2

Cato had decided to use his soldiers and noncombatants as oarsmen; if he didn’t push them too hard, splendid exercise for convalescents, he thought. Zephyrus was blowing fitfully from the west, so sails were useless, but the weather was tranquil and the sea flat calm, as always under that gentle breeze. Hate Caesar with implacable intensity he might, but he had pored over those crisp, impersonal commentaries Caesar himself had written about his war in Gaul of the Long-hairs, and not allowed his feelings to blind him to the many practical facts they contained. Most important, that the General had shared in the sufferings and the deprivations of his ranker soldiers—walked when they walked, lived on a few scraps of ghastly beef when they did, never held himself aloof from their company on the long marches and during the terrible times when they huddled behind their fortifications and could see no other fate than to be captured and burned alive in wicker cages. Politically and ideologically Cato had made great capital out of those same commentaries, but though his inwardly turned passions drove him to deride and dismiss Caesar’s every action, a part of his mind absorbed the lessons.

As a child Cato had found it agony to learn; he didn’t even have his half sister Servilia’s ability to remember what he had been taught and told, let alone possess anything approaching Caesar’s legendary memory. It was rote, rote, rote for Cato, while Servilia sneered contempt and his adored half brother Caepio sheltered him from her viciousness. That Cato had survived a hideous childhood as the youngest of that tempestuous, divided brood of orphans was purely due to Caepio. Caepio, of whom it had been said that he was not his father’s child, but the love child of his mother, Livia Drusa, and Cato’s father, whom she later married; that Caepio’s height, red hair and hugely beaked nose were pure Porcius Cato; that therefore Caepio was Cato’s full, not half, brother, despite the august patrician name of Servilius Caepio he bore, and the vast fortune he had inherited as a Servilius Caepio. A fortune founded on fifteen thousand talents of gold stolen from Rome: the fabulous Gold of Tolosa.

Sometimes when the wine didn’t work and the daimons of the night refused to be banished, Cato would recall that evening when some minion of Uncle Drusus’s enemies had thrust a small but wicked knife into Uncle Drusus’s groin and twisted it until the damage within could not be repaired. A measure of how deadly the mixture of politics and love could become. The screams of agony that went on and on and on, the lake of blood on the priceless mosaic floor, the exquisite succor that the two-year-old Cato had felt enfolded within the five-year-old Caepio’s embrace as all six children had witnessed Drusus’s awful, lingering death. A night never to be forgotten.

After his tutor finally managed to teach him to read, Cato had found his code of living in the copious works of his great-grandfather Cato the Censor, a pitiless ethic of stifled emotions, unbending principles and frugality; Caepio had tolerated it in his baby brother, but never subscribed to it himself. Though Cato, who didn’t perceive the feelings of others, had not properly understood Caepio’s misgivings about a code of living which did not permit its practitioner the mercy of an occasional failure.

They could not be separated, even served their war training together. Cato never envisioned an existence without Caepio, his stout defender against Servilia as she heaped scorn on his auburn head because he was a descendant of Cato the Censor’s disgraceful second marriage to the daughter of his own slave. Of course she was aware of Caepio’s true parentage, but as he bore her own father’s name, she focused all her malice on Cato.

Whose progeny he actually was had never worried Caepio, Cato thought as he leaned on the ship’s rail to watch the myriad twinkling lights of his fleet throw dissolving gold ribbons across the black still waters. Servilia. A monstrous child, a monstrous woman. More polluted even than our mother was. Women are despicable. The moment some haughty beautiful fellow with impeccable ancestors and tomcat appeal strolls into view, they scramble to open their legs to him. Like my first wife, Attilia, who opened her legs to Caesar. Like Servilia, who opened her legs to Caesar, still does. Like the two Domitias, the wives of Bibulus, who opened their legs to Caesar. Like half of female Rome, who opened their legs to Caesar. Caesar! Always Caesar.

His mind strayed then to his nephew, Brutus. Servilia’s only son. Undeniably the son of her husband at the time, Marcus Junius Brutus, whom Pompeius Magnus had had the gall to execute for treason. The fatherless Brutus had mooned for years over Caesar’s daughter, Julia, even managed to become engaged to her. That had pleased Servilia! If her son was married to his daughter, she could keep Caesar in the family, didn’t need to work so hard to hide her affair with Caesar from her second husband, Silanus. Silanus had died too, but of despair, not Pompeius Magnus’s sword.

Servilia always said that I couldn’t win Brutus to my side, but I did. I did! The first horror for him was the day that he found out his mother had been Caesar’s mistress for five years; the second was the day Caesar broke his engagement to Julia and married the girl to Pompeius Magnus, almost old enough to be her grandfather—and Brutus’s father’s executioner. Pure political expediency, but it had bound Pompeius Magnus to Caesar until Julia died. And the bleeding Brutus—how soft he is!—turned from his mother to me. It is a right act to inflict punishment upon the immoral, and the worst punishment I could have found for Servilia was to take her precious son away.

Where is Brutus now? A lukewarm Republican at best, always torn between his Republican duty and his besetting sin, money. Neither a Croesus nor a Midas—too Roman, of course. Too steeped in interest rates, brokerage fees, sleeping partnerships and all the furtive commercial activities of a Roman senator, disbarred by tradition from naked moneymaking, but too avaricious to resist the temptation.

Brutus had inherited the Servilius Caepio fortune founded in the Gold of Tolosa. Cato ground his teeth, grasped the rail with both hands until his knuckles glistened white. For Caepio, beloved Caepio, had died. Died alone on his way to Asia Province, waiting in vain for me to hold his hand and help him cross the River. I arrived an hour too late. Oh, life, life! Mine has never been the same since I gazed on Caepio’s dead face, and howled, and moaned, and yammered like one demented. I was demented. I am still—oh, still demented. The pain! Caepio was thirty to my twenty-seven; soon I will be forty-six. Yet Caepio’s death seems like yesterday, my grief as fresh now as it was then.

Brutus inherited in accordance with the mos maiorum; he was Caepio’s closest agnate male relative. Servilia’s son, his nephew. I do not grudge Brutus one sestertius of that staggering fortune, and can console myself with the knowledge that Caepio’s wealth could not have gone to a more careful custodian than he. I simply wish that Brutus was more a man, less a milksop. But with that mother, what else could I expect? Servilia has made him what she wanted—obedient, subservient, and desperately afraid of her. How odd, that Brutus actually got up the gumption to cut his leading strings and join Pompeius Magnus in Macedonia. That cur Labienus says he fought at Pharsalus. Amazing. Perhaps being isolated from his harpy of a mother has wrought great changes in him? Perhaps he’ll even show his pimple-pocked face in Africa Province? Hah! I’ll believe that when I see it!

Cato swallowed a yawn, and went to lie on his straw pallet between the miserably still forms of Statyllus and Athenodorus Cordylion—shockingly bad sailors, both of them.

 

Zephyrus continued to blow from the west, but veered around just sufficiently to the north to keep Cato’s fifty transports heading in the general direction of Africa. However, he noted with sinking heart, far to the east of Africa Province. Instead of sighting first Italy’s heel, then Italy’s toe, and finally Sicily, they were pushed firmly against the west coast of the Greek Peloponnese all the way to Cape Taenarum, from whence they limped to Cythera, the beautiful island that Labienus had intended to visit in search of troops fleeing from Pharsalus. If he was still there, he didn’t signal from the shore. Suppressing his anxiety, Cato sailed on toward Crete, and passed the stubby sere bluffs of Criumetopon on the eleventh day at sea.

Gnaeus Pompey had not been able to provide a pilot, but had sent Cato to spend a day with his six best men, all experienced mariners who knew the eastern end of Our Sea as well as had the Phoenicians of old. Thus it was Cato who identified the various landfalls, Cato who had an idea of where they were going.

Though they had sighted no other ships, Cato hadn’t dared to stop and take on water anywhere in Greece, so on the twelfth day he anchored his fleet in unsheltered but placid conditions off Cretan Gaudos Isle, and there made sure that every barrel and amphora he owned was filled to the brim from a spring that gushed out of a cliff into the wavelets. Cretan Gaudos was the last lonely outpost before he committed them to the empty wastes of the Libyan Sea. Libya. They were going to Libya, where men were executed smeared with honey and lashed across an ant heap. Libya. A place of nomad Marmaridae—marble people—and, if the Greek geographers were to be believed, perpetually shifting sands, rainless skies.

At Gaudos he had himself rowed in a tiny boat from one cluster of transports to the next, standing up to shout his little speech of cheer and explanation in that famously stentorian voice.

“Fellow voyagers, the coast of Africa is still far away, but here we must say farewell to the friendly breast of Mother Earth, for from now on we sail without sight of land amid the streams of tunnyfish and the whoofs of dolphins. Do not be afraid! I, Marcus Porcius Cato, have you in my hand, and I will hold you safely until we reach Africa. We will keep our ships together, we will row hard but sensibly, we will sing the songs of our beloved Italy, we will trust in ourselves and in our gods. We are Romans of the true Republic, and we will survive to make life hard for Caesar, so I swear it by Sol Indiges, Tellus and Liber Pater!”

A little speech greeted by frenzied cheers, smiling faces.

Then, though he was neither priest nor augur, Cato killed a biden-tine ewe and offered it, as the Commander, to the Lares Permarini, the protectors of those who traveled on the sea. A fold of his purple-bordered toga over his head, he prayed:

“O ye who are called the Lares Permarini, or any other name ye prefer—ye who may be gods, goddesses or of no sex at all—we ask that ye intercede on our behalf with the mighty Father Neptune—whose offspring ye may or may not be—before we set out on our journey to Africa. We pray that ye will testify before all the gods that we are sincere as we ask ye to keep us safe, keep us free from the storms and travails of the deep, keep our ships together, and allow us to land in some civilized place. In accordance with our contractual agreements, which go back to the time of Romulus, we hereby offer ye the proper sacrifice, a fine young female sheep which has been cleansed and purified.”

