No matter what his private feelings, however, Herod had no choice other than to welcome the Queen of Egypt to his capital and house her royally in his new palace, a sumptuous building.
“In fact, I see new buildings going up everywhere,” Cleopatra said to her host over dinner, thinking to herself that the food was awful and Queen Mariamne an ugly bore. Fecund, however: two sons already. “One looks suspiciously like a fortress.”
“Oh, it is a fortress,” said Herod, unruffled. “I shall call it the Antonia, after our Triumvir. I’m also building a new temple.”
“And some new structures at Masada, I hear.”
“It was a cruel exile for my family, but a handy place. I’m giving it better housing, more granaries and food rooms, and water cisterns.”
“A pity I won’t see it. The coast road is more comfortable.”
“Especially for a lady with child.” He waved a dismissing hand at Mariamne, who rose and departed immediately.
“You have sharp eyes, Herod.”
“And you an insatiable appetite for territory, according to my reports from Antioch. Cilicia Tracheia! What do you want that rocky stretch of coast for?”
“Among other things, to restore Olba to Queen Aba and the line of the Teucrids. I didn’t get the only city, however.”
“Cilician Seleuceia is too strategically important to the Romans, my dear ambitious Queen. Incidentally, you can’t have my income from the balsam and the bitumen. I need it too badly.”
“I already have both the balsam and the bitumen, Herod, and here,” she said, fishing a paper out of a jeweled bag of gold net, “are instructions from Marcus Antonius directing you to collect the revenues on my behalf.”
“Antonius wouldn’t do this to me!” cried Herod, reading.
“Antonius would, and has. Though it was my idea to make you do the collecting. You should have paid your debts, Herod.”
“I will outlast you, Cleopatra!”
“Nonsense. You’re too greedy and too fat. Fat men die early.”
“While skinny women live forever, you imply. Not in your case, Queen. My greed is as nothing compared to yours. You won’t be content with less than the entire world. But Antonius isn’t the man to get it for you. He’s losing his grip on what part of the world he already has, haven’t you noticed?”
“Pah!” she spat. “If you mean his campaign against the King of the Parthians, that is simply something he has to get out of his system before he turns his energies to more feasible objectives.”
“Objectives you invent for him!”
“Rubbish! He’s quite capable of seeing them for himself.”
Herod flung himself back on his couch and clasped his pudgy, beringed fingers on his belly. “How long have you been plotting what I think you’re plotting?”
The golden eyes went wide, gazed at him disingenuously. “Herod! I, plotting? Your imagination grows fevered. The next thing you’ll be babbling in delirium. What could I plot?”
“With Antonius wearing a ring through his nose and trailing vast numbers of legions behind him, my dear Cleopatra, my guess is that you’re out to overturn Rome in favor of Egypt. What better time to strike than while Octavianus is weak and the western provinces in need of his best men? There’s no limit to your ambitions, your lusts. What surprises me is that no one appears to have woken up to your designs save me. Poor Antonius, when he does!”
“If you’re wise, Herod, you’ll keep your speculations inside your head, not drip them off the end of your tongue. They’re insane, baseless.”
“Give me the balsam and the bitumen, and I’m silent.”
She slid off the couch and into her backless slippers. “I wouldn’t give you the smell of a sweaty rag, you abomination!” And out she went, her trailing draperies making sibilant sounds as of soft, fell voices whispering spells.
16
The day after Cleopatra left Zeugma for Egypt, Ahenobarbus turned up, breezy and unapologetic.
“You’re supposed to be on your way to Bithynia,” Antony said, looking displeased, feeling overjoyed.
“That was your scheme to get rid of me while ever you thought the Egyptian harpy was going to campaign with you. No Roman man could stomach that, Antonius, and I’m surprised you thought you could—unless you’ve given up being a Roman man.”
“No, I haven’t!” Antony said irritably. “Ahenobarbus, you have to understand that Cleopatra’s willingness to lend me huge amounts of gold is all that got this expedition going! She seemed to think that the loan entitled her to participate in the endeavor, but by the time we got this far, she was happy to go home.”
“And I was happy to abandon my journey to Nicomedia. So, my friend, enlighten me as to recent events.”
