The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough
Marius had given the Head Count useful work and a wage for doing it. But he did them few favors otherwise, save to lop the curved top and curved bottom off the old five-foot-tall infantryman’s shield, for a man couldn’t have carried that on his back beneath his loaded pole; at its new reduced height of three feet, it didn’t collide with his burdens, or clip the backs of his ankles as he strode along.
And so they marched into western Numidia six miles long, singing their marching songs at the tops of their voices to keep their pace even and feel the comfort of military camaraderie, moving together, singing together, a single mighty human machine rolling irresistibly along. Midway down the column marched the general Marius with all his staff and the mule carts carrying their gear, singing with the rest; none of the high command rode, for it was uncomfortable as well as conspicuous, though they did have horses close by in case of attack, when the general would need the additional height of horseback to see to his dispositions and send out his staff with orders.
“We sack every town and village and hamlet we encounter,” Marius said to Sulla.
And this program was faithfully carried out, with some additions: granaries and smokehouses were pillaged to augment the food supply, local women were raped because the soldiers were missing their own women, and homosexuality was punishable by death. Most of all, everyone kept his eyes peeled for booty, which was not allowed to be taken as private property, but was contributed to the army’s haul.
Every eighth day the army rested, and whenever it reached a point where the coastline intersected the march route, Marius gave everyone three days of rest to swim, fish, eat well. By the end of May they were west of Cirta, and by the end of Quinctilis they had reached the river Muluchath, six hundred miles further west again.
It had been an easy campaign; Jugurtha’s army never appeared, the settlements were incapable of resisting the Roman advance, and at no time had they run short of either food or water. The inevitable regimen of hardtack bread, pulse porridge, salty bacon, and salty cheese had been varied by enough goat meat, fish, veal, mutton, fruit, and vegetables to keep everyone in good spirits, and the sour wine with which the army was occasionally issued had been augmented with Berber barley beer and some good wine.
The river Muluchath formed the border between western Numidia and eastern Mauretania; a roaring torrent in late winter, by midsummer the big stream had dwindled to a string of water holes, and by the late autumn it dried up completely. In the midst of its plain not far from the sea there reared a precipitous volcanic outcrop a thousand feet high, and on top of it Jugurtha had built a fortress. In it, so Marius’s spies had informed him, there was a great treasure stored, for it functioned as Jugurtha’s western headquarters.
The Roman army came down to the plain, marched to the high banks the river had cut itself when in full spate, and built a permanent camp as close to the mountain fortress as possible. Then Marius, Sulla, Sertorius, Aulus Manlius, and the rest of the high command took time to study the impregnable-looking citadel.
“We can forget the idea of a frontal assault,” Marius said, “and I, for one, can’t see any way to besiege it.”
“That’s because there isn’t a way to besiege it,” said young Sertorius positively; he had made several thorough inspections of the peak from all sides.
Sulla lifted his head so that he could see the top of the peak from under the brim of his hat. “I think we’re going to sit here at the bottom without ever getting to the top,” he said, and grinned. “Even if we built a gigantic wooden horse, we’d never get it up the track to the gates.”
“Any more than we’d get a siege tower up there,” said Aulus Manlius.
“Well, we’ve got about a month before we have to turn east again,” said Marius finally. “I suggest we spend that month camped here. We’ll make life as palatable for the men as possible—Lucius Cornelius, make up your mind where you want to take our drinking water from, then allocate the deeper river pools downstream of that for swimming holes. Aulus Manlius, you can organize fishing parties to go all the way to the sea—it’s about ten miles, so the scouts say. You and I will ride down to the coast ourselves tomorrow to spy out the land. They’re not going to run the risk of coming out of that citadel to attack us, so we may as well let the men enjoy themselves. Quintus Sertorius, you can forage for fruit and vegetables.”
“You know,” said Sulla later on, when he and Marius were alone in the command tent, “this whole campaign has been a holiday. When am I going to be blooded?”
“You should have been at Capsa, only the place surrendered,” said Marius, and gave his quaestor a searching glance. “Are you becoming bored, Lucius Cornelius?”