And on the thirteenth day the fleet weighed anchor to sail to only the Lares Permarini knew where.

Having attained his sea legs, Statyllus abandoned his bed and kept Cato company.

“Though I try valiantly, I can never understand the Roman mode of worship,” he said, now enjoying the slight motion of a big, heavy ship riding a glossy sea.

“In what way, Statyllus?”

“The—legality, Marcus Cato. How can any people have legal contracts with their gods?”

“Romans do, always have done. Though I confess, not being a priest, that I wasn’t exactly sure when the contract with the Lares Permarini was drawn up,” Cato said very seriously. “However, I did remember that Lucius Ahenobarbus said the contracts with numina like the Lares and Penates were drawn up by Romulus. It’s only the late arrivals like Magna Mater and”—he grimaced in disgust—”Isis whose legal agreements with the Senate and People of Rome are preserved. A priest would automatically know, it’s a part of his job. But who would elect Marcus Porcius Cato to one of the pontifical colleges when he can’t even get himself elected consul in a poor year of dismal candidates?”

“You are still young,” Statyllus said softly, well aware of Cato’s disappointment when he had failed to secure the consulship four years ago. “Once the true government of Rome is restored, you will be senior consul, returned by all the Centuries.”

“That is as may be. First, let us get ourselves to Africa.”

 

The days crept by as the fleet crept southeast, chiefly by oar power, though the huge single sail each ship bore aloft on a mast did swell occasionally, help a little. However, as a slack sail made rowing a harder business, sails were furled unless the day was one of frequent helpful puffs.

To keep himself fit and alert, Cato took a regular shift on an oar, plying it alone. Like merchant vessels, transports had but one bank of oars, fifteen to a side. All were fully decked, which meant the oarsmen sat within the hull, an ordeal more endurable because they were housed in an outrigger that projected them well over the water, made it easier and airier to row. Warships were entirely different, had several banks of oars plied by two to five men per oar, the bottom bank so close to the surface of the sea that the ports were sealed with leather valves. But war galleys were never meant to carry cargo or stay afloat between battles; they were jealously cared for and spent most of their twenty years of service sitting ashore in ship sheds. When Gnaeus Pompey quit Corcyra, he left its natives hundreds of ship sheds—firewood!

Because Cato believed that selfless hard work was one of the marks of a good man, he put his back to it, and inspired the other twenty-nine men who rowed with him to do the same. Word of the Commander’s participation somehow spread from ship to ship, and men rowed more willingly, stroking to the beat of the hortator’s drum. Counting every soul aboard those ships carrying soldiers rather than mules, wagons or equipment, there were men enough for two teams only, which meant a constant four hours on, four hours off, day and night.

The diet was monotonous; bread, the universal staple, had been off the menu except for that day spent at Cretan Gaudos. No ship could risk fire by stoking ovens. A steady fire was lit on a hearth of firebricks to heat a huge iron cauldron, and in that only one food could be cooked—thick pease porridge flavored with a small chunk of bacon or salt pork. Concerned about drinking water, Cato had issued an order that the porridge was to be eaten without additional salt, yet another blow for appetites.

However, the weather allowed all fifty ships to keep close together, and it seemed, Cato ascertained on his constant trips around them in his tiny boat, that his 1,500 men were as optimistic as he could have hoped for, given their healthy fear of an entity as secretive and mysterious as the sea. No Roman soldier was happy on the sea. Dolphins were greeted with joy, but there were sharks too, and schools of fish fled at the approach of all those whacking oars, which limited visual entertainment as well as guaranteed the absence of fish stew.

The mules drank more than Cato had estimated, the sun beat down every day, and the level of water in the barrels was dropping with appalling swiftness. Ten days out from Cretan Gaudos, he began to doubt that they would live to see land. As he took his tiny boat from ship to ship, he promised the men that the mules would go overboard long before the water barrels were empty. A promise his men did not welcome; they were soldiers, and mules to soldiers were quite as precious as gold. Each century had ten mules to carry what a man could not fit into his fifty-pound back load, and one four-mule wagon for the really heavy stuff.

Then Corus began to blow out of the northwest; whooping with delight, the men swarmed to break out the sails. In Italy, a wet wind, but not in the Libyan Sea. Their pace picked up, the oars were easier to pull, and hope blossomed.

 

At the middle of the fourteenth night since Cretan Gaudos, Cato woke and sat up in a hurry, the nostrils of his awesome beak flaring. The sea, he had long realized, had a smell all its own—sweetish, weedy, faintly fishy. But now a different perfume was smothering it. Earth! He could smell earth!

Sniffing ecstatically, he went to the rail and lifted his eyes to that magical indigo sky. It wasn’t dark, had never really been dark. Though the orb of the moon had waned to invisibility, the vault was a richly glowing spangle of light from countless stars, spun in places like thin veils, all save the planets winking.

The Greeks say that the planets revolve around our globe much closer to it than the shimmering stars, which are an unimaginable distance away. We are blessed, for we are the home of the gods. We are the center of the whole universe, we hold court for all the celestial bodies. And, to worship us and the gods, they shine, lamps of the night reminding us that light is life.

My letters! My letters are still unread! Tomorrow we will land in Africa, and I will have to sustain the spirits of the men in a place of marble people and shifting sands. Like it or not, I must read my letters as soon as dawn pales the sky, before excitement spreads and I am caught up in it. Until then, I row.

 

From Servilia, a distillation of pure poison; mumbling his way through her conjoined words, Cato gave up on the seventh column, screwed her little scroll into a ball and tossed it overboard. So much for you, my detested half sister!

An oily missive from his father-in-law, Lucius Marcius Philippus, arch-fence-sitter and Epicure supreme. Rome was very quiet under the consul Vatia Isauricus and the urban praetor Gaius Trebonius. In fact, mourned Philippus in elegant prose, absolutely nothing was happening beyond wild reports that Pompeius had won a great victory at Dyrrachium and Caesar was on the run, a defeated man. It followed Servilia into the sea, danced away on the ripples created by the oar blades. So much for you too, Philippus, with your feet safely in both camps—nephew-in-law of Caesar, father-in-law of Cato, Caesar’s greatest enemy. Your news is stale, it sticks in my gullet.

The real reason why he had never read his letters was the last one he read: the one from Marcia. His wife.

When Cornelia Metella defied tradition and set out to join Pompeius Magnus, I hungered desperately to follow her example. That I did not is Porcia’s fault—why did you have to own a daughter as fiercely devoted to the mos maiorum as you are yourself? When she caught me packing, she flew at me like a harpy, then went around the corner to see my father and demanded that he forbid me to go. Well, you know my father. Anything for peace. So Porcia had her wretched way and I still sit here in Rome.

Marcus, meum mel, mea vita, I live alone in a vacuum of the spirit, wondering and worrying. Are you well? Do you ever think of me? Will I ever see you again?

It is not fair that I should have spent a longer time married to Quintus Hortensius than both my marriages to you put together. We have never spoken of that exile to which you sentenced me, though I understood immediately why you did it. You did it because you loved me too much, and deemed your love for me a betrayal of those Stoic principles you hold dearer than your life. Or your wife. So when sheer senescence prompted Hortensius to ask for me in marriage, you divorced me and gave me to him—with the connivance of my father, of course. I know that you took not one sestertius from the old man, but my father took ten million of them. His tastes are expensive.

I saw my exile with Hortensius as evidence of the depth of your love for me—four long, dreadful years! Four years! Yes, he was too old and enfeebled to force his attentions on me, but can you imagine how I felt as I sat for hours each day with Hortensius, cooing at his favorite pet fish, Paris? Missing you, longing for you, suffering your renunciation of me over and over again?

And then, after he died and you took me as your wife a second time, I had but a few short months with you before you left Rome and Italy on one of your remorseless acts of duty. Is that fair, Marcus? I am but twenty-six years old, I have been married to two men, one twice, yet I am barren. Like Porcia and Calpurnia, I have no child.

I know how much you detest reading my reproaches, so I will cease my complaining. If you were a different kind of man, I would not love you the way I do. There are three of us who mourn our missing men—Porcia, Calpurnia, and I. Porcia? I hear you ask. Porcia, missing dead Bibulus? No, not Bibulus. Porcia misses her cousin Brutus. She loves him, I believe, quite as much as you love me, for she has your nature—on fire with passions, all of them frozen by her absurd devotion to the teachings of Zeno. Who was Zeno, after all? A silly old Cypriot who denied himself all the glorious things that the gods gave us to enjoy, from laughter to good food. There speaks the Epicurean’s child! As for Calpurnia, she misses Caesar. Eleven years his wife, yet only a few months actually with Caesar, who was philandering with your frightful sister until he left for Gaul. Since then—nothing. We widows and wives are poorly served.

Someone told me that you have neither shaved nor cut your hair since you left Italy, but I cannot imagine your wonderful, nobly Roman face as bewhiskered as a Jew’s.

Tell me why, Marcus, we women are taught to read and write, yet are always doomed to sit at home, waiting? I must go, I cannot see for tears. Please, I beg of you, write to me! Give me hope.

The sun was up; Cato was a painfully slow reader. Marcia’s scroll was crumpled up, then skimmed across the sparkling water. So much for wives.