Antonius looks very well, Ahenobarbus thought, better than I have seen him look since Philippi. He has something to do worthy of his steel, and it’s the fulfillment of a dream besides. Much as I loathe the Egyptian harpy, I’m grateful to her for the loan of her gold. He’ll pay it back out of one short campaign segment.
“I’ve obtained a source of information about the Parthians,” Antony said. “A nephew of the new Parthian king, name of Monaeses. When Phraates slaughtered his entire family, Monaeses managed to flee to Syria because he wasn’t at the court at the time. He was in Nicephorium, sorting out a trade dispute with the Skenites. Of course he daren’t go home—there’s a price on his head. It seems King Phraates has married the nubile daughter of some minor Arsacid house and intends to breed a new lot of heirs. The bride’s family all went to the sword, or the axe, or whatever it is the Parthians use. This new litter of sons will be years growing up, therefore years off being a danger to Phraates. Whereas Monaeses is a grown man and has a following. Ruthless, these eastern monarchs.”
“I hope you remember that when you’re dealing with Cleopatra,” Ahenobarbus said dryly.
“Cleopatra,” said Antony a trifle haughtily, “is different.”
“And you, Antonius, are love-struck,” said the uncompromising one bluntly. “I hope your judgment of this Monaeses is sounder.”
“Sound as a Bryaxis bronze.”
But when Ahenobarbus met Prince Monaeses, his belly caved in hollowly. Trust this man? Never! He couldn’t look you in the eye, for all his fine Greek and aping of Greek manners.
“Don’t give him the tip of your little finger!” Ahenobarbus cried. “Do, and he’ll take your arm off at the shoulder! Can’t you see that he’s the one King Phraates kept in reserve, trained in western ways, in case it became necessary to put a spy in our midst? Monaeses didn’t escape slaughter, he was spared to do his Parthian duty—lure us to ruin and defeat!”
Antony’s reply was a laugh; nothing Ahenobarbus or any of the other doubters could say would swerve him from his opinion that Monaeses was as solid as Cleopatra’s gold.
Most of the army was waiting in Carana with Publius Canidius, but Antony brought six more legions with him as well as ten thousand Gallic horse troopers and a total of thirty thousand foreign levies made up of Jews, Syrians, Cilicians, and Asian Greeks. He had left one legion at Jerusalem to ensure Herod’s continued tenure of the throne—Antony was a loyal friend, if sometimes a gullible one—and seven legions to garrison Macedonia, always restless.
The Euphrates had cut a wide valley between Zeugma and its upper reaches at Carana; there was plenty of grazing for horses, mules, and oxen. Samosata came and went, the valley began to close in a little, and the road became rougher as the vast force pressed on into Melitene. Not far north of Samosata the army passed the baggage train, a disappointment, as Antony had started it twenty days earlier from Zeugma than the army, and had thought this would see both units reach Carana at the same moment. But he had confidently expected the oxen to walk fifteen and more miles a day, whereas not all the whips and curses in the world could get more than ten from them, as he now discovered.
The baggage train was Antony’s pride and joy, the biggest any Roman army had ever assembled. Liter
ally hundreds of catapults, ballistas, and smaller artillery trundled along behind the required number of oxen each piece needed, plus several battering rams capable of breaking down ordinary town gates, and one eighty-foot-long monster capable of breaking down, as Antony jokingly put it to Monaeses, “even the gates of Ilium of old!” That was just the war machinery. In wagon after wagon came the supplies—wheat, barrels of salt pork, sides of heavily smoked bacon, oil, lentils, chickpeas, salt, spare parts, tools and equipment for the legion artificers, charcoal, sows of smelted iron for steeling, huge beams and planks, saws for cutting trees or soft rock like tufa, ropes and hawsers, canvas, extra tents, poles, harness, everything an efficient praefectus fabrum could think an army the size of this one might need to replenish what it carried with it as well as undertake a siege. In single file the train measured fifteen miles long, but it traveled on a broad front three miles thick; two under-strength legions of four thousand men each were permanently seconded to guarding such an immense and precious adjunct of war; Oppius Statianus was in command, and grumbling about it to anyone who would listen.
