not two streets away.

Marcus Fulvius Bambalio, the steward had informed him, was indisposed; the lady Sempronia would see him. Well aware of the adage that all women looked like their mothers, Clodius felt his heart sink at his first sight of the illustrious and elusive Sempronia. A typical Cornelian, plump and homely. Born not long before Gaius Sempronius Gracchus perished by his own hand, the only surviving child of that entire unlucky family had been given as a debt of honor to the only surviving child of Gaius Gracchus’s Fulvian allies, for they had lost everything in the aftermath of that futile revolution. They were married during the fourth of Gaius Marius’s consulships, and while Fulvius (who had preferred to assume a new cognomen, Bambalio) set out to make a new fortune, his wife set out to become invisible. She succeeded so well that even Juno Lucina had not been able to find her, for she was barren. Then in her thirty-ninth year she attended the Lupercalia, and was lucky enough to be struck by a piece of flayed goat skin as the priests of the College danced and ran naked through the city. This cure for infertility never failed, nor did it for Sempronia. Nine months later she bore her only child, Fulvia.

“Publius Clodius, welcome,” she said, indicating a chair.

“Lady Sempronia, this is a great honor,” said Clodius, on his very best behavior.

“I suppose Appius Claudius has informed you?’’ she asked, eyes assessing him, but face giving nothing away.

“Yes.”

“And are you interested in marrying my daughter?”

“It is more than I could have hoped for.”

“The money, or the alliance?”

“Both,” he said, seeing no point in dissimulation; no one knew better than Sempronia that he had never seen her daughter.

She nodded, not displeased. “It is not the marriage I would have chosen for her, nor is Marcus Fulvius overjoyed.” A sigh, a shrug. “However, Fulvia is not the grandchild of Gaius Gracchus for nothing. In me, none of the Gracchan spirit and fire ever dwelled. My husband too did not inherit the Fulvian spirit and fire. Which must have angered the gods. Fulvia took both our shares. I do not know why her fancy alighted on you, Publius Clodius, but it did, and a full eight years ago. Her determination to marry you and no one else began then, and has never faded. Neither Marcus Fulvius nor I can deal with her, she is too strong for us. If you will have her, she is yours.”

“Of course he’ll have me!” said a young voice from the open doorway to the peristyle garden.

And in came Fulvia, not walking but running; that was her character, a mad dash toward what she wanted, no time to ponder.

To Clodius’s surprise, Sempronia got up immediately and left. No chaperon? How determined was Fulvia?

Speech was impossible for Clodius; he was too busy staring. Fulvia was beautiful! Her eyes were dark blue, her hair a funny streaky pale brown, her mouth well shaped, her nose perfectly aquiline, her height almost his own, and her figure quite voluptuous. Different, unusual, like no Famous Family in Rome. Where had she come from? He knew the story of Sempronia at the Lupercalia, of course, and thought now that Fulvia was a visitation.

“Well, what do you have to say?” this extraordinary creature demanded, seating herself where her mother had been.

“Only that you leave me breathless.”

She liked that, and smiled to reveal beautiful teeth, big and white and fierce. “That’s good.”

“Why me, Fulvia?” he asked, his mind now fixing itself on the chief difficulty, his circumcision.

“You’re not an orthodox person,” she said, “and nor am I. You feel. So do I. Things matter to you the way they did to my grandfather, Gaius Gracchus. I worship my ancestry! And when I saw you in court struggling against insuperable odds, with Pupius Piso and Cicero and the rest sneering at you, I wanted to kill everyone who ground you down. I admit I was only ten years old, but I knew I had found my own Gaius Gracchus.”

Clodius had never considered himself in the light of either of the Brothers Gracchi, but Fulvia now planted an intriguing seed: what if he embarked on that sort of career—an aristocratic demagogue out to vindicate the underprivileged? Didn’t it blend beautifully with his own career to date? And how easy it would be for him, who had a talent for getting on with the lowly that neither of the Gracchi had owned!

“For you, I will try,” he said, and smiled delightfully.

Her breath caught, she gasped audibly. But what she said was strange. “I’m a very jealous person, Publius Clodius, and that will not make me an easy wife. If you so much as look at another woman, I’ll tear your eyes out.”

“I won’t be able to look at another woman,” he said soberly, switching from comedy to tragedy faster than an actor could change masks. “In fact, Fulvia, it may be that when you know my secret, you won’t look at me either.”

This didn’t dismay her in the least; instead she looked fascinated, and leaned forward. “Your secret?”

“My secret. And it is a secret. I won’t ask you to swear to keep it, because there are only two kinds of women. Those who would swear and then tell happily, and those who would keep a secret without swearing. Which kind are you, Fulvia?”

“It depends,” she said, smiling a little. “I think I am both. So I won’t swear. But, Publius Clodius, I am loyal. If your secret doesn’t diminish you in my eyes, I will keep it. You are my chosen mate, and I am loyal. I would die for you.”