His hands were shaking. Such a stupid, stupid letter! To love a woman with the consuming intensity of a funeral pyre is not a right act, cannot be a right act. Doesn’t she understand that every one of her many letters says the same thing? Doesn’t she realize that I will never write to her? What would I say? What is there to say?

 

No nose save his seemed to snuff that earthy tang in the air; everybody went about their business as if today were just another day. The morning wore on. Cato took a turn at the oars, then went back to stand at the rail straining his eyes. Nothing showed until the sun was directly overhead, when a thin, faint blue line appeared on the horizon. Just as Cato saw it, the sailor aloft at the masthead shrieked.

“Land! Land!”

His ship led the fleet, which swelled into a teardrop behind it. No time to step into his tiny boat himself, so he sent an eager pilus prior centurion, Lucius Gratidius, in his stead to instruct the captains not to get ahead of him, and to watch carefully for shoals, reefs, hidden rocks. The water had suddenly become very shallow and clear as the best Puteoli glass, with the same faintly blue sheen now that the sun was not glancing off it.

The land came up extremely fast because it was so flat, not a phenomenon Romans were used to, accustomed to sailing regions where high mountains reared in close proximity to the sea and thus made land visible many miles from shore. To Cato’s relief, the westering sun revealed country more green than ocher; if grasses grew, then there was some hope of civilization. From Gnaeus Pompey’s pilots he knew that there was only one settlement on the eight-hundred-mile coast between Alexandria and Cyrenaica: Paraetonium, whence Alexander the Great had set off south to the fabled oasis of Ammon, there to converse with the Egyptian Zeus.

Paraetonium, we must find Paraetonium! But is it west of here, or is it east?

Cato scraped in the bottom of a sack and managed to gather a small handful of chickpea—they had very little left—then threw the legumes into the water as he prayed:

“O all ye gods, by whichever name ye wish to be known, of whatever sex or no sex ye are, let me guess correctly!”

A brisk gust from Corus came on the echo of his plea; he went to the captain, stationed on a tiny poop between the rope-bound tillers of the massive rudder oars.

“Captain, we turn east before the wind.”

Not four miles down the coast Cato’s farsighted eyes took in the sight of two slight bluffs with the entrance to a bay between them, and one or two mud-brick houses. If this were Paraetonium, then the town had to be inside the harbor. The entrance was mined with rocks, but a clear passage lay almost in its middle; two sailors shoved at the tillers and Cato’s ship turned, oars inboard for the maneuver, to sail into a beautiful haven.

He gasped, goggled. Three Roman ships already lay at anchor! Who, who? Too few for it to be Labienus, so who?

On the back reaches of the bay was a mud-brick, tiny town. Size didn’t matter, though. Wherever people lived collectively, there was bound to be potable water and some provisions for sale. And he would soon find out which Romans owned the ships, all flying the SPQR pennant from their mastheads. Important Romans.

He went ashore in his tiny boat accompanied by the pilus prior centurion, Lucius Gratidius; the entire population of Paraetonium, some six hundred souls, was lined up along a beach, marveling at the sight of fifty big ships making port one at a time. That he might not be able to communicate with the Paraetonians did not occur to him; everyone everywhere spoke Greek, the lingua mundi.

The first words he heard, however, were Latin. Two people stepped forward, a handsome woman in her middle twenties and a stripling youth. Cato gaped, but before he could say anything the woman had fallen on his neck in floods of tears, and the youth was attempting to wring his hand off.

“My dear Cornelia Metella! And Sextus Pompeius! Does this mean that Pompeius Magnus is here?” he asked.

A question which caused Cornelia Metella to weep harder, and set Sextus Pompey to crying too. Their grief held a message: Pompey the Great was dead.

While he stood with Pompey the Great’s fourth wife twined around his neck watering his purple-bordered toga and tried to extricate his hand from Sextus Pompey’s grasp, a rather important-looking man in a tailored Greek tunic walked up to them, a small entourage in his wake.

“I am Marcus Porcius Cato.”

“I am Philopoemon” was the answer, given with an expression that said Cato’s name meant absolutely nothing to a Paraetonian.

Indeed this was the end of the world!

Over dinner in Philopoemon’s modest house he learned the awful story of Pompey the Great in Pelusium, of the retired centurion Septimius who had lured Pompey into a boat and to his death, which Cornelia Metella and Sextus had witnessed from their ship. Worst news of all, Septimius had chopped off Pompey’s head, put it in a jar, then left the body lying on the mud flats.

“Our freedman Philip and the boy who was his slave had gone in the dinghy with my father, but they survived by running away,” Sextus said. “We could do nothing to help—Pelusium harbor was full of the Egyptian king’s navy, and several warships were bearing down on us. Either we stayed to be captured and probably killed too, or we put to sea.” He shrugged, his mouth quivering. “I knew which course my father would have wanted, so we fled.”

Though her fountain of tears had dried up, Cornelia Metella contributed little to the conversation. How much she has changed, Cato thought, he who rarely noticed such things. She had been the haughtiest of patrician aristocrats, daughter of the august Metellus Scipio, first married to the elder son of Pompey’s partner in two of his consulships, Marcus Licinius Crassus. Then Crassus and her husband had set out to invade the Kingdom of the Parthians, and perished at Carrhae. The widowed Cornelia Metella had become a political pawn, for Pompey was widowed too, the death of Caesar’s Julia slipping rapidly into the past. So the boni, including Cato, had plotted to detach Pompey the Great from Caesar; the only way, they felt, to pull Pompey on to the boni side was to give him Cornelia Metella as his new wife. Extremely sensitive about his own obscure origins (Picentine, but with the awful stigma of Gaul added to that), Pompey always married women of the highest nobility. And who was higher than Cornelia Metella? A descendant of Scipio Africanus and Aemilius Paullus, no less. Perfect for boni purposes! The scheme had worked. His gratitude patent, Pompey had espoused her eagerly, and became, if not one of the boni, at least their close ally.

In Rome she had continued as she began, insufferably proud, cool if not downright cold, clearly regarding herself as her father’s sacrificial animal. Marriage to a Pompeius from Picenum was a shocking comedown, even if this particular Pompeius was the First Man in Rome. He just didn’t have the blood, so Cornelia Metella had gone secretly to the Vestal Virgins and obtained some of their medicine made from diseased rye, aborted a pregnancy.

But here in Paraetonium she was different, very different. Soft. Sweet. Gentle. When finally she did speak, it was to tell Cato of Pompey’s plans after his defeat at Pharsalus.

“We were going to Serica,” she said sadly. “Gnaeus had had his fill of Rome, of life anywhere around the margins of Our Sea. So we intended to enter Egypt, then journey to the Red Sea and take ship for Arabia Felix. From there we were going to India, and from India to Serica. My husband thought that the Sericans might be able to use the skills of a great Roman military man.”

“I am sure they would have found a use for him,” Cato said dubiously. Who knew what the Sericans might have made of a Roman? Certainly they would not have known him from a Gaul, a German or a Greek. Their land was so far away, so mysterious that the only information Herodotus had to offer about them was that they made a fabric from the spinnings of a grub, and that he called it bombyx. Its Latin name was vestis serica. On rare occasions a specimen had come through the Sarmatian trade routes of the King of the Parthians, but it was so precious that the only Roman known to have had a piece was Lucullus.

How far had Pompeius Magnus fallen, to contemplate such a course of action! Truly he was not a Roman of Rome.

“I wish I could go home!” Cornelia Metella sighed.

“Then go home!” Cato barked; this was the kind of evening he deemed wasted, when he had men to put into camp.

Shocked, she stared at him in dismay. “How can I go home when Caesar controls the world? He will proscribe—our names will be at the top of his proscription list, and our heads will bring some disgusting slave his freedom plus a small fortune for informing on us. Even if we live, we will be impoverished.”

“Gerrae!” Cato said roundly. “My dear woman, Caesar is no Sulla in that respect. His policy is clemency—and very clever it is too. He intends to earn no hatred from businessmen or his fellow nobles, he intends that they kiss his feet in abject thanks for sparing their lives and letting them keep their property. I admit that Magnus’s fortune will be confiscate, but Caesar won’t touch your wealth. As soon as the winds permit it, I recommend that you go home.” He turned sternly to Sextus Pompey. “As for you, young man, the choice is clear. Escort your stepmother as far as Brundisium or Tarentum, then join Caesar’s enemies, who will gather in Africa Province.”

Cornelia Metella swallowed. “There is no need for Sextus to escort me,” she said. “I take your word for Caesar’s clemency, Marcus Cato, and will sail alone.”

Declining Philopoemon’s offer of a bed, Cato drew the ethnarch of Paraetonium aside as he prepared to leave.

“Whatever you can spare us by way of water or food, we will pay for in silver coin,” he said.

Philopoemon looked as much worried as delighted. “We can give you all the water you want, Marcus Cato, but we haven’t much food to spare. There is famine in Egypt, so we haven’t been able to buy in wheat. But we have sheep we can sell you, and cheese from our goats. While you’re here, we can give your men green salads from several kinds of wild parsley, but it doesn’t keep.”

“Whatever you can spare will be appreciated.”

On the morrow he left Lucius Gratidius and Sextus Pompey to deal with the men, himself preferring to have more conversation with Philopoemon. The more he could learn about Africa, the better.

Paraetonium existed to provide a port for the many pilgrims who journeyed to the oasis of Ammon to consult its oracle, as famous on this shore of Our Sea as Delphi was in Greece. Ammon lay two hundred miles to the south across a rainless desert of long sand dunes and outcrops of bare rocks; there the Marmaridae roamed from well to well with their camels and goats, their big leather tents.

