When Lupus realized how neatly he'd been tricked, he demanded that Lucius Caesar give him one of his two veteran legions! Naturally Lucius Caesar said no, in words to the effect that if Lupus couldn't control his own legates, then he'd better not come crying to the senior consul about it. Unfortunately Lupus is taking it out on Marius and Caepio, by flogging them to recruit and train with redoubled vigor. He himself sits in Carseoli and sulks.
Coelius and Sertorius in Italian Gaul are moving mountains to ship arms and armor and troops, and every little steelyard and foundry in Roman territory anywhere in the world is busier than a lone Sardinian capturing a convoy. So I suppose it doesn't really matter that Caepio's towns worked for the Italians all those years. We wouldn't have been bright enough to find work for them anyway. Now they are working for us, and that's as much as one can hope for.
Somehow before May we have to get sixteen legions into the field. That is, we have to produce ten legions we do not at the moment have. Oh, we'll do it! If there is one thing Rome excels at, it's getting the job done when the odds are against her. Volunteers are coming from everywhere and every class, and the Latin Rights people have proven staunch to us. Due to our haste, there has been no attempt to segregate the Latin volunteers from the Roman, so it looks as if some sort of hegemony has been visited upon us involuntarily. What I am trying to say is, there will be no auxiliary legions in this war. They'll all be classified and numbered as Roman.
Lucius Julius Caesar and I leave for Campania at the start of April, about eight days away. Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar is already installed as the commandant of Capua, a job I consider he will do well. I am profoundly glad he won't be leading any armies. Our legion of raw recruits will be split into two units of five cohorts each—Lucius Caesar and I think it will be necessary to garrison both Nola and Aesernia. These troops can do that, they don't have to be crown-winners. Aesernia is a real outpost in enemy territory, of course, but it remains loyal to us, that we know. Scipio Asiagenes and Lucius Acilius—both junior legates (and both rather poor quality)—are taking five cohorts to Aesernia at once. The praetor Lucius Postumius is taking the other five cohorts to Nola. For a Postumius, he is a fairly steady sort of fellow. I like him. Is it because he's not an Albinus, would you say?
And that, dear Publius Rutilius, is all for the moment. Scaurus's courier is just about knocking on my door. When I have an opportunity I'll write again, but I fear you'll have to rely upon your women correspondents for the most regular news. Julia has promised she will write often.
Sulla laid down his pen with a sigh. A very long letter, but something of a catharsis too. Worth the effort, even if it did mean scant sleep. He was aware to whom he was writing, never forgot it, yet he found himself able to say things on his paper that he could never have said to Publius Rutilius Rufus in person. Of course that was because Publius Rutilius Rufus was too far away to represent a threat of any kind.
However, he hadn't mentioned his sudden elevation in the Senate by Lucius Julius Caesar. That was too new and too delicately poised to risk offending Fortune by talking about it as if it were an established fact. Mere accident had provoked it, of that Sulla was sure; disliking Gaius Marius, Lucius Caesar had looked for someone else to ask. By rights he should have asked Titus Didius or Publius Crassus, or some other triumphator. But his eye had lighted upon Sulla, and his mind decided Sulla would do. Of course he hadn't expected such a grasp of the situation, but when he got it, Lucius Caesar did a not unusual thing; he singled Sulla out as his in-House expert. To have to consult a Marius or a Crassus did the consul no good—it made the consul look like a tyro having to ask the masters all the time. Whereas to ask a relative nobody like Sulla looked like consular genius. Lucius Caesar could claim to have "discovered" Sulla. And when he leaned upon Sulla, it appeared to be a kind of patronage.
For the moment Sulla was content to have it so. As long as he behaved nicely and deferentially to Lucius Caesar, he would get the commands and the jobs he needed in order to eclipse Lucius Caesar. Who, as Sulla was rapidly discovering, had a streak of morbid pessimism in him, and was not as confidently competent as he had seemed in the beginning. When the two departed for Campania early in April, Sulla left the military decisions and dispositions to Lucius Caesar, while he threw himself with praiseworthy energy and enthusiasm into recruiting and training new legions. There were plenty among the centurions of the two veteran legions in Capua who had served under Sulla somewhere or other, and even more among the retired centurions who had re-enlisted to train troops. The word got around, and Sulla's reputation grew. Now all he needed was for Lucius Caesar to make a few mistakes, or else become so bogged down in one section of the coming campaign that he had no choice but to give Sulla a free rein. On one point, Sulla was absolutely set; when his chances came, he wouldn't be making any mistakes at all.
