“That ought to please him,” Agrippa said, “though he won’t like your keeping Octavia’s twenty galleys.”
“Oh, they’ll go to Athens next year, with two thousand picked troops aboard, and Octavia as an extra present. She misses him.”
But Rome’s share, sixty percent now that Lepidus was out of the equation, didn’t reach Rome intact after all. The sixty-six thousand chests were loaded aboard the troop transports that first had to call into Portus Julius and there disgorge the twenty legions whom Octavian was bringing home, some for retirement, most to stay under the Eagles for reasons none save Octavian knew.
Word of the enormous treasure had spread. The legion representatives at the end of the Sicilian campaign were not an admirable lot, nor imbued with patriotism. When Octavian and Agrippa had marched them to Capua and inserted them into camp on its outskirts, twenty legion representatives came as a delegation to Octavian talking mutiny unless he paid every man a hefty bonus.
They meant it, so much Octavian could see. He listened to their spokesman expressionlessly, then asked, “How much?”
“A thousand denarii—four thousand sesterces—each,” said Lucius Decidius. “Otherwise all twenty legions will run amok.”
“Does that include the noncombatants?”
Obviously not; the faces looked bewildered. Decidius was a quick thinker, however. “For them, a hundred denarii each.”
“Pray pardon me while I sit down with my abacus and work out how much that amounts to,” Octavian said, apparently unruffled.
He proceeded to do just that, the ivory beads whizzing back and forth across their thin rods faster than any untutored legion representative could credit. Oh, he was a treat, was young Caesar!
“That is fifteen thousand, seven hundred and forty-four silver talents,” he said a few moments later. “In other words, the usual contents of Rome’s Treasury, whole and entire.”
“Gerrae, it ain’t!” said Decidius, who could read and write, but was hopeless at sums. “You’re a swindler and a liar!”
“I assure you, Decidius, that I am neither. I simply speak the truth. To prove this, when I pay you—yes, I will pay you!—I’ll put the money in one hundred thousand bags of a thousand for the men, and twenty thousand bags of a hundred for the noncombatants. Denarii, not sesterces. I’ll pile these bags on the assembly ground, and I suggest that you find enough legionaries who can count to verify that each bag does indeed hold the requisite amount of money. Though it’s quicker to weigh than count,” he ended demurely.
“Oh, I forgot to say that it’s four thousand denarii each for the centurions,” Decidius added.
“Too late, Decidius! Centurions get the same as rankers. I agreed to your original request, and I refuse to alter it after the fact, is that clear? I am going somewhat further—after the fact, because I am a Triumvir and allowed that privilege—by telling you that you can’t have this bonus and expect land. This is your retirement payout, and it finishes us free and clear. If you get land, it will be at my pleasure. Fritter away what should be in the Treasury with my best wishes, but do not ask for more, now or in the future. Because Rome will pay no more big bonuses. In future, Rome’s legions will be fighting for Rome, not for a general nor in a civil war. And in future, Rome’s legions will get their pay, their savings, and a small bonus when they retire. No more land, no more anything the Senate and People don’t sanction. I am instituting a standing army of twenty-five legions, all of whose men will serve for twenty years without discharge. A career, not a job. A torch carried for Rome, not a candle for a general. Do I make myself understood? It’s over, Decidius, on this day.”
The twenty representatives listened in growing horror, for there was something of Caesar about that beautiful young face now that it was neither as beautiful nor as young as it used to be. They knew he meant what he said. As representatives, they were the most militant and the most venal of their kind, but even the most militant and venal of men can hear the closing of a door, and one closed on that day. Perhaps the future would hold mutinies too, but Caesar was saying that it would carry the death penalty for all involved.
“You can’t execute a hundred thousand of us,” Decidius said.
“Oh, can’t I?” Octavian’s eyes grew wider, more luminous. “How long would you last if I were to tell the three million people of Italia that you are holding them to ransom, taking money out of their purses? Because you wear a mail shirt and a sword? It’s not a good enough reason, Decidius. If the people of Italia knew, they’d tear a hundred thousand of you into little pieces.” He waved a contemptuous hand. “Be off, all of you! And look at the size of your bonuses when I pile my bags up on the assembly ground. Then you’ll know how much you asked for.”