“Actually, no,” said Sulla, frowning. “I wouldn’t have believed how interesting this kind of life is—there’s always something interesting to do, interesting problems to wrestle. I don’t even mind the bookkeeping! It’s just that I need to be blooded. Look at you. By the time you were my age, you’d been in half a hundred battles. Whereas look at me—a tyro.”
“You’ll be blooded, Lucius Cornelius, and hopefully soon.”
“Oh?”
“Certainly. Why do you think we’re here, so far from anywhere important?”
“No, don’t tell me, let me work it out!” said Sulla quickly. “You’re here because... because you’re hoping to give King Bocchus a big enough fright to ally himself with Jugurtha... because if Bocchus does ally himself with Jugurtha, Jugurtha will feel strong enough to attack.”
“Very good!” said Marius, smiling. “This land is so vast we could spend the next ten years marching up and down it, and never so much as smell Jugurtha on the wind. If he didn’t have the Gaetuli, smashing the settled areas would smash his ability to resist, but he does have the Gaetuli. However, he’s too proud to like the idea of a Roman army on the loose among his towns and villages, and there’s no doubt he must be feeling the pinch of our raids, particularly in his grain supply. Yet he’s too crafty to risk a pitched battle while I’m in command. Unless we can push Bocchus to his aid. The Moors can field at least twenty thousand good troops, and five thousand excellent cavalry. So if Bocchus does join him, Jugurtha will move against us, nothing surer.’’
“Don’t you worry that with Bocchus, he’ll outnumber us?”
“No! Six Roman legions properly trained and properly led can contend with any enemy force, no matter how large.”
“But Jugurtha learned his warfare with Scipio Aemilianus at Numantia,” said Sulla. “He’ll fight the Roman way.”
“There are other foreign kings who fight the Roman way,” said Marius, “but their troops aren’t Roman. Our methods were evolved to suit the minds and temperaments of our people, and I make no distinction in this regard between Roman and Latin and Italian.”
“Discipline,” said Sulla.
“And organization,” said Marius.
“Neither of which is going to get us to the top of that mountain out there,” said Sulla.
Marius laughed. “True! But there’s always one intangible, Lucius Cornelius.”
“What’s that?”
“Luck,” said Marius. “Never forget luck.”
They had become good friends, Sulla and Marius, for though there were differences between them, there were also basic similarities: neither man was an orthodox thinker, both men were unusual, adversity had honed each of them finely, and each was capable of great detachment as well as great passion. Most important similarity of all, both men liked to get on with the job, and liked to excel at it. The aspects of their natures which might have driven them apart were dormant during those early years, when the younger man could not hope to rival the older in any way, and the younger man’s streak of cold-bloodedness did not need to be exercised, any more than did the older man’s streak of iconoclasm.
“There are those who maintain,” said Sulla, stretching his arms above his head, “that a man makes his own luck.” Marius opened his eyes wide, an action which sent his eye
*
Publius Vagiennius, who hailed from back-country Liguria and was serving in an auxiliary squadron of cavalry, found himself with a great deal more to do than he liked to do after Gaius Marius established camp along the banks of the river Muluchath. Luckily the plain was covered with a long, dense growth of native grass turned silver by the summer sun, so that grazing for the army’s several thousand mules was not a problem. However, horses were fussier eaters than mules, and nudged half-heartedly at this hard strappy ground cover—with the result that the cavalry’s horses had to be moved to the north of the citadel mountain in the midst of the plain, to a place where underground soaks had stimulated the growth of more tender grasses.
If the commander were other than Gaius Marius, thought Publius Vagiennius resentfully the whole of the cavalry might have been permitted to camp separately, in close proximity to decent grazing for their horses. But no. Gaius Marius wanted no temptations offered the dwellers in the Muluchath citadel, and had issued orders that every last man had to camp within the main compound. So every day the scouts had first to ascertain that no Enemy lurked in the vicinity; then the cavalry troopers were allowed to lead their horses out to graze, and every evening were obliged to lead their horses back again to the camp. This meant every horse had to be hobbled to graze, otherwise catching it would have been impossible.