When Cato asked of Alexander the Great, Philopoemon frowned. “No one knows,” he said, “whether Alexander went to Ammon to ask a question of the oracle, or whether Ra, lord of the Egyptian gods, had summoned him to the oasis to deify him.” He looked pensive. “All the Ptolemies since the first Soter have made the pilgrimage, whether on the throne of Egypt or satrap in Cyrenaica. We are tied to Egypt through its kings and queens, the oasis, but our blood is Phoenician, not Macedonian or Greek.”

As Philopoemon chattered on, now about the herds of camels the town kept to hire out to pilgrims, Cato’s thoughts strayed. No, we cannot stay here for very long, but if we sail while Corus is blowing, we will wind up in Alexandria. After hearing how the boy king dealt with Pompeius Magnus, I do not think Egypt is safe for Romans opposing Caesar.

“While Corus blows, impossible,” he muttered.

Philopoemon looked puzzled. “Corus?”

“Argestes,” Cato said, giving the wind its Greek name.

“Oh, Argestes! It will soon vanish, Marcus Cato. Aparctias is due any day.”

Aparctias, Aquilo—the Etesian winds! Yes, of course! It is the middle of October by the calendar, the middle of Quinctilis by the seasons. The Dog Star is about to rise!

“Then,” Cato said with a huge sigh of relief, “we will not need to abuse your hospitality much longer, Philopoemon.”

Nor did they. The following day, the Ides of October, the Etesian winds arrived with the dawn. Cato busied himself in getting Cornelia Metella aboard her three ships, then waved her off feeling unusually tender emotions; she had donated him Pompey the Great’s nest egg, two hundred talents of silver coins. Five million sesterces!

 

The fleet set sail on the third day of the Etesians, the men happier than they had been since Pompey had enlisted them in his grand army of the civil war. Most were in their late twenties and had served Pompey in Spain for years—they were veterans, therefore enormously valuable troops. Like other rankers, they lived in ignorance of the hideous differences between Rome’s political factions; ignorant too of Cato’s reputation as a crazed fanatic. They thought him a splendid fellow—friendly, cheerful, compassionate. Not adjectives even Favonius would have attached to his dearest amicus, Marcus Porcius Cato. They had greeted Sextus Pompey with joy, and cast lots to see whose ship would carry him. For Cato had no intention of accommodating Pompey the Great’s younger son on his own vessel; Lucius Gratidius and the two philosophers were as much company as he could stomach.

Cato stood on the poop as his ship led the fifty out of Paraetonium’s bay with the wind on the leading edge of his sail and the first shift of oarsmen-soldiers pulling with a will. They had food enough for a twenty-day voyage; two of the local farmers had grown bumper crops of chickpea in good winter rains as well as enough wheat to feed Paraetonium. They had been happy to sell most of the chickpea to Cato. No bacon, alas! It took an Italian oak forest plump with acorns to breed good bacon porkers. Oh, pray that someone in Cyrenaica kept pigs! Salt pork was far better than no pork at all.

The five-hundred-mile voyage west to Cyrenaica took just eight days, the fleet far enough out to sea not to have to worry about reefs or shoals; Cyrenaica was a huge bump in the north African coast, thrusting it much closer to Crete and Greece than the interminably straight coast between it and the Nilus Delta.

Their first landfall was Chersonnesus, a cluster of seven houses festooned in fishing nets; Lucius Gratidius rowed ashore and learned that Darnis, immensely bigger, was only a few miles farther on. But “immense” to a village of fishermen turned out to be about the size of Paraetonium; there was water to be had, but no food other than catches of fish. Eastern Cyrenaica. About fifteen hundred miles to go.

Cyrenaica had been a fief of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt until its last satrap, Ptolemy Apion, had bequeathed it to Rome in his will. A reluctant heir, Rome had done nothing to annex it or so much as put a garrison there, let alone send it a governor. Living proof that lack of government simply allowed people to wax fat on no taxes and do what they always did with greater personal prosperity, Cyrenaica became a legendary backwater of the world, a kind of honeyed dream-land. As it was off the beaten track and had no gold, gems or enemies, it didn’t attract unpleasant people. Then thirty years ago the great Lucullus had visited it, and things happened fast. Romanization began, the taxes were imposed, and a governor of praetorian status was appointed to administer it in conjunction with Crete. But as the governor preferred to live in Crete, Cyrenaica carried on much as it always had, a golden backwater, the only real difference those Roman taxes. Which turned out to be quite bearable, for the droughts which plagued other lands supplying grain to Italy were usually out of step with any droughts in Cyrenaica. A big grain producer, Cyrenaica suddenly had a market on the far side of Our Sea. The empty grain fleets came down from Ostia, Puteoli and Neapolis on the Etesian winds, and by the time the harvest was in and the ships loaded, Auster the south wind blew the fleets back to Italy.

 

When Cato arrived, it was thriving on the drought conditions that plagued every land from Greece to Sicily; the winter rains had been excellent, the wheat, almost ready for harvesting now, was coming in a hundredfold, and enterprising Roman grain merchants were beginning to arrive with their fleets.

A wretched nuisance for Cato, who found Darnis, small as it was, stuffed with ships already. Clutching his long hair, he was forced to sail on to Apollonia, the port serving Cyrene city, the capital of Cyrenaica. There he would find harbor!

He did, but only because Labienus, Afranius and Petreius had arrived before him with a hundred and fifty transports, and had evicted the grain fleets into the roads on the high seas. As Cato on the poop of his leading ship was an unmistakable figure, Lucius Afranius, in charge of the harbor, let him bring his fleet in.

“What a business!” Labienus snarled as he walked Cato at a fast clip to the house he had commandeered off Apollonia’s chief citizen. “Here, have some decent wine,” he said once they entered the room he had made his study.

The irony was lost on Cato. “Thank you, no.”

Jaw dropped, Labienus stared. “Go on! You’re the biggest soak in Rome, Cato!”

“Not since I left Corcyra,” Cato answered with dignity. “I vowed to Liber Pater that I wouldn’t touch a drop of wine until I brought my men safely to Africa Province.”

“A few days here, and you’ll be back guzzling.” Labienus went to pour himself a generous measure, and downed it without pausing to breathe.

“Why?” Cato asked, sitting down.

“Because we’re not welcome. The news of Magnus’s defeat and death has flown around Our Sea as if a bird carried it, and all Cyrenaica can think about is Caesar. They’re convinced he’s hard on our heels, and they’re terrified of offending him by seeming to aid his enemies. So Cyrene has locked its gates, and Apollonia is intent on doing whatever harm it can to us—a situation made worse after we sent the grain fleets packing.”

When Afranius and Petreius entered with Sextus Pompey in tow, all that had to be explained again; Cato sat, wooden-faced, his mind churning. Oh, ye gods, I am back among the barbarians! My little holiday is over.

A part of him had looked forward to visiting Cyrene and its Ptolemaic palace, rumored to be fabulous. Having seen Ptolemy the Cyprian’s palace in Paphos, he was keen to compare how the Ptolemies had lived in Cyrenaica against how they had lived in Cyprus. A great empire two hundred years ago, Egypt, which had even owned some of the Aegean islands as well as all Palestina and half of Syria. But the Aegean islands and the lands in Syria-Palestina had gone a century ago; all the Ptolemies had managed to hang on to were Cyprus and Cyrenaica. From which Rome had forced them out quite recently. Well do I remember, reflected Cato, who had been Rome’s agent of annexation in Cyprus, that Cyprus had not welcomed Roman rule. From Orient to Occident is never easy.

Labienus had found 1,000 Gallic cavalry and 2,000 infantrymen lurking in Crete, rounded them up with his customary ruthlessness and appropriated every vessel Crete owned. With 1,000 horses, 2,000 mules and 4,000 men—he had noncombatants and slaves as well—crammed into two hundred ships, he sailed from Cretan Apollonia to Cyrenaican Apollonia (there were towns named after Apollo all over the world) in just three days, having had no other choice than to wait for the Etesian winds.

“Our situation goes from bad to worse,” Cato told Statyllus and Athenodorus Cordylion as the three settled into a tiny house Statyllus had found abandoned; Cato refused to dispossess anyone, and cared not a rush for comfort.

“I understand,” Statyllus said, fussing around the much older Athenodorus Cordylion, who was losing weight and developing a cough. “We should have realized that Cyrenaica would side with the winner.”

“Very true,” Cato said bitterly. He clutched at his beard, pulled it. “There are perhaps four nundinae of the Etesian winds left,” he said, “so somehow I have to push Labienus into moving on. Once the south wind begins to blow, we will never reach Africa Province, and Labienus is more determined to sack Cyrene than he is to do anything constructive about continuing to wage war.”

“You will prevail,” said Statyllus comfortably.

 

That Cato did prevail was thanks to the goddess Fortuna, who seemed to be on his side. The following day word came from the port of Arsinoë, some hundred miles to the west; Gnaeus Pompey had kept his word and shipped another 6,500 of Cato’s wounded to Africa. They had landed in Arsinoë and found the local inhabitants very glad to see them.

“Therefore we leave Apollonia and sail to Arsinoë,” Cato said to Labienus in his harshest voice.

“A nundinum from now,” said Labienus.

“Eight more days? Are you mad? Do what you like, you utter fool, but tomorrow I take my own fleet and leave for Arsinoë!”

The snarl became a roar, but Cato was no Cicero. He had cowed Pompey the Great, and he wasn’t a bit afraid of barbarians like Titus Labienus. Who stood, fists clenched, teeth bared, his black eyes glaring into that cool grey steel. Then he sagged, shrugged.

“Very well, we leave for Arsinoë tomorrow,” he said.

Where the goddess Fortuna deserted Cato, who found a letter from Gnaeus Pompey waiting for him.