“Don’t die for me, Fulvia, live for me!” cried Clodius, who was falling in love more rapidly than a child’s cork ball could tumble down a cataract.

“Tell me!” she said, growling the words ferociously.

“While I was with my brother-in-law Rex in Syria,” Clodius began, “I was abducted by a group of Skenite Arabs. Do you know what they are?”

“No.”

“They’re a race out of the Asian desert, and they had usurped many of the positions and properties the Greeks of Syria had owned before Tigranes transported the Greeks to Armenia. When these Greeks returned after Tigranes fell, they found themselves destitute. The Skenite Arabs controlled everything. And I thought that was terrible, so I began to work to have the Greeks restored and the Skenite Arabs returned to the desert.”

“Of course,” she said, nodding. “That is your nature, to fight for the dispossessed.”

“My reward,” said Clodius bitterly, “was to be abducted by these people of the desert, and subjected to something no Roman can abide—something so disgraceful and ludicrous that if it became known, I would never be able to live in Rome again.”

All sorts of somethings chased through that intense dark blue gaze as Fulvia reviewed the alternatives. “What could they have done?” she asked in the end, absolutely bewildered. “Not rape, sodomy, bestiality. Those would be understood, forgiven.”

“How do you know about sodomy and bestiality?”

She looked smug. “I know everything, Publius Clodius.”

“Well, it wasn’t any of them. They circumcised me.”

“What did they do?”

“You don’t know everything after all.”

“Not that word, anyway. What does it mean?”

“They cut off my foreskin.”

“Your what?” she asked, revealing deeper layers of ignorance.

Clodius sighed. “It would be better for Roman virgins if the wall paintings didn’t concentrate on Priapus,” he said. “Men are not erect all the time.”

“I know that!”

“What you don’t seem to know is that when men are not erect, the bulb on the end of their penis is covered by a sheath called the foreskin,” said Clodius, beads of sweat on his brow. “Some peoples cut it off, leaving the bulb on the end of the penis permanently exposed. That’s called circumcision. The Jews and the Egyptians do it. So, it appears, do the Arabs. And that is what they did to me. They branded me an outcast, as un-Roman!”

Her face looked like a boiling sky, changing, turning. “Oh! Oh, my poor, poor Clodius!” she cried. Her tongue came out, wet her lips. “Let me look!” she said.

The very thought of that caused twitches and stirs; Clodius now discovered that circumcision did not produce impotence, a fate which permanent limpness since Antioch had seemed to promise. He also discovered that in some ways he was a prude. “No, you most definitely can’t look!” he snapped.

But she was on her knees in front of his chair, and her hands were busy parting the folds of toga, pushing at his tunic. She looked up at him in mingled mischief, delight and disappointment, then waved at a bronze lamp of an impossibly enormous Priapus, the wick protruding from his erection. “You look like him,” she said, and giggled. “I want to see you down, not up!”

Clodius leaped out of the chair and rearranged his clothing, panicked eyes on the door in case Sempronia came back. But she did not, nor it seemed had anyone else witnessed the daughter of the house inspecting what were to be her goods.

“To see me down, you’ll have to marry me,” he said.

“Oh, my darling Publius Clodius, of course I’ll marry you!” she cried, getting to her feet. “Your secret is safe with me. If it really is such a disgrace, you’ll never be able to look at another woman, will you?”

“I’m all yours,” said Publius Clodius, dashing away his tears. “I adore you, Fulvia! I worship the ground you walk on!”

*

Clodius and Fulvia were married late in Quinctilis, after the last of the elections. They had been full of surprises, starting with Catilina’s application to stand in absentia for next year’s consulship. But though Catilina’s return from his province was delayed, other men from Africa had made it their business to be in Rome well before the elections. It seemed beyond any doubt that Catilina’s governorship of Africa was distinguished only for its corruption; the African farmers—tax and otherwise—who had come to Rome were making no secret of their intention to have Catilina prosecuted for extortion the moment he arrived home. So the supervising consul of the curule elections, Volcatius Tullus, had prudently declined to accept Catilina’s in absentia candidacy on the grounds that he was under the shadow of prosecution.

Then a worse scandal broke. The successful candidates for next year’s consulships, Publius Sulla and his dear friend Publius Autronius, were discovered to have bribed massively. Gaius Piso’s lex Calpurnia dealing with bribery might be a leaky vessel, but the evidence against Publius Sulla and Autronius was so ironclad that not even slipshod legislation could save them. Whereupon the guilty pair promptly pleaded guilty and offered to conclude a deal with the existing consuls and the new consuls-elect, Lucius Cotta and Lucius Manlius Torquatus. The upshot of this shrewd move was that the charges were dropped in return for payment of huge fines and an oath sworn by both men that neither of them would ever again stand for public office; that they got away with it was thanks to Gaius Piso’s bribery law, which provided for such solutions. Lucius Cotta, who wanted a trial, was livid when his three colleagues voted that the miscreants could keep both citizenship and residency as well as the major portions of their immense fortunes.

