Caesar's Women (21 page)

Unable to convince anyone that he was capable of prosecuting some villain, and spurned by villains in need of defense counsel, Publius Clodius had a hideous time of it. In others the snubbing might have led to a self-examination bearing positive fruit when it came to reforming character, but in Clodius it merely contributed to his weaknesses. It deprived him of Forum experience and banished him to the company of a small group of young noblemen commonly dismissed as ne'er-do-wells. For four years Clodius did nothing save drink in low taverns, seduce girls from all walks of life, play at dice, and share his dissatisfactions with others who also bore grudges against noble Rome.

In the end it was boredom drove him to do something constructive, for Clodius didn't really have the temperament to be content with a daily round owning no purpose. Thinking himself different, he knew he had to excel at something. If he didn't, he would die as he was living, forgotten, despised. That just wasn't good enough. Wasn't grand enough. For Publius Clodius the only acceptable fate was to end up being called the First Man in Rome. How he was going to achieve this he didn't know. Except that one day he woke up, head aching from too much wine, purse empty from too much losing at dice, and decided that the degree of his boredom was too great to bear a moment longer. What he needed was action. Therefore he would go where there was action. He would go to the East and join the personal staff of his brother-in-law Lucius Licinius Lucullus. Oh, not to earn himself a reputation as a brave and brilliant soldier! Military endeavors did not appeal to Clodius in the least. But attached to Lucullus's staff, who knew what opportunities might not present themselves? Big brother Appius hadn't earned the admiration of Rome by soldiering, but by stirring up so much trouble for Tigranes in Antioch that the King of Kings had rued his decision to put Appius Claudius Pulcher in his place by making him kick his heels for months waiting for an audience.

Off went Publius Clodius to the East not long before big brother Appius was due to return; it was the beginning of the year immediately after the joint consulship of Pompey and Crassus. The same year Caesar left for his quaestorship in Further Spain.

Carefully choosing a route which would not bring him face-to-face with big brother Appius, Clodius arrived at the Hellespont to find that Lucullus was engaged in pacifying the newly conquered kingdom of King Mithridates, Pontus. Having crossed the narrow strait into Asia, he set off cross-country in pursuit of brother-in-law Lucullus. Whom Clodius thought he knew: an urbane and punctilious aristocrat with a genuine talent for entertaining, immense wealth no doubt now increasing rapidly, and a fabled love of good food, good wine, good company. Just the kind of superior Clodius fancied! Campaigning in Lucullus's personal train was bound to be a luxurious affair.

He found Lucullus in Amisus, a magnificent city on the shores of the Euxine Sea in the heart of Pontus. Amisus had withstood siege and been badly mauled in the process; now Lucullus was busy repairing the damage and reconciling the inhabitants to the rule of Rome rather than the rule of Mithridates.

When Publius Clodius turned up on his doorstep, Lucullus took the pouch of official letters (all of which Clodius had prised open and read with glee) from him, then proceeded to forget he existed. An absent directive to make himself useful to the legate Sornatius was as much time as Lucullus could spare for his youngest brother-in-law before returning to what occupied his thoughts most: his coming invasion of Armenia, the kingdom of Tigranes.

Furious at this offhand dismissal, Clodius hied himself off—but not to make himself useful to anyone, least of all a nobody like Sornatius. Thus while Lucullus got his little army into marching mode, Clodius explored the byways and alleys of Amisus. His Greek of course was fluent, so there was no impediment in the way of his making friends with anyone he met as he drifted around, and he met many intrigued by such an unusual, egalitarian and oddly un-Roman fellow as he purported to be.

He also gathered much information about a side of Lucullus he didn't know at all—about his army, and about his campaigns to date.

King Mithridates had fled two years before to the court of his son-in-law Tigranes when he was unable to contend with the Roman remorselessness in war, and feeling the pinch of those quarter-million seasoned troops he had lost in the Caucasus on a pointless punitive expedition against the Albanian savages who had raided Colchis. It had taken Mithridates twenty months to persuade Tigranes to see him, longer still to persuade Tigranes to help him recover his lost lands of Pontus, Cappadocia, Armenia Parva and Galatia.

Naturally Lucullus had his spies, and knew perfectly well that the two kings were reconciled. But rather than wait for them to invade Pontus, Lucullus had decided to go on the offensive and invade Armenia proper, strike at Tigranes and prevent his aiding Mithridates. His original intention had been to leave no sort of garrison in Pontus, trusting to Rome and Roman influence to keep Pontus quiet. For he had just lost his governorship of Asia Province, and now learned from the letters brought by Publius Clodius that the enmity he had stirred in the breasts of the Ordo Equester back in Rome was growing by leaps and bounds. When the letters not only told him that the new governor of Asia Province was a Dolabella, but also that Dolabella was to “supervise” Bithynia too, Lucullus understood much. Obviously the knights of Rome and their tame senators preferred incompetence to success in war. Publius Clodius, concluded Lucullus dourly, was no harbinger of good luck!

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.