Things in Africa Province look very good, Marcus Cato. If I keep on going at the rate I am, I will have my fleets settled into good bases along the southern coast of Sicily, with one or two of the Vulcaniae Isles to deal with grain from Sardinia. In fact, things look so good that I have decided to leave my father-in-law Libo in charge, and take myself off to Africa Province with a great number of soldiers who have turned up in western Macedonia and asked me to let them fight on against Caesar.

Therefore, Marcus Cato, though it pains me to do it, I must ask that you return all your ships to me at once. They are desperately needed, and I’m afraid that unwounded troops must take precedence over your own, wounded men. As soon as I can, I will send you another fleet large enough to get your fellows to Africa Province, though I warn you that you must sail far out to sea. The great bite in the African coast between Cyrenaica and our province is not navigable—no charts, and waters choked with hazards.

I wish you well, and have made an offering that you and your wounded, having suffered so much, do reach us.

No ships. Nor, Cato knew, could they possibly return before Auster made it impossible for them to return.

“Be my fate as it may, Titus Labienus, I must insist that you send your ships to Gnaeus Pompeius as well,” Cato brayed loudly.

“I will not!”

Cato turned to Afranius. “Lucius Afranius, as a consular you outrank us. Next comes Marcus Petreius, then me. Titus Labienus, though you have been a propraetor under Caesar, you were never an elected praetor. Therefore the decision does not rest with you. Lucius Afranius, what do you say?”

Afranius was Pompey the Great’s man to the core; Labienus mattered only in that he was a fellow Picentine and a client of Pompey’s. “If Magnus’s son requires our ships, Marcus Cato, then he must have them.”

“So here we sit in Arsinoë with nine thousand infantry and a thousand horse. Since you’re so devoted to the mos maiorum, Cato, what do you suggest we do?” Labienus asked, very angry.

Well aware that Labienus knew that he was too loathed by the troops to appeal to them as a Caesar might have, Cato relaxed. The worst was over.

“I suggest,” he said calmly, “that we walk.”

No one had the wind to reply, though Sextus Pompey’s eyes lit up, sparkled.

“Between reading Gnaeus Pompeius’s letter and seeking this council,” Cato said, “I made a few enquiries of the locals. If there is nothing else a Roman soldier can do, he can march. It seems the distance from Arsinoë to Hadrumetum, the first big town in Africa Province, is somewhat less than the fifteen hundred miles between Capua and Further Spain. About fourteen hundred miles. I estimate that resistance in Africa Province will not fully coalesce until May of next year. Here in Cyrenaica we have all heard that Caesar is in Alexandria and mired down in a war there, and that King Pharnaces of Cimmeria is running rampant in Asia Minor. Gnaeus Calvinus is marching to contain him, with two legions of Publius Sestius’s and little else. I am sure you know Caesar in the field better than any of us, Labienus, so do you really think that, once he has tidied up Alexandria, he will go west when he leaves?”

“No,” said Labienus. “He’ll march to extricate Calvinus and give Pharnaces such a walloping that he’ll flee back to Cimmeria with his tail between his legs.”

“Good, we agree,” Cato said, quite pleasantly. “Therefore, my fellow curule magistrates and senators, I will go to our troops and ask for a democratic decision as to whether we march the fourteen hundred miles to Hadrumetum.”

“No need for that, Afranius can decide,” Labienus said, and spat his mouthful of wine on to the floor.

“No one can make this decision except those we are going to ask to take this journey!” Cato yelled, at his most aggressive. “Do you really want ten thousand unwilling, resentful men, Titus Labienus? Do you? Well, I do not! Rome’s soldiers are citizens! They have a vote in our elections, no matter how worthless that vote might be if they are poor. But many of them are not poor, as Caesar well knew when he sent them on furlough to Rome to vote for him or his preferred candidates. These men of ours are tried-and-true veterans who have accumulated wealth from sharing in booty—they matter politically as well as militarily! Besides, they lent every sestertius in their legion banks to help fund the Republic’s war against Caesar, so they are our creditors too. Therefore I will go to them and ask.”

Accompanied by Labienus, Afranius, Petreius and Sextus Pompey, Cato went to the huge camp on Arsinoë’s fringe, had the troops assembled in the square to one side of the general stores, and explained the situation. “Think about it overnight, and have an answer for me at dawn tomorrow!” he shouted.

At dawn they had their answer ready, and a representative to deliver it: Lucius Gratidius.

“We will march, Marcus Cato, but on one condition.”

“What condition?”

“That you are in the command tent, Marcus Cato. In a battle we will gladly take orders from our generals, our legates, our tribunes, but on a march through country no one knows, with no roads and no settlements, only one man can prevail—you,” said Lucius Gratidius sturdily.

The five noblemen stared at Gratidius in astonishment, even Cato: an answer no one had expected.

“If the consular Lucius Afranius agrees that your request is in keeping with the mos maiorum, I will lead you,” said Cato.

“I agree,” Afranius said hollowly; Cato’s comment about the fact that Pompey the Great was debtor to his own army had hit Afranius (and Petreius) hard; he had lent Pompey a fortune.

*     *     *     

“At least,” said Sextus to the housebound Cato the next day, “you administered such a kick to Labienus’s arse that he got off it. Did he ever!”

“What are you talking about, Sextus?”

“He spent the night loading his cavalry and horses aboard a hundred of his ships, then sailed at dawn for Africa Province with the money, all the wheat Arsinoë would sell him, and his thumb to his nose.” Sextus grinned. “Afranius and Petreius went as well.”

A huge gladness invaded Cato, who actually forgot himself enough to grin back. “Oh, what a relief! Though I’m concerned for your brother, left a hundred ships short.”

“I’m concerned for him too, Cato, but not concerned enough to want the fellatores marching with us—Labienus and his precious horses! You don’t need a thousand horses on this expedition, they drink water by the amphora and they’re fussy eaters.” Sextus gave a sigh. “It’s his taking all the money will hurt us most.”

“No,” Cato said serenely, “he didn’t take all the money. I still have the two hundred talents your dear stepmother gave me. I just forgot to mention their existence to Labienus. Fear not, Sextus, we’ll be able to buy what we need to survive.”

“No wheat,” Sextus said gloomily. “He cleaned Arsinoë out of the early harvest, and with the grain fleets hovering, we won’t get any of the late harvest.”

“Given the amount of water we’ll have to carry, Sextus, we can’t carry wheat as well. No, this expedition’s food will be on the hoof, you might say. Sheep, goats and oxen.”

“Oh, no!” Sextus cried. “Meat? Nothing but meat?”

“Nothing but meat and whatever edible greens we can find,” Cato said firmly. “I dare-say Afranius and Petreius decided to risk the sea because they suddenly wondered if, with Cato in the command tent, they’d be allowed to ride while others walked.”

“I take it that no one is going to ride?”

“No one. Tempted at that news to hurry after Labienus?”

“Not I! Notice, by the way, that he took no Roman troops with him. The cavalry is Gallic, they’re not citizens.”

“Well,” said Cato, rising to his feet, “having made my notes, it’s time to start organizing the march. It is now the beginning of November, and I estimate that preparations will take two months. Which means we’ll start out in early January.”

“The beginning of autumn by the seasons. Still awfully hot.”

“I am told that the coast is endurable, and we must stick to the coast or get hopelessly lost.”

“Two months’ preparation seems excessive.”

“Logistics demand it. For one thing, I have to commission the weaving of ten thousand shady hats. Imagine what life would be like if Sulla had not made the shady hat famous! Its value in the sun of these latitudes is inestimable. Detest Sulla though all good men must, I have him to thank for that piece of common sense. The men must march as comfortably as possible, which means we take all our mules and those Labienus left behind. A mule can find forage wherever a plant can grow, and the local people have assured me that there will be forage along the coast. So the men will have pack animals for their gear. One thing about a march into uninhabited terra incognita, Sextus, is that mail shirts, shields and helmets need not be worn, and we need not build a camp every night. The few natives there are will not dare to attack a column of ten thousand men.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Sextus Pompey devoutly, “because I can’t imagine Caesar letting the men march unarmed.”

“Caesar is a military man, I am not. My guide is instinct.”

 

Yielding up ten talents of Cornelia Metella’s gift enabled the men to eat bread during those two months of preparation, sop it in good olive oil; enquiries produced bacon, and Cato still had a great deal of chickpea. His own thousand men were superbly fit, thanks to almost a month of rowing, but between their wounds and inertia, the later arrivals were weaker. Cato sent for all his centurions and issued orders: every man intending to march had to submit himself to a rigorous program of drill and exercise, and if, when January arrived, he was not fit, he would be left in Arsinoë to fend for himself.

The dioiketes of Arsinoë, one Socrates, was a great help, a treasure house of good advice. Scholarly and fair-minded, his imagination had soared the moment Cato told him what he intended to do.

“Oh, Marcus Cato, a new anabasis!” he squawked.

“I am no Xenophon, Socrates, and my ten thousand men are good Roman citizen soldiers, not Greek mercenaries prepared to fight for the Persian enemy,” Cato said, trying these days to moderate his voice and not offend people he needed. Thus he hoped that his tones were not indicative of the horror he felt at being likened to that other, very famous march of ten thousand men almost four hundred years ago. “Besides, my march will fade from the annals of history. I do not have Xenophon’s compulsion to explain away treachery in writing because no treachery exists. Therefore I will write no commentary of my march of the ten thousand.”

“Nonetheless, it is a very Spartan thing you do.”

“It is a very sensible thing I do” was Cato’s answer.