They filed out looking sheepish but determined.
“Have you their names, Agrippa?”
“Yes, every last one. And a few more besides.”
“Break them up and mix them up. I think it’s better that each meets an accident, don’t you?”
“Fortuna is capricious, Caesar, but death in battle is easier to arrange. A pity the campaigns are over.”
“Not at all!” said Octavian in the most cordial of voices. “Next year we are going to Illyricum. If we don’t, Agrippa, the tribes will unite with the Bessi and the Dardani and pour over the Carnic Alpes into Italian Gaul. That’s the lowest and easiest way into Italia, and the only reason it hasn’t been used to invade is lack of unity among the tribes. Who are becoming Romanized, in the wrong way. Legion representatives are going to be heroic, and a lot will die in the process of winning a crown for valor. By the way, I’m going to award you a Naval Crown.” He giggled. “It will suit you, Agrippa—all that gold.”
“Thank you, Caesar, that’s very nice of you. But Illyricum?”
“No, mutiny. It’s going to go out of fashion, or my name is not Caesar and I am not the son of a god. Pah! I’ve just lost near sixteen thousand talents for a paltry campaign that saw more men drown than perish at the end of a sword. If for no other reason than exorbitant bonuses, there can be no more civil wars. The legions are going to fight in Illyricum for Rome, and only Rome. It will be a proper campaign, with no element of commander worship or dependence on him to grant bonuses. Though I’m going along to fight too, it’s your campaign, Agrippa. You I trust.”
“You’re amazing, Caesar.”
Octavian looked genuinely surprised. “Why?” he asked.
“You faced them down, that scabby lot of utter villains. They came here this morning to intimidate you, and you turned the table, intimidating them. They left very frightened men.”
Came the smile that (or so Livia Drusilla thought) could melt a bronze statue. “Oh, Agrippa, they may be utter villains, but they’re such children! I know that at least one in every eight legionaries must be able to read and write, but in future, when they belong to a standing army, they’re all going to have to be literate—and numerate. Winter camp is going to be stuffed with teachers. If they had any real idea of how much their greed has just cost Rome, they’d think again. That’s why the lessons begin now, with those bags.” He sighed, looked rueful. “I must send for a full cohort of Treasury clerks. Here I sit until it’s done, Agrippa, right under my own eyes. No peculation, embezzlement, or fraud on the farthest horizon.”
“Will you palm them off with cistophori? There were a lot of them in Sextus’s hoard, and I remember the story about the great Cicero’s brother being paid in cistophori.”
“The cistophori will be melted down and minted as sesterces and denarii. My utter villains and the men they represent will be paid in denarii, as they demanded.” A dreamy look suffused his eyes. “I’m trying to visualize how high the piles of bags will be, but even my imagination boggles.”
It was January before Octavian could return to Rome, his task concluded. He turned the event itself into something of a circus, compelling every one of a hundred and twenty thousand men to file past the assembly ground and look at the small m
ountains of bags, then made a speech that was more in dead Caesar’s mode than in his own. His method of disseminating what he said was novel; he himself stood atop a high tribunal and addressed those centurions his agents informed him were the really influential men, while each of his agents gave the same speech to one century of troops, not read from a paper, but declaimed from memory. It astonished Agrippa, who knew all about Octavian’s agents, but had never realized how many of them there were. A century consisted of eighty soldiers and twenty noncombatant servants; there were sixty centuries to the legion, and twenty legions assembled to see the bags, hear the speech. Twelve hundred agents! No wonder he knew everything there was to know. Son of Caesar he might pretend to be, but the truth was that Octavian resembled no one, even his divine father. He was something absolutely new, as perceptive men like the late Aulus Hirtius had understood very early in his career.
As for his civilian agents, they were men who were virtually unemployable in any other capacity—the kind of gossipy, idle fellows who loved being paid a small wage just to loiter around a marketplace and talk, talk, talk. When one reported a valuable item of information back to his superior in a long, carefully structured chain, he would receive a few denarii as a reward, but only if the information proved accurate. Octavian's legionary agents were only paid for information; Rome paid their wages.