None of which really concerned Clodius, whose target was, as eight years earlier, Catilina. Mind running riot with dreams of revenge at last, Clodius prevailed upon the African plaintiffs to commission him to prosecute Catilina. Wonderful, wonderful! Catilina’s comeuppance was at hand just when he, Clodius, had married the most exciting girl in the world! All his rewards had come at once, not least because Fulvia turned out to be an ardent partisan and helper, not at all the demure little stay-at-home bride other men than Clodius might perhaps have preferred.

At first Clodius worked in a frenzy to assemble his evidence and witnesses, but the Catilina case was one of those maddening affairs wherein nothing happened quickly enough, from finding the evidence to locating the witnesses. A trip to Utica or Hadrumetum took two months, and the job needed many such trips to Africa. Clodius fretted and chafed, but then, said Fulvia, “Think a little, darling Publius. Why not drag the case out forever? If it isn’t concluded before next Quinctilis, then for the second year in a row, Catilina won’t be allowed to run for the consulship, will he?”

Clodius saw the point of this advice immediately, and slowed down to the pace of an African snail. He would secure Catilina’s conviction, but not for many moons to come. Brilliant!

He then had time to think about Lucullus, whose career was ending in disaster. Through the lex Manilia, Pompey had been dowered with Lucullus’s command against Mithridates and Tigranes, and had proceeded to exercise his rights. He and Lucullus had met at Danala, a remote Galatian citadel, and quarreled so bitterly that Pompey (who had until then been reluctant to squash Lucullus under the weight of his imperium maius) formally issued a decree outlawing Lucullus’s actions, then banished him from Asia. After which Pompey re-enlisted the Fimbriani; free though they were at last to go home, the Fimbriani couldn’t face such a major dislocation after all. Service in the legions of Pompey the Great sounded good.

Banished in circumstances of awful humiliation, Lucullus went back to Rome at once, and sat himself down on the Campus Martius to await the triumph he was certain the Senate would grant him. But Pompey’s tribune of the plebs,, his nephew Gaius Memmius, told the House that if it tried to grant Lucullus a triumph, he would pass legislation in the Plebeian Assembly to deny Lucullus any triumph; the Senate, said Memmius, had no constitutional right to grant such boons. Catulus, Hortensius and the rest of the boni fought Memmius tooth and nail, but could not marshal sufficient support; most of the Senate was of the opinion that its right to grant triumphs was more important than Lucullus, so why allow concern for Lucullus to push Memmius into creating an unwelcome precedent?

Lucullus refused to give in. Every day the Senate met, he petitioned again for his triumph. His beloved brother, Varro Lucullus, was also in trouble with Memmius, who sought to convict him for peculations alleged to have occurred years and years before. From all of which it might safely be assumed that Pompey had become a nasty enemy of the two Luculli—and of the boni. When he and Lucullus had met in Danala, Lucullus had accused him of walking in to take all the credit for a campaign he, Lucullus, had actually won. A mortal insult to Pompey. As for the boni, they were still adamantly against these special commands for the Great Man.

It might have been expected that Lucullus’s wife, Clodilla, would visit him in his expensive villa on the Pincian Hill outside the pomerium, but she didn’t. At twenty-five she was now a complete woman of the world, had Lucullus’s wealth at her disposal and no one save big brother Appius to supervise her activities. Of lovers she had many, of reputation none savory.

Two months after Lucullus’s return, Publius Clodius and Fulvia visited her, though not with the intention of effecting a reconciliation. Instead (with Fulvia listening avidly) Clodius told his youngest sister what he had told Lucullus in Nisibis—that he, Clodia and Clodilla had done more than just sleep together. Clodilla thought it a great joke.

“Do you want him back?” asked Clodius.

“Who, Lucullus?” The great dark eyes widened, flashed. “No, I do not want him back! He’s an old man, he was an old man when he married me ten years ago—had to fill himself up with Spanish fly before he could get a stir out of it!”

“Then why not go out to the Pincian and see him, tell him you’re divorcing him?” Clodius looked demure. “If you fancy a little revenge, you could confirm what I told him in Nisibis, though he might choose to make the story public, and that could be hard for you. I’m willing to take my share of the outrage, so is Clodia. But both of us will understand if you’re not.”

“Willing?” squeaked Clodilla. “I’d love it! Let him spread the story! All we have to do is deny it, with many tears and protestations of innocence. People won’t know what to believe. Everyone is aware of the state of affairs between you and Lucullus. Those on his side will believe his version of events. Those in the middle will vacillate.