To Socrates he confided his greatest worry—that the men, raised on an Italian diet of starches, oils, greens and fruits, with the sole meat for a poor man a bit of bacon for flavoring, would not be able to tolerate a diet consisting of meat.

“But you must surely know of laserpicium,” said Socrates.

“Yes, I know of it.” What was visible of Cato’s face between the hair and the beard screwed itself up in revulsion. “The kind of digestive men like my father-in-law pay a fortune for. It is said to help a man’s stomach recover from a surfeit of”—he drew a breath, looked amazed—”meat! A surfeit of meat! Socrates, Socrates, I must have laserpicium, but how can I afford enough of it to dose ten thousand men every single day for months?”

Socrates laughed until the tears ran down his face. “Where you are going, Marcus Cato, is a wilderness of silphium, a scrubby little bush that your mules, goats and oxen will feast on. From silphium a people called the Psylli extract laserpicium. They live on the western edge of Cyrenaica, and have a tiny port town, Philaenorum. Were a surfeit of meat a dietary custom around Your Sea, the Psylli would be a great deal richer than they are. It is the canny merchants who visit Philaenorum who make the big profits, not the Psylli.”

“Do any of them speak Greek?”

“Oh, yes. They have to, else they’d get nothing for their laserpicium.”

The next day Cato was off to Philaenorum on a horse, with Sextus Pompey galloping to catch him up.

“Go back and be useful in the camp,” Cato said sternly.

“You may order everyone around as much as you like, Cato,” Sextus caroled, “but I am my father’s son, and dying of curiosity. So when Socrates said that you were off to buy whole talents of laserpicium from people called Psylli, I decided that you needed better company than Statyllus and Athenodorus Cordylion.”

“Athenodorus is ill,” Cato said shortly. “Though I’ve had to forbid anyone to ride, I’m afraid I must relax that rule for Athenodorus. He can’t walk, and Statyllus is his nursemaid.”

 

Philaenorum turned out to be two hundred miles south, but the countryside was populated enough to procure a meal and a bed each night, and Cato found himself glad of Sextus’s cheerful, irreverent company. However, he thought as they rode the last fifty miles, I see a hint of what we must contend with. Though there is grazing for stock, it is a barren wasteland.

“The one grace,” said Nasamones, leader of the Psylli, “is the presence of groundwater. Which is why silphium grows so well. Grasses don’t because their root systems can’t burrow deeply enough to find a drink—silphium has a little taproot. Only when you cross the salt pans and marshes between Charax and Leptis Major will you need all the water you can carry. There is more salt desert between Sabrata and Thapsus, but that is a shorter distance and there is a Roman road for the last part of the way.”

“So there are settlements?” Cato asked, brightening.

“Between here and Leptis Major, six hundred miles to the west, only Charax.”

“How far is Charax?”

“Around two hundred miles, but there are wells and oases on the shore, and the people are my own Psylli.”

“Do you think,” Cato asked diffidently, “that I could hire fifty Psylli to accompany us all the way to Thapsus? Then, if we encounter people who have no Greek, we will be able to parley. I want no tribes afraid that we are invading their lands.”

“The price of hire will be expensive,” said Nasamones.

“Two silver talents?”

“For that much, Marcus Cato, you may have us all!”

“No, fifty of you will be enough. Just men, please.”

“Impossible!” Nasamones shot back, smiling. “Extracting laserpicium from silphium is women’s work, and that is what you must do—extract it as you march. The dose is a small spoonful per day per man, you’d never be able to carry half enough. Though I’ll throw in ten Psylli men free of charge to keep the women in order and deal with snakebites and scorpion stings.”

Sextus Pompey went ashen, gulped in terror. “Snakes?” He shuddered. “Scorpions?”

“In great numbers,” Nasamones said, as if snakes and scorpions were just everyday nuisances. “We treat the bites by cutting into them deeply and sucking the poison out, but it is easier said than done, so I advise you to use my men, they are experts. If the bite is properly treated, few men die—only women, children, and the aged or infirm.”

Right, thought Cato grimly, I will have to keep sufficient mules free of cargo to bear men who are bitten. But my thanks, gracious Fortuna, for the Psylli!

“And don’t you dare,” he said savagely to Sextus on the way back to Arsinoë, “say one word about snakes or scorpions to a single soul! If you do, I’ll send you in chains to King Ptolemy.”

 

The hats were woven, Arsinoë and the surrounding countryside denuded of its donkeys. For, Cato discovered from Socrates and Nasamones, mules would drink too much, eat too much. Asses, smaller and hardier, were the burden beasts of choice. Luckily no farmer or merchant minded trading his asses for mules; these were Roman army mules, bred from the finest stock. Cato acquired 4,000 asses in return for his 3,000 mules. For the wagons he took oxen, but it turned out that sheep were impossible to buy. In the end he was forced to settle for 2,000 cattle and 1,000 goats.

This is not a march, it is an emigration, he thought dourly; how Labienus, safe in Utica by now, must be laughing! But I will show him! If I die in the effort, I will get my Ten Thousand to Africa Province fit to fight! For ten thousand there were; Cato took his noncombatants with him as well. No Roman general asked his troops to march, build, fight and care for themselves. Each century held a hundred men, but only eighty of them were soldiers; the other twenty were noncombatant servants who ground the grain, baked the bread, handed out water on the march, cared for the century’s beasts and wagon, did the laundry and cleaning. They were not slaves, but Roman citizens who were deemed unsuitable soldier material—mentally dull yokels who received a tiny share of the booty as well as the same wages and rations as the soldiers.

While the Cyrenaican women labored over the hats, Cyrenaican men were put to making water skins; earthenware amphorae, with their pointed bottoms and a shape designed for setting in a frame or a thick bed of sawdust, were too cumbersome to strap on panniers astride a donkey’s back.

“No wine?” asked Sextus, dismayed.

“No, not a drop of wine,” Cato answered. “The men will be drinking water, and so will we. Athenodorus will have to go without his little invalid fortification.”

 

Two days into January the gigantic migration commenced its walk, cheered by the entire population of Arsinoë. Not a neat military column on the march, rather a wandering mass of animals and tunic-clad men with big straw hats on their heads moving among the animals to keep them more or less in one enormous group as Cato headed south for Philaenorum and the Psylli. Though the sun blazed down at lingering summer heat, the pace, Cato soon learned, would not enervate his men. Ten miles a day, set by the animals.

But though Marcus Porcius Cato had never generaled troops or been thought of by noble Rome, perpetually exasperated by his stubbornness and single-mindedness, as a person with any common sense whatsoever, Cato turned out to be the ideal commander of a migration. Eyes everywhere, he observed and adapted to mistakes no one, even Caesar, could have foreseen. At dawn on the second day his centurions were instructed to make sure every man’s caligae were laced ruthlessly tight around his ankles; they were walking over unpaved land full of small potholes, often concealed, and if a man sprained an ankle or tore a ligament, he became a burden. By the end of the first nundinum, not yet halfway to Philaenorum, Cato had worked out a system whereby each century took charge of a certain number of asses, cattle and goats, designated its own property; if it ate too well or drank too much, it could not filch stock or water from another, more prudent century.

Each dusk the mass stopped, replenished its water from wells or springs, each man settling to sleep on his waterproof felt sagum, a circular cape with a hole in its middle through which, on a rainy or snowy march, he thrust his head. All the bread and chickpea Cato could carry went on this first segment of the march, for laserpicium would not be a part of the menu until Philaenorum. Ten miles a day. As well, then, that these first two hundred miles were through kinder country; they were the learning experience. After Philaenorum, things were going to get a lot worse.

When by some miracle they reached Philaenorum in eighteen rather than twenty days, Cato gave the men three days of rest in a slipshod camp just behind a long, sandy beach. So people swam, fished, paid a precious sestertius to some Psylli woman for sex.

All legionaries knew how to swim, it was a part of their boot-camp training—who knew when someone like Caesar would order them to swim a lake or a mighty river? Naked and carefree, the men frolicked, gorged on fish.

Let them, thought Cato, down swimming too.

“I say!” Sextus exclaimed, looking at the naked Cato, “I never realized how well you’re built!”

“That,” said the man with no sense of humor, “is because you are too young to remember the days when I wore no tunic under my toga to protest against the erosion of the mos maiorum.”

*     *     *     

Not required to herd animals or participate in century doings, the centurions had other duties. Cato called them together and issued instructions about laserpicium and the coming all-meat diet.

“You will eat no plant that the Psylli traveling with us say is inedible, and you will make sure that your men do the same,” he yelled. “Each of you will be issued with a spoon and your century’s supply of laserpicium, and every evening after the men have eaten their beef or goat, you will personally administer half of that spoon to each man. It will be your duty to accompany the Psylli women and two hundred noncombatants as they gather silphium and process it—I understand that the plant has to be crushed, boiled and cooled, after which the laserpicium is skimmed off the top. Which means we need firewood in country devoid of all trees. Therefore you will ensure that every dead plant and the dried crushed plants are collected and carried for burning. Any man who attempts to violate a Psylli woman will be stripped of his citizenship, flogged and beheaded. I mean what I say.”

If the centurions thought he was finished, they were wrong. “One other point!” Cato roared. “Any man, no matter what his rank, who allows a goat to eat his hat, will have to go without a hat. That means sunstroke and death! As it happens, I have sufficient spare hats to replace those already eaten by goats, but I am about to run out. So let every man on this expedition take heed—no hat, no life!”

“That’s telling them,” said Sextus as he accompanied Cato to the house of Nasamones. “The only trouble, Cato, is that a goat determined to eat a hat is as difficult to elude as a whore with her sights on a rich old dodderer. How do you protect your hat?”