Better prepared than any of the other commanders, Pompey Strabo equipped two new legions from the people on his own vast estates in northern Picenum; with the centurions of the two veteran legions he had stolen helping him, he got his new troops into fair condition in fifty days. During the second week in April he set off from Cingulum with four legions—two veteran, two raw. A good proportion. Though his military career had not been particularly distinguished, he had the requisite experience for command, and had made himself a reputation as a very hard man.
An incident which happened when he was a thirty-year-old quaestor in Sardinia had unfortunately contributed much toward his contempt for and isolation from his fellow members of the Senate. Pompey Strabo had written from Sardinia to the Senate requesting that he be allowed to impeach his superior, the governor Titus Annius Albucius, and that he himself be empowered to prosecute Titus Albucius upon their return to Rome. Led by Scaurus, the Senate had responded with a scathing letter from the praetor Gaius Memmius, who had included in it a copy of Scaurus's speech— in which he had called Pompey Strabo everything from a noxious mushroom to crass, bovine, ill-mannered, presumptuous, stupid, and under-bred. To Pompey Strabo, he had done the correct thing in demanding that he bring his superior to trial; to Scaurus and the other leaders of the House at that time, what Pompey Strabo had done was unpardonable. No one indicted his superior! But, having indicted his superior, no one pressed for the job of prosecuting him! Then Lucius Marcius Philippus had turned the absent Pompey Strabo into a laughingstock by suggesting that the Senate should substitute a different cross-eyed prosecutor for the trial Titus Albucius now had to face, and nominated Caesar Strabo.
There was a lot of the Celtic king in Pompey Strabo, in spite of the fact that he claimed to be completely Roman. His chief defense of his Romanness was his tribe, Clustumina, a moderately elderly rural tribe whose citizens lived in the eastern Tiber valley. But few of the Romans who mattered doubted for one moment that the Pompeii had been in Picenum far longer than the date of Roman conquest of the area. The tribe created for the new Picentine citizens was Velina, and most of the vassals who lived on Pompeian lands in northern Picenum and eastern Umbria were of the tribe Velina. The interpretation among those who mattered in Rome was that the Pompeii were Picentines and owned vassals long before Roman influence in that part of Italy, and had bought themselves membership in a better tribe than Velina. It was an area of Italy where Gauls had settled in large numbers after the failed invasion of central Italy and Rome by the first King Brennus three hundred years earlier. And as Pompeian looks were Celtic in the extreme, those who mattered in Rome deemed them Gauls.
Be that as it may, some seventy years ago a Pompeius had finally taken the inevitable journey down the Via Flaminia to Rome, and by unscrupulously bribing the electors, got himself voted in as consul twenty years later. At first this Pompeius—who was more closely related to Quintus Pompeius Rufus than to Pompey Strabo—had found himself at loggerheads with the great Metellus Macedonicus, but they had patched up their differences, and eventually shared the censorship. All of which meant that the Pompeii were on their Roman way.
The first Pompeius of Strabo's branch to make the trip south had been Pompey Strabo's father, who had procured himself a seat in the Senate and married none other than the sister of the famous Latin language satirist, Gaius Lucilius. The Lucilii were Campanians who had been Roman citizens for generations; they were quite rich, and had consuls in the family. A temporary shortage of cash had transformed Pompey Strabo's father into desirable husband material—especially when Lucilia's abysmal unattractiveness was added to the Lucilian debit account. Unfortunately Strabo's father had died before he could attain a senior magistracy—but not before Lucilia had produced her crosseyed little Gnaeus Pompeius, immediately cognominated Strabo. She had produced another boy, called Sextus, much younger than Pompey Strabo, and of much poorer quality. Thus it was Pompey Strabo who became the family's hope for great things.
Strabo was not by nature a student, let alone a scholar; though he was educated in Rome by a series of excellent tutors, he achieved little in the way of learning. Presented with the great Greek ideas and ideals, the boy Pompey Strabo had dismissed them as idle waffle and complete impracticality. He liked the warlords and international meddlers who liberally dotted Roman history. As a contubernalis—cadet—serving under various commanders, Pompey Strabo had not been popular with his peers—men like Lucius Caesar, Sextus Caesar, his middling cousin Pompeius Rufus, Cato Licinianus, Lucius Cornelius Cinna. They had used him as a butt because of his atrociously crossed eyes, certainly, but also because he had an innate uncouthness no amount of Roman polish ever managed to conceal. His early years in the army had been miserable, and his service as a tribune of the soldiers hardly less so. No one liked Pompey Strabo!