His auditors included Antony when the army passed by.
“All very well while we can march like this,” Statianus said tactlessly, “but those mountains up ahead spell narrow valleys to me, and if we have to string the wagons out, both our communications and our defenses won’t last.”
Not an opinion Antony wanted to hear, or was prepared to listen to. “You’re an old woman, Statianus,” he said, kicking his horse onward. “Just get more miles a day out of them!”
The mobile forces reached Carana fifteen days after leaving Zeugma, a distance of three hundred and fifty miles, but the baggage train didn’t arrive for twelve more days, despite its head start. Which meant that Antony was in a foul mood; when he was, he would listen to no one, from friends like Ahenobarbus to marshals like Canidius, fresh from an expedition to the Caucasus and extremely well informed about mountains.
“Italia is ringed around by the Alpes,” Canidius said, “but they’re like a child’s toy bricks compared to these peaks. Look all around the bowl Carana sits in, and you’re looking at hundreds of mountains around fifteen thousand feet high. Go north or east, and they just get taller, more precipitous. The valleys are notches scarcely wider than the boiling streams that fill them. It is the middle of April already, which means you have until October to do your campaigning. Six months, and winter will be here. Carana is the biggest saucer of relatively level land between here and the great flats where the Araxes flows into the Caspian Sea. All I had were ten legions and two thousand cavalry, but I found even a force of that size unwieldy in this country. Still, I daresay you know what you’re doing, so I don’t intend to argue.”
Like Ventidius, Canidius was a Military Man of ignoble origins; only his great skill as a general of troops had enabled him to rise. He had attached himself to Mark Antony after Caesar’s death, and was fonder of Antony than of Antony’s martial capabilities. However, after Ventidius’s triumph in Syria, Canidius knew that he wouldn’t be put in command of an enterprise like the one Antony now proposed to lead into the Kingdom of the Parthians by, so to speak, the back door. A tortuous undertaking that would require the genius of a Caesar, and Antony was no Caesar. For one thing, he liked sheer size, whereas Caesar had detested big armies. To him, ten legions and two thousand cavalry were as many men as any commander could deploy with success; larger than that, and orders became scrambled, lines of communication imperiled by distance and time. Canidius agreed with Caesar.
“Has King Artavasdes come?” Antony asked.
“Which one?”
Antony blinked. “I meant Armenia.”
“Aye, he’s here, waiting with tiara in hand for an audience. But so is Artavasdes of Media Atropatene.”
“Media Atropatene?”
“That’s right. Both of them got the wind up after my jaunt to the Caucasus, and both have decided that Rome is going to win this encounter with the Parthians. Artavasdes of Armenia wants his seventy valleys in Media Atropatene returned to him, and Artavasdes of Media Atropatene wants to rule the Kingdom of the Parthians.”
Antony roared with laughter. “Canidius, Canidius, what luck! Only how can we tell them apart by their names?”
“I call Armenia, Armenia, and Media Atropatene, plain Media.”
“Don’t they have some physical attributes I can use?”
“Not this pair! They’re as alike as twins—all that intermarriage, I suppose. Frilly skirts and jackets, wig-beards, lots of curls, hooked noses, black eyes, and black hair.”
“They sound Parthian.”
“All the same stock, I imagine. Are you ready to see them?”
“Does either speak Greek?”
“No, or Aramaic. They speak their own languages, and Parthian.”
“Just as well, then, that I have Monaeses.”
However, Antony didn’t have Monaeses for long. Having acted as interpreter at several rather strange audiences between people who had no idea how their opposites thought, Monaeses elected to return to Nicephorium—he was, as he reminded Antony, King of the Skenite Arabs, and ought to put his new kingdom on a war footing. With profuse thanks and assurances that the three men he had found to act as interpreters would do better at it than he, Monaeses left for the south.
“I wish I could trust him,” Canidius said to Ahenobarbus.
“I wish I could trust him, but I don’t. Since events are in motion and can’t be stopped now, all either of us can do, Canidius, is to offer to the gods that we’re wrong.”
“Or, if right, that there’s nothing Monaeses can do to upset Antonius’s plans.”