“When it is not on my head, I am lying flat with my hat under me. What does it matter if the crown is crushed? Each morning I plump it out again, and tie it firmly on my head with the ribbons those sensible women who made it, gave it.”

“The word is out,” Nasamones said, sorry that this wonderful circus treat was about to leave. “Until you reach Charax, my people will give you all the help they can.” He coughed delicately. “Er—may I offer you a little hint, Marcus Cato? Though you will need the goats, you will never get to Africa Province alive if you continue to let the goats roam free. They will not only eat your hats, they will eat your very clothes. Agoat will eat anything. So tie them together as you walk, and pen them at night.”

“Pen them with what?” Cato cried, fed up with goats.

“I note that every legionary has a palisade stake in his pack. It is long enough to serve as a staff for help covering uneven ground, so each man can carry it. Then at night he can use it as part of a fence to pen up the goats.”

“Nasamones,” said Cato with a smile more joyous than any Sextus had ever seen, “truly I do not know what we would have done without you and the Psylli.”

 

The beautiful mountains of Cyrenaica were gone; the Ten Thousand set off into a flat wilderness of silphium and little else, the ocher ground between those drab, greyish little bushes littered with rubble and fist-sized stones. The palisade stake staffs were proving invaluable.

Nasamones had been right; the wells and soaks were frequent. However, they were not multiple, so it was impossible to water ten thousand men and seven thousand beasts each night—that would have taken a river the size of the Tiber. So Cato had a century and its beasts refill their water skins at each well or soak they passed. This kept the spectacular horde moving, and at sundown everyone could settle for a meal of beef or goat boiled in seawater—the whole Ten Thousand collected dead bushes—and a sleep.

Apart from a brazen sky and silphium scrub, their constant companion was the sea, a huge expanse of polished aquamarine, fluffed with white where rocks lurked, breaking in gentle wavelets upon beach after beach after beach. At the pace the animals moved, men could take a quick dip to cool off and keep clean; if all they could cover were ten miles a day, it would be the end of April before they reached Hadrumetum. And, thought Cato with huge relief, by that time the squabbles as to who will be commander-in-chief of our armies will be over. I can simply slide my Ten Thousand into the legions—I myself will serve in some peaceful capacity.

No Roman ate beef, no Roman ate goat; cattle had but one use, the production of leather, tallow and blood-and-bone fertilizer, and goats were for milk and cheese.

One steer provided about five hundred pounds of edible parts, for the men ate all save the hide, the bones and the intestines. A pound of this per day per man—no one could force himself to eat more—saw the herd dwindle at the rate of twenty beasts a day for six days; the eight-day nundinum was made up with two days of goat, even worse.

At first Cato had hoped that the goats would yield milk from which cheese might be made, but the moment Philaenorum was left behind, the nanny goats nursing kids rejected them and dried up. Nogoat expert, he supposed this had something to do with too much silphium and no straw hats or other delicacies. The long-horned cattle ambled along without annoying the human complement, their hip bones protruding starkly from their nether regions like vestigial wings, shriveled empty udders swinging beneath the cows. No cattle expert either, he supposed that bulls were a nuisance, since all the male cattle were castrated. Be it a tomcat, a dog, a ram, a billy goat or a bull, a wholly male beast wore itself thin and stringy pursuing sex. Scatter the seed, reap a bumper crop of kittens, pups, lambs, kids or calves.

Some of this he voiced to Sextus Pompey, who was fascinated at aspects of the fanatical Marcus Porcius Cato that he fancied no other Roman had ever witnessed. Was this the man who had hectored his father into civil war? Who as a tribune of the plebs had vetoed any legislation likely to improve the way things worked? Who, when as young as Sextus was now, had intimidated the entire College of Tribunes of the Plebs into keeping that wretched column inside the Basilica Porcia? Why? Because Cato the Censor had put the column there; it was a part of the mos maiorum and could not be removed for any reason. Oh, all the stories he had heard about Cato the incorruptible urban quaestor—Cato the drinker—Cato the seller of his beloved wife! Yet here was that selfsame Cato musing about males and their hunger for sex, just as if he himself were not a male—and a very well-endowed male at that.

“Speaking for myself,” Sextus said chattily, “I’m looking immensely forward to civilization. Civilization means women. I’m desperate for a woman already.”

The grey eyes turned his way looked frosty. “If a man is a man, Sextus Pompeius, he should be able to control his baser instincts. Four years are nothing,” Cato said through his teeth.

“Of course, of course!” Sextus said, beating a hasty retreat. Four years, eh? An interesting span to come up with! Marcia had spent four years as wife of Quintus Hortensius between two bouts of Cato. Did he love her, then? Did he suffer, then?

 

Charax was a village on an exquisite lagoon. Its inhabitants, a mixture of Psylli and an inland people called Garamantes, made a living diving for sponges and seed pearls; they consumed nothing but fish, sea urchins and a few vegetables grown in plots painstakingly watered by the women, who, upon seeing this appalling host descending, defended their produce shrilly, brandishing hoes and shrieking curses. Cato promptly issued an order forbidding the plundering of vegetables, then set to with the local chieftain to buy whatever greens he could. Nothing like enough, naturally, though the sight of his silver coins reconciled the women into harvesting everything larger than a sprout.

Romans knew well that humankind could not survive unless fruits and green vegetables were a part of the diet, but so far Cato hadn’t noticed any prodromal signs of scurvy in the men, who had gotten into the habit of chewing a sprig of silphium as they walked, to have some saliva. Whatever else silphium contained besides laserpicium evidently had the same effect as greens. We are but four hundred miles along our way, he thought, but I know in my bones that we are going to make it.

One day off to swim and gorge on fish, then the Ten Thousand moved on into terrible country, flat as a planed board, a wearisome trek across salt pans and brackish marshes interspersed with a few stretches of silphium. Of wells or oases there were none for four hundred miles; forty days of pitiless sun, freezing nights, of scorpions and spiders. No one in Cyrenaica had mentioned spiders, which came as a horrific shock. Italy, Greece, the Gauls, the Spains, Macedonia, Thrace, Asia Minor—that part of the globe Romans marched around, across, up, down, and sideways—lacked big spiders. With the result that a highly decorated primipilus centurion, veteran of almost as many battles as Caesar, would faint dead away at the sight of a big spider. Well, the spiders of Phazania, as this region was called, were not big. They were enormous, as large in the body as a child’s palm, with disgustingly hairy legs that folded under them malignly when they rested.

“Oh, Jupiter!” Sextus cried, shaking one of the things out of his sagum before he folded it one morning. “I tell you straight, Marcus Cato, that had I known such creatures existed, I would gladly have suffered Titus Labienus! I only half believed my father when he said that he turned back within three days of reaching the Caspian Sea because of spiders, but now I know what he meant!”

“At least,” said Cato, who seemed unafraid, “their bite is merely painful because of the size of their nippers. They aren’t poisonous like the scorpions.”

Secretly he was as frightened and revolted as anyone, but pride would not let him betray what he felt; if the Commander screamed and ran, what would the Ten Thousand think? If only there were woody plants to make fires at night for warmth! Who would ever have dreamed that a place so scorching during the day could grow so cold after the sun set? Suddenly, dramatically. One moment frying, the next shivering until the teeth chattered. But what tiny supplies of driftwood they combed from the beaches had to be saved for the cooking fires, silphium and meat.

The Psylli men had earned their keep. No matter how the ground was scoured for scorpions, scorpions there were. Many men were stung, but after the Psylli had trained the century medics on how to slice into the flesh and suck vigorously, few men needed to ride donkeys. One Psylli woman, small and frail, was not so lucky. Her scorpion sting killed her, but not quickly, not kindly.

The more difficult the going became, the more cheerful Cato became. How he managed to cover as much territory as he did in a day escaped Sextus; it seemed that he visited every small group, paused for a chat and a laugh, told them how wonderful they were. And they would swell, grin, pretend that they were having a merry holiday. Then plod on. Ten miles a day.

The water skins shrank; not two days into that forty-day stretch had elapsed before Cato introduced water rationing, even to the animals. But if an occasional cow or steer keeled over, it was slaughtered on the spot to become that night’s meal for some of the men. The asses, it seemed as indefatigable as Cato, just kept walking; that the water skin element in their cargoes was losing weight helped them. Yet thirst is terrible. The days and nights both reverberated to the anguished moos of cattle, the maas of goats, the sad squealing of donkeys. Ten miles a day.

Occasionally storm clouds in the distance would torment them, looming ever blacker, drawing closer; once or twice, the grey slanted curtain of falling rain. But never near the Ten Thousand.

 

For Cato, in between the spurts of energy that pushed him to make his rounds of the men, the journey had become a kind of glory. Somewhere inside his core the desolate wastes his Stoic ethic had made of his Soul reached out to embrace the desolate wastes his body traversed. As if he floated on a sea of pain, yet the pain was purifying, even beautiful.

At noon, when the sun turned the landscape to vast shimmering mists, he sometimes fancied that he saw his brother Caepio walking toward him, red hair glowing like a halo of flames, his unmistakable face a shining beacon of love. Once it was Marcia he saw, and once another, different dark woman; a stranger who he knew in his heart was his mother, though she had died two months after his birth, and he had never seen a portrait of her. Servilia transformed into goodness. Livia Drusa. Mama, Mama.

His last vision occurred on the fortieth day out from Charax, heralded at dawn by Lucius Gratidius to say that the water skins had shrunk to nothing. It was Caepio again, but this time the beloved figure came so close that his outstretched arms almost touched Cato’s.

“Do not despair, little brother. There is water.”

Someone shrieked. The vision popped out of existence in a sudden roar from ten thousand parched throats: WATER!