By the time the meeting was dismissed, the legions knew that only the veterans of Mutina and Philippi would be retiring; that next year the bulk of them would be fighting in Illyricum—and that mutiny would not be tolerated for any reason, least of all bonuses. The slightest hint of it, and backs would be bared for the lash, then heads would roll.
Agrippa triumphed at last for his victories in Further Gaul; Calvinus, loaded with Spanish plunder and a fearsome reputation for treating mutinous soldiers cruelly, sheathed the scarred little Regia, Rome’s oldest temple, in costly marbles and adorned its exterior with statues; Statilius Taurus was given the job of governing Africa and reducing its legions to two; the grain was flowing as the grain should, and at the old price; and a very happy Octavian ordered the fortifications around the domus Livia Drusilla pulled down. He built a comfortable barracks for the Germans at the end of the Palatine on the corner where the Via Triumphalis met the Circus Maximus, and appointed them as a special bodyguard. Though he walked behind twelve lictors, as was the custom, he and his lictors walked surrounded by Germans in armor. A new phenomenon for Rome, unused to seeing armed troops inside the sacred boundary of the city save in times of emergency.
Though the legions belonged to Rome, the Germans belonged to Octavian, and Octavian alone. There were six hundred of them, the cohors praetorii, officially designated protectors of magistrates, senators, and triumvirs, but no magistrate or senator was under any illusions; when needed, they would answer only to Octavian, who suddenly became special in a way even Caesar had not. Rich and powerful senators and knights had always hired bodyguards, but they were motley lots of ex-gladiators who had never looked truly military. Octavian outfitted his Germans in spectacular gear, and kept them fresh and the Head Count entertained by having them perform their drills inside the Circus Maximus every day.
No one booed or hissed or spat at him anymore when Octavian walked the city streets or appeared in the Forum Romanum; he had saved Rome and Italia from starvation without assistance from Marcus Antonius, whose loaned fleet somehow never got a mention. The job of organizing Italia was given to Sabinus, who found he relished the work, consisting as it did of confirming deeds to land, assessing the public lands of the various towns and municipia, taking censuses of veterans, wheat farmers, anyone Octavian considered valuable or noteworthy, and repairing roads, bridges, public buildings, harbors, temples, and granaries. Sabinus also was dowered with a team of praetors to hear grievance lawsuits, of which there were many; Romans of all Classes were litigious.
Twenty days after the battle of Naulochus, Octavian had turned twenty-seven; he had been at the heart of Roman politics and war for nine whole years. Longer at a stretch than even Caesar or Sulla, who had been absent from Rome for years at a time. Octavian was a Roman fixture. This showed in many ways, but particularly in his bearing. Slight, not tall, his togate form moved with grace, dignity, and a strange aura of power—the power of one who had survived against all the odds, and emerged triumphant. The people of Rome from highest to lowest had grown used to seeing him, and, like Julius Caesar, he was not too grand to talk to anyone. This, despite the German bodyguard, who knew better than to intervene when he pushed through their ranks to chat to a citizen. If their swords were loose in their scabbards, they had learned to conceal their anxiety, exchanging remarks in broken Latin with those in the crowd not trying to get to Caesar. Looking gorgeous.
By the New Year, when that serendipitous Pompeian with the same name, Sextus Pompeius, had assumed the consulship together with Lucius Cornificius, news of great victories in the East began to arrive in Rome, spread by Antony’s agents at the instigation of Poplicola. Antony had conquered the Parthians, won vast tracts for Rome, accumulated untold treasure. His partisans were overjoyed, his enemies confounded. Octavian, the most important unbeliever, sent special agents to the East to find out whether these rumors were true.
On the Kalends of March he convened the Senate, something he didn’t ordinarily do. Whenever he did, the senators turned up to the last man, out of curiosity and a growing respect. He wasn’t there yet; there were still senators who called him Octavianus, refused to give him the title of Caesar, but their number was diminishing. And his survival for nine perilous years had added an element of fear. If his power grew greater still and Mark Antony didn’t come home soon, nothing would stop him from becoming whatever he wanted to be. That was where the fear came in.