And those on our side, like brother Appius, will think us shockingly injured.”

“Just get in first and divorce him,” said Clodius. “That way, even if he also divorces you, he can’t strip you of a hefty share in his wealth. You’ve no dowry to fall back on.”

“How clever,” purred Clodilla.

“You could always marry again,” said Fulvia.

The dark and bewitching face of her sister-in-law twisted, became vicious. “Not I!” she snarled. “One husband was one too many! I want to manage my own destiny, thank you very much! It’s been a joy to have Lucullus in the East, and I’ve salted away quite a snug little fortune at his expense. Though I do like the idea of getting in first with the divorce. Brother Appius can negotiate a settlement which will give me enough for the rest of my life.”

Fulvia giggled gleefully. “It will set Rome by the ears!’’

It did indeed set Rome by the ears. Though Clodilla divorced Lucullus, he then publicly divorced her by having one of his senior clients read out his proclamation from the rostra. His reasons, he said, were not merely because Clodilla had committed adultery with many men during his absence; she had also had incestuous relations with her brother Publius Clodius and her sister Clodia.

Naturally most people wanted to believe it, chiefly because it was so deliciously awful, but also because the Claudii/Clodii Pulchri were an outlandish lot, brilliant and unpredictable and erratic. Had been for generations! Patricians, say no more.

Poor Appius Claudius took it very hard, but had more sense than to be pugnacious about it; his best defense was to stalk around the Forum looking as if the last thing in the world he wanted to talk about was incest, and people took the hint. Rex had remained in the East as one of Pompey’s senior legates, but Claudia, his wife, adopted the same attitude as big brother Appius. The middle one of the three brothers, Gaius Claudius, was rather intellectually dull for a Claudian, therefore not considered a worthy target by the Forum wits. Luckily Clodia’s husband, Celer, was another absentee on duty in the East, as was his brother, Nepos; they would have been more awkward, asked some difficult questions. As it was, the three culprits went about looking both innocent and indignant, and rolled on the floor laughing when no outsiders were present. What a gorgeous scandal!

Cicero, however, had the last word. “Incest,” he said gravely to a large crowd of Forum frequenters, “is a game the whole family can play.”

*

Clodius was to rue his rashness when finally the trial of Catilina came on, for many of the jury looked at him askance, and allowed their doubts to color their verdict. It was a hard and bitter battle which Clodius for one fought valiantly; he had taken Cicero’s advice about the nakedness of his prejudices and his malice seriously, and conducted his prosecution with skill. That he lost and Catilina was acquitted couldn’t even be attributed to bribery, and he had learned enough not to imply bribery when the verdict of ABSOLVO came in. It was, he concluded, just the luck of the lots and the quality of the defense, which had been formidable.

“You did well, Clodius,” said Caesar to him afterward. “It wasn’t your fault you lost. Even the tribuni aerarii on that jury were so conservative they made Catulus look like a radical.” He shrugged. “You couldn’t win with Torquatus leading the defense, not after the rumor that Catilina planned to assassinate him last New Year’s Day. To defend Catilina was Torquatus’s way of saying he didn’t choose to believe the rumor, and the jury was impressed. Even so, you did well. You presented a neat case.”

Publius Clodius rather liked Caesar, recognizing in him another restless spirit, and envying him a kind of self-control Clodius was unhappily aware he didn’t own. When the verdict came in, he had been tempted to scream and howl and weep. Then his eyes fell on Caesar and Cicero standing together to watch, and something in their faces gave him pause. He would have his revenge, but not today.

To behave like a bad loser could benefit no one save Catilina.

“At least it’s too late for him to run for the consulship,” said Clodius to Caesar, sighing, “and that’s some sort of victory.”

“Yes, he’ll have to wait another year.” They walked up the Sacra Via toward the inn on the corner of the Clivus Orbius, with the imposing facade of Fabius Allobrogicus’s arch across the Sacred Way filling their eyes. Caesar was on his way home, and Clodius heading for the inn itself, where his clients from Africa were lodging.

“I met a friend of yours in Tigranocerta,” said Clodius.

“Ye gods, who could that have been?”

“A centurion by name of Marcus Silius.”

“Silius? Silius from Mitylene? A Fimbrianus?”

“The very one. He admires you very much.”

“It’s mutual. A good man. At least now he can come home.’’

“It appears not, Caesar. I had a letter from him recently, written from Galatia. The Fimbriani have decided to enlist with Pompeius.”

“I wondered. These old campaigners weep a lot about home, but when an interesting campaign crops up, somehow home loses its allure.” Caesar extended his hand with a smile. “Ave, Publius Clodius. I intend to follow your career with interest.”

Clodius stood outside the inn for some time, staring into nothing. When he finally entered, he looked as if he was prefect of his school—upright, honor-bound, incorruptible.