 

During the space of a short afternoon the countryside changed with all the drama and shock of a thunderclap. The water marked the boundary of this change, a small but running stream so recent that the plants along its perpendicular banks were still infantile. Only then did Cato realize that they had been under way for eighty days, that autumn was beginning to change into winter, that the rains were starting to fall. One of those taunting storms had dropped its liquid blessing inland at a place where the contours permitted it to run, gurgling and absolutely pure, all the way down to the sea. The cattle herd had shrunk to less than fifty beasts, the goat herd to about a hundred. Caepio had given his message just in time.

Humans and animals scattered along both banks of the rivulet for five miles to drink until sated, then, with stern warnings that no creature was to urinate or defecate anywhere near the stream, Cato allowed the Ten Thousand four days to fill the water skins, swim in the sea, fish, and sleep. He himself would have to find civilization and more food.

“The land of Phazania is behind us,” he said to Sextus as they stretched out in the sand after a dip.

We have become brown as nuts, Sextus thought, gazing up and down the endless beach at the clusters of men. Even Cato, so fair, is deeply tanned. I dare-say that means I look like a Syrian. “What land are we entering now?” he asked.

“Tripolitana,” Cato said.

Why does he look so sad? Anyone would think that we have just walked out of the Elysian Fields, rather than out of Tartarus. Has he no idea that this water has come on the very last day before we started to die of thirst? That our food has run out too? Or did he conjure the water up out of his own will? Nothing about Cato surprises me anymore.

“Tripolitana,” he echoed. “Land of the three cities. Yet I know of no cities between Berenice and Hadrumetum.”

“The Greeks like things to sound familiar—look at all the towns named Berenice, Arsinoë, Apollonia, Heracleia. So I imagine that when they built three villages of a few houses here where the coast is more fertile, they called the land ‘Three Cities.’ Leptis Major, Oea and Sabrata, if Socrates and Nasamones are right. Odd, isn’t it? The only Leptis I knew was Leptis Minor in our Africa Province.”

Tripolitana wasn’t a lush cornucopia of plenty like Campania or the Baetis River valley in Further Spain, but from that first stream onward the country began to look as if people might show their faces. Silphium still grew, but joined now by softer plants the Psylli pronounced edible. Occasional strange trees dotted the flatness, branches spread in planes like the layers in a slate ledge, sparsely leafed with yellow-green fernlike fronds; they reminded Cato of the two trees which used to be in Uncle Drusus’s peristyle garden, trees said to have been brought back to Rome by Scipio Africanus. If so, then in spring or summer they must bear fabulous scarlet or yellow blossoms.

To Sextus Pompey, Cato appeared back to normal. “I think,” he said, “that it’s high time I hopped on an ass and trotted ahead to see which way the locals would like to see ten thousand men and a handful of goats go. Not, I am sure, through the middle of their wheat fields or peach orchards. I will try to buy some food. Fish is a pleasant change, but we need to replenish our stock of animals and—how I hope!—find grain for bread.”

Astride an ass, Sextus thought, sitting ruthlessly on his laughter, Cato is ridiculous. His legs are so long that he looks as if he’s paddling the thing, rather than riding it.

Ridiculous he may have appeared to Sextus, but when he came back four hours later the three men accompanying him were eyeing him in awed wonder. We have truly reached civilization, because they have heard of Marcus Porcius Cato.

“We have a route for when we move on,” he announced to Sextus, scissoring off his donkey with more ease than a man stepped over a low fence. “Here are Aristodemus, Phazanes and Phocias, who will serve as our agents in Leptis Major. Twenty miles away, Sextus, and I have been able to buy a flock of hogget sheep. Meat, I know, but at least a different kind. You and I are moving into Leptis itself, so pack your stuff.”

They passed through a village, Misurata, and so came to a town of twenty-thousand folk of Greek descent; Leptis Major or Magna. The harvest was all in, and it had been a good one. When Cato produced his silver coins, he bought enough wheat to put the men back on bread, and sufficient oil to moisten it.

“Only six hundred miles to Thapsus, another hundred up to Utica, and of those, but two hundred waterless ones between Sabrata and Lake Tritonis, the beginning of our Roman province.” Cato broke open a loaf of fresh, crusty bread. “At least having crossed Phazania, Sextus, I know how much water we will need on our last stretch of desert. We’ll be able to load some of the asses with grain, unearth the mills and ovens from the wagons, and make bread whenever there is fire-wood. Isn’t this a wonderful place? This once, I’m going to fill up on bread.”

The quintessential Stoic, thought Sextus, has feet of bread. But he’s right. Tripolitana is a wonderful place.

Though the season for grapes and peaches had finished, the locals dried them, which meant raisins to munch by the handful, and leathery slices of peach to suck on. Celery, onions, cabbage and lettuce abounded in the wild, seeded from domestic gardens.

Women and children as well as men, the Tripolitanans wore tight trousers of densely woven wool and leather leggings over closed-toe boots as protection against snakes, scorpions and those massive spiders, known as tetragnathi. Almost all were engaged in agriculture—wheat, olives, fruit, wine—but kept sheep and cattle on common land deemed too poor for the plough. In Leptis there were businessmen and merchants, plus the inevitable contingent of Roman agents nosing to make a quick sestertius, but the feeling was of rustication, not of commerce.

Inland lay a low plateau that was the commencement of three thousand miles of desert stretching both east and west as well as farther to the south than anybody knew. The Garamantes roamed it on camels, herding their goats and sheep, living in tents to exclude not the rain—there was none—but the sand. A high wind blasted its grains with a force that could kill by suffocation.

A great deal more confident now that eight hundred miles lay behind them, the Ten Thousand left Leptis in high spirits.

 

The two-hundred-mile expanse of salt pans took only nineteen days to cross; though lack of firewood prevented the baking of bread, Cato had acquired as many sheep as cattle to vary the all-meat diet in a better way. No more goats! If I never see another goat again as long as I live, vowed Cato, I will count myself well satisfied. A sentiment his men echoed, especially Lucius Gratidius, upon whom had devolved the goats.

Lake Tritonis formed the unofficial boundary of the Roman African province—a disappointment, as its waters were bitter with natron, a substance akin to salt. Because an inferior sort of murex populated the sea just east of it, a factory for the manufacture of purple-dye sat on its shore alongside a stinking tower of empty shells and the rotting remains of the creatures that had lived inside them. The purple dye was extracted from a small tube in the murex body, which meant a lot of leftovers.

However, the lake marked the beginning of a properly surveyed and paved Roman road. Laughing and chattering, the Ten Thousand hustled past the festering factory as fast as they could, prancing all over the road. Where there was a road, was also Rome.

Outside Thapsus, Athenodorus Cordylion collapsed and died, so suddenly that Cato, elsewhere, didn’t reach him in time to say goodbye. Weeping, Cato saw to the building of a driftwood pyre, offered libations to Zeus and a coin to Charon the ferryman, then took up his staff and set off again ahead of his men. So few left from the old days. Catulus, Bibulus, Ahenobarbus, and now dear Athenodorus Cordylion. How many more days do I have? If Caesar ends in ruling the world, I trust not many.

The march ended in a vast camp on the outskirts of Utica, always the capital of the Roman province. Another Carthage had been built adjacent to the site of the home of Hannibal, Hamilcar and Hasdrubal, but Scipio Aemilianus had razed that home so thoroughly that the new Carthage never rivaled Utica, possessed of an equally magnificent harbor.

A terrible wrench to part from the Ten Thousand, who mourned losing their beloved Commander; never organized into legions, the fifteen cohorts and extra noncombatants Cato had brought would be broken up and inserted into existing legions to plump them out. Still, that incredible march endowed every last participant in it with a luminousness akin to godhead in the eyes of their fellow Roman soldiers.

The only one Cato took with him and Sextus Pompey was Lucius Gratidius, who, if Cato had his way, would train civilians. On his last evening before he entered the governor’s palace in Utica and reentered a world he hadn’t known for well over five months, Cato sat to write to Socrates, the dioiketes of Arsinoë.

I had the forethought, my dear Socrates, to find a few men whose natural double step measured exactly five feet, and I then deputed them to pace out our entire journey from Arsinoë to Utica. Averaging their tallies resulted in a figure of 1,403 miles. Given that we dallied for three days at Philaenorum, a day at Charax, and four days outside Leptis Major—a total of one nundinum—we actually walked for 116 days. If you remember, we left Arsinoë three days before the Nones of January. We have arrived in Utica on the Nones of May. I had thought until I sat to work all this out on my abacus that we traveled at the rate of ten miles per day, but it turns out we covered twelve miles per day. All save sixty-seven of my men survived the trip, though we also lost a Psylli woman to a scorpion bite.

This is just to tell you that we arrived and are safe, but also to tell you that were it not for you and Nasamones of the Psylli, our expedition would have foundered. We had naught but kindness and succor from those we encountered along the way, but the services you and Nasamones rendered us exceed all bounds. One day when our beloved Republic is restored, I hope to see you and Nasamones in Rome as my guests. I will do you public honor in the Senaculum.

The letter took a year to reach Socrates, a year during which much happened. Socrates read it through a wall of tears, then sat, the sheet of Fannian paper fallen to his lap, and shook his head.

“Oh, Marcus Cato, would that you were a Xenophon!” he cried. “Four months upon an uncharted course, and all you can regale me with are facts and figures. What a Roman you are! A Greek would have been making copious notes as foundation for his book; you merely kept a few men pacing and counting. The thanks are greatly appreciated and the letter will be treasured as a relic because you found the time to write it, but oh, what I would give for a narrative of the march of your Ten Thousand!”