As Triumvir in charge of Rome and Italia, he occupied an ivory curule chair on the magistrates’ dais at the end of the new Curia his divine father had built, such a long process that it was not finished until the year of Sextus Pompey’s defeat. As his imperium was maius, he outranked the consuls, whose ivory curule chairs were to either side of his, and farther back.
He rose to speak, holding no notes, spine straight, hair a golden nimbus in a building whose sheer size made it rather dim. Light poured in through clerestory windows high above and was swallowed by the gloom of an interior big enough to hold a thousand men in two banks of three tiers, one to either side of the dais. Most of them sat on small stools, those who had been senior magistrates on the bottom tier, more junior magistrates on the middle tier, and the pedarii, forbidden to speak, on the top tier. As there was no party system, whether a man chose to sit to right or to left of the dais was not significant, though those belonging to a faction tended to cluster together. Some took verbatim notes in shorthand for their own archives, but six clerks took verbatim records for the Senate as a body, which were copied out afterward, impressed with the seals of the consuls, and inserted into the archives held next door in the Senate offices.
“Honored consuls, consulars, praetors, ex-praetors, aediles, exaediles, tribunes of the plebs, ex-tribunes of the plebs, and conscript fathers, I am here to report on what has been done. I regret that I could not make this report any earlier, but it was necessary that I travel to Africa Province to install Titus Statilius Taurus as its governor and see for myself what kind of mess the ex-Triumvir Lepidus had created. A considerable mess, consisting chiefly in the accumulation of a staggering number of legions which he later used in an attempt to take over Rome’s government. A situation I dealt with, as you know. But never again will any promagistrate of any rank or imperium be permitted to recruit, arm, and train legions in his province, or import legions to his province, without the express consent of the Senate and People of Rome.
“Very well, onward. My oldest legions, veterans of Mutina and Philippi, will be discharged and given land in Africa and in Sicilia, the latter a bigger mess than Africa, in crying need of good governance, proper farming, and a prosperous populace. These v
eterans will be settled on one to two hundred iugera of land that must grow wheat alternating with legumes every fourth year. The old latifundia of Sicilia will be subdivided save for one given to Imperator Marcus Agrippa. He will act as overall supervisor of veteran growers, thus relieving them of the burden of selling their crop, which he will do in their names and pay them fairly. The legion representatives of these troops are happy with my arrangements, and anxious to be retired.
“Their going will leave Rome with twenty-five good legions, sufficient men to cope with whatever wars Rome is compelled to wage. Very shortly they will be serving in Illyricum, which I intend to subdue during this year, next year, and perhaps the year after. It is high time that the people of eastern Italian Gaul were protected against raids by the Iapudes, Delmatae, other Illyrian tribes. If my divine father had lived, this would have been done. So now it falls to me, and I will do it in conjunction with Marcus Agrippa. For I myself cannot and will not leave Rome for more than a matter of months. Good governance happens at first hand, and mine is the hand the Senate and People of Rome have honored with the task of establishing good governance.”
Octavian stepped down from the curule dais, steered a course around the long wooden bench below it that accommodated the ten tribunes of the plebs, and walked to the center of the tesselated floor. There he spoke turning in very slow circles so that every senator had a good view of him and saw his face as much as the back of his head. The nimbus of gold light followed, imbued his slight figure with an aura of unworldliness.
“We have had riots and unrest ever since Sextus Pompeius began to interfere with the grain supply,” he went on, level-voiced, calm. “The Treasury was empty, people starved, the price of goods soared to a height which meant that none without means could live as all Romans should live—with dignity and a modicum of comfort. Those who could not afford one slave multiplied. The capite censi who did not have a soldier’s wage coming in were in such dire straits that there were times when no shop in Rome dared open. Not their fault, conscript fathers! Our fault, for not dealing with Sextus Pompeius. We had neither the fleets nor the money to deal with him, as all of you well know. It took four years of scrimping and saving to assemble the ships we needed, but last year it was done, and Marcus Agrippa swept Sextus Pompeius from the seas forever.”