The First Man in Rome (106 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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