“I’d be happier if our army was a great deal smaller. He’s like a child over his Armenian cataphracts! But as a veteran of Armenian and Parthian cataphracts, I can tell you that the Armenian sort aren’t to be compared with the Parthian,” said Canidius with a sigh. “Their armor is thinner and weaker, their horses not much bigger than ours at home—I’d sooner call them lancers in mail than proper cataphracts. But Antonius is ecstatic at being gifted with sixteen thousand of them.”
“Sixteen thousand more horses to feed,” said Ahenobarbus.
“And can we trust Armenia or Media any more confidently than we can trust Monaeses?” Canidius asked.
“Armenia, perhaps. Media, not at all. How far is it from here to Artaxata?” Ahenobarbus asked.
“Two hundred miles, maybe slightly fewer.”
“Do we have to go there?”
“Into the belly of the Armenians, you mean. Unfortunately, yes. I’ve never been enthusiastic about this back-door approach, though it would have merit were the terrain less ghastly. We hit Phraaspa, then Ecbatana, then Susa, then into Mesopotamia. And does he think that the baggage train will keep up? Surely not!”
“Oh, he’s Marcus Antonius,” said Ahenobarbus. “He belongs to the school of general who believes that if he wants something enough, it will happen. And he can be very good in a campaign of the Philippi kind. But how will he cope with the unknown?”
“It all boils down to two things, Ahenobarbus. The first—is Monaeses a traitor? The second—can we trust Armenia? If the answer to the first is a negative and the answer to the second an affirmative, Antonius will succeed. Not otherwise.”
This time the baggage train had set off for Artaxata, the capital of Armenia, almost the moment it had arrived in Carana, much to the wrath of Oppius Statianus, deprived of a rest, a bath, a woman, and a chance to talk to Antony. He had intended to give Antony a list of things he thought could well remain in Carana, thus cutting down the size of the train and perhaps speeding up its pace a little. But no, the orders came to keep on going, and take everything. The moment it reached Artaxata, it was to start the journey to Phraaspa. Again no rest, no bath, no woman, and no chance to talk to Antony.
Antony was edgy and anxious to start his campaign, convinced that he was stealing a march on the Parthians with his back-door approach. Oh, no
doubt someone had warned them that Phraaspa would be the first Parthian city to come under assault—there were too many easterners and foreigners of all descriptions to keep a secret as big as this one—but Antony was relying upon his pace, which he intended be as headlong as any march Caesar ever commanded. A Roman army would be at Phraaspa months before it was expected.
So he didn’t linger in Artaxata, he marched as soon as possible in the straightest line he could. It was five hundred miles from Artaxata to Phraaspa, and in some ways the terrain was neither as rugged nor as high as the country they had traversed from Carana to Artaxta. But, Antony’s Median and Armenian guides told him, he was marching in the wrong direction for ease of passage. Every range, every fold, every furrow, ran east to west, and while it would have been much easier to march east of Lake Matiane—a huge body of water—the only pass through the mountains meant marching down its west side, a matter of crossing many ranges, up and down, up and down. At the south end of the lake the army had to strike east before turning to come down upon Phraaspa; a new range of peaks fifteen thousand and more feet high lay to the west.
Sixteen legions, ten thousand Gallic cavalry, fifty thousand foreign troops both horsed and on foot, and sixteen thousand Armenian cataphracts—one hundred and forty thousand men—began the march. More than fifty thousand of them were mounted. Not even Alexander the Great had commanded such a multitude, thought Antony exultantly, absolutely sure that no force on earth could beat him. What an adventure, what a colossal undertaking! He’d eclipse Caesar at last.
They encountered the baggage train disappointingly soon; it had not yet crossed the mountain pass to come down to Lake Matiane, so it had nearly four hundred miles to go. Though Canidius urged Antony to lessen his rate and stay within fairly easy distance of the baggage train, Antony refused. With some justice; if he kept his pace down to that of the baggage train, he would be too late at Phraaspa to take it before winter, even if it put up no serious resistance. Besides, they were romping along, despite the constant up and down of the mountains. Antony contented himself with a message to Statianus that he should separate some elements of the train from others, and try to speed things up by lightening the weight of the wagons best suited to forging ahead.