All of this he was later to tell his own son, a violent partisan of his father's. That son (now aged fifteen) and a daughter, Pompeia, were the products of another Lucilian marriage; following the precedent set by his father, Pompey Strabo also espoused an ugly Lucilia, this one the daughter of the famous satirist's elder brother, Gaius Lucilius Hirrus. Luckily the Pompeian blood was capable of overcoming Lucilian homeliness, for neither Strabo nor his son was homely, save for Strabo's cross-eyes. Like generations of Pompeii before them, they were fair of face and coloring, blue-eyed, very snub of nose. In the Rufus branch of the family the hair ran to red; the Strabo branch ran to gold.
When Strabo marched his four legions south through Picenum, he left his son behind in Rome with his mother, there to further his education. But the son was no intellectual either—and very much shaped by his father into the bargain—so he packed up his trunk and headed home to northern Picenum, there to mingle with the centurions left behind to keep on training Pompeian clients as legionaries, and subject himself to a rigorous program of military training well before he could assume the toga of manhood. Unlike his father in this respect, Young Pompey was universally adored. He called himself plain Gnaeus Pompeius, no cognomen. None of that branch owned a cognomen save for Young Pompey's father, and Strabo was a name he could not adopt because he didn't have cross-eyes. Young Pompey's eyes were very large, very wide, very blue, and quite perfect. The eyes, said his doting mother, of a poet.
While Young Pompey kicked his heels at home, Pompey Strabo continued his march south. Then as he was crossing the Tinna River near Falernum, he was ambushed by six legions of Picentes under Gaius Vidacilius, and was obliged to fight a waterlogged defensive action which gave him no room to maneuver. To make his predicament worse, Titus Lafrenius came up with two legions of Vestini— and Publius Vettius Scato arrived with two legions of Marsi! Everyone Italian wanted to have a piece of the first action in the war.
The battle was a credit to neither side. Enormously outnumbered, Pompey Strabo managed to extricate himself almost intact from the river and hustled his precious army to the coastal city of Firmum Picenum, where he shut himself up and prepared to withstand a long siege. By rights the Italians should have annihilated him, but they hadn't yet absorbed the lesson of the one unfailing Roman military characteristic—speed. In that respect—and it turned out to be the vital respect—Pompey Strabo was the winner, even if the battle had to be awarded to the Italians.
Vidacilius left Titus Lafrenius outside the walls of Firmum Picenum to keep the Romans inside and took himself off with Scato to do mischief elsewhere, while Pompey Strabo sent a message to Coelius in Italian Gaul asking for relief to be sent as soon as possible. His plight was not desperate; he had access to the sea, and to a small Roman Adriatic fleet no one had remembered was based there. Firmum Picenum was a Latin Rights colony, and loyal.
5
As soon as the Italians heard that Pompey Strabo was marching, honor was satisfied; Rome was the aggressor. Mutilus and Silo in the grand council now got all the support they wanted. While Silo remained in Italica and sent Vidacilius, Lafrenius, and Scato north to deal with Pompey Strabo, Gaius Papius Mutilus led six legions to Aesernia. No Latin outpost would mar the autonomy of Italia! Aesernia must fall.
The caliber of Lucius Caesar's two junior legates became embarrassingly obvious at once; Scipio Asiagenes and Lucius Acilius disguised themselves as slaves and fled the city before the Samnites arrived. Their defection dismayed Aesernia not at all. Formidably fortified and very well provisioned, the city shut its gates and manned its walls with the five cohorts of recruits the junior legates had left behind, so anxious were they to escape. Mutilus saw at once that the siege would be a prolonged one, so he left Aesernia under heavy attack by two of his legions and moved on with the other four toward the Volturnus River, which bisected Campania east to west.
When the news came that the Samnites were marching, Lucius Caesar shifted himself from Capua to Nola, where Lucius Postumius's five cohorts had tamed the town's insurrection.
"Until I find out what Mutilus plans to do, I think it best to garrison Nola with both our veteran legions as well," he said to Sulla as he prepared to leave Capua. "Keep up the work. We are frightfully outnumbered. As soon as you can, send some troops to Venafrum with Marcellus."
"It's already done," said Sulla laconically. "Campania has always been the favorite place for veterans to settle after they retire, and they're flocking to join. All they need is a helmet on the head, a mail-shirt, a sword by the side, and a shield. As fast as I can equip them and sort out the most experienced to serve as centurions, I'm sending them out to the places you want garrisoned. Publius Crassus and his two oldest sons went to Lucania yesterday with one legion of retired veterans."
"You should tell me!" said Lucius Caesar a little peevishly.
"No, Lucius Julius, I should not," said Sulla firmly, his calm unimpaired. "I am here to implement your plans. Once you tell me who is to go where with what, it's my job to see your orders carried out. You don't need to ask, any more than I need to tell."
"Whom did I send to Beneventum, then?" Lucius Caesar asked, aware that his weaknesses were beginning to show; the demands of generaling were too vast.
But not too vast for Sulla, who didn't permit his satisfaction to show. Sooner or later things would become too much for Lucius Caesar—and then it would be his turn. He let Lucius Caesar move to Nola, knowing it would be as temporary as it was futile. Sure enough, when word came of the investment of Aesernia, Lucius Caesar marched back to Capua, then decided his best move would be to march to the relief of Aesernia. But the central areas of Campania around the Volturnus were in open revolt, Samnite legions were everywhere, and it was rumored Mutilus had taken himself off in the direction of Beneventum.
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Northern Campania was still safe, its allegiance more Roman; Lucius Caesar moved his two veteran legions through Teanum Sidicinum and Interamna in order to approach Aesernia across friendly ground. What he didn't know was that Publius Vettius Scato of the Marsi had detached himself from the siege of Pompey Strabo in Firmum Picenum and marched around the western foreshores of Lake Fucinus, also heading for Aesernia. He came down the watershed of the Liris, skirted Sora, and met Lucius Caesar between Atina and Casinum.
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nbsp; Neither side had expected it. Both sides fell into accidental battle complicated by the gorge in which they encountered each other, and Lucius Caesar lost. He retreated back to Teanum Sidicinum, leaving two thousand precious veteran soldiers dead on the field and Scato pushing on unimpeded toward Aesernia. This time the Italians could claim a solid victory, and did.
Never wholly reconciled to Roman rule, the towns of southern Campania declared one after the other for Italia, including Nola and Venafrum. Marcus Claudius Marcellus extricated himself and his troops from Venafrum ahead of the approaching Samnite army; but instead of retreating to a safely Roman place like Capua, Marcellus and his men elected to go to Aesernia. They found the Italians completely surrounding it, Scato and his Marsi on one side, Samnites on the other. But Italian guard duty was lax, and Marcellus was quick to take advantage of it. All the Romans managed to get inside the town during the night. Aesernia now possessed a brave and capable commandant, and ten cohorts of Roman legionaries.
Licking his wounds in Teanum Sidicinum as sullenly as an old dog losing its first fight, a depressed and dismayed Lucius Julius Caesar was bombarded with one piece of bad news after another; Venafrum gone, Aesernia heavily invested, Nola holding two thousand Roman soldiers prisoner including the praetor Lucius Postumius, and Publius Crassus and his two sons driven inside Grumentum by the Lucani, now also in revolt, and very ably led by Marcus Lamponius. To cap everything else, Sulla's intelligence was reporting that the Apuli and the Venusini were about to declare for Italia.
* * *
But all that was as nothing compared to the plight of Publius Rutilius Lupus just east of Rome. It had started when Gaius Perperna arrived with one legion of raw recruits instead of two legions of veterans during the intercalated February; after that, things went from bad to worse. While Marius threw himself into the work of enlisting and arming men and Caepio did the same, Lupus engaged himself in a battle of the pen with the Senate in Rome. There were elements of insurrection within his own forces and even within the ranks of his own legates, scribbled Lupus furiously, and what was the Senate going to do about it? How could he be expected to conduct a war when his own people were inimical? Did Rome or did Rome not want Alba Fucentia protected? And how could he do that when he had not one experienced legionary? And when was something going to be done to recall Pompey Strabo? And when was someone going to move that Pompey Strabo be prosecuted for treason? And when was the Senate going to get his two legions of veterans back from Pompey Strabo? And when was he going to be relieved of that intolerable insect, Gaius Marius?