Every morning therefore Publius Vagiennius had to ride one of his two mounts and lead the other across the plain from the camp to the good grass, hobble them for a good day’s browsing, and plod the five miles back to the camp, where (it seemed to him, at any rate) his hours of leisure had just begun when it was time to plod out to pick up his horses again. Added to which, not a cavalry trooper born liked walking.
However, there was nothing to say a man had to walk back to camp after turning his animals out to graze; therefore Publius Vagiennius made some adjustments to his schedule. Since he rode bareback and without a bridle—only a fool would leave his precious saddle and bridle parked in open country for the day—he got into the habit of slinging a water bag over his shoulder and a lunch pouch on his belt when starting out from the camp. Then, having liberated his two animals close to the base of the citadel mountain, he would retire to a shady spot to while away his day.
On his fourth trip, he settled comfortably with water bag and lunch pouch in a fragrant flower-filled dell surrounded by sheer crags, sat down with his back against a grassy shelf, closed his eyes, and dozed. Then came a moist little puff of wind spinning dizzily down the funnels and grooves of the mountain, and on its breath a very strong, curious smell. A smell which made Publius Vagiennius, eyes gleaming excitedly, sit up with a jerk. For it was a smell he knew. Snails. Big, fat, juicy, sweet, succulent, ambrosiac snails!
In the towering coastal alps of Liguria and in the higher alps behind—whence came Publius Vagiennius—there were snails. He had grown up on snails. He had become addicted to putting garlic in everything he ate thanks to snails. He had become one of the world’s most knowledgeable connoisseurs of snails. He dreamed one day of breeding snails for the market, even of producing a brand-new breed of snails. Some men’s noses were tuned to wines, other men’s noses were tuned to perfumes, but the nose of Publius Vagiennius was tuned to snails. And that whiff of snails which came borne on the wind off the citadel mount told him that somewhere up aloft dwelled snails of an unparalleled deliciousness.
With the industry of a pig on the trail of truffles, he got to work following the evidence of his olfactory apparatus, prowling the flanges of rock for a way up to the snail colony. Not since coming to Africa with Lucius Cornelius Sulla in September of the year before had he so much as tasted a snail. African snails were held to be the best in the world, but wherever they lived he hadn’t found out, and those which came into the markets of Utica and Cirta went straight to the tables of the military tribunes and the legates—if they didn’t go straight to Rome, that is.
Anyone less motivated would not have found the ancient fumarole, its volcanic vapors long since spent, for it lay behind a seemingly uninterrupted wall of basalt formed in tall columnar crystals; nose down, Publius Vagiennius sniffed his way around an optical illusion and found a huge chimney. During the passage of millions of years of inactivity, dust blown in by winds had filled the vent to the level of the ground outside and was piling up against the leeward wall higher and higher, but it was still possible for a man to gain access to the interior of this natural cavity. It measured some twenty feet across, and perhaps two hundred feet upward there gleamed a patch of sky. The walls were vertical, and to almost all observers appeared unscalable. But Publius Vagiennius was an alpine man; he was also a snail gastronome on the track of a superlative taste experience. So he climbed the fumarole—not without difficulty, but certainly without ever being in real danger of falling.
And at its top he emerged onto a grassy shelf perhaps a hundred feet long and fifty feet wide at its widest point, which was where the chimney came to its termination. Because all of this occurred on the north face of the rugged volcanic outcrop—actually the eroded remnant of the lava plug, for the outer mountain itself had disappeared aeons before—the shelf was permanently wet from seepage, some of which dripped over the rim of the fumarole, but most of which ran down the rocks on the outside at the point where the shelf sloped to form a fissure. A great crag some hundred feet above overhung most of the shelf, and the cliff between shelf and overhang was hollowed out into an open-fronted cave wet with seepage, a wonderful wall of ferns, mosses, liverworts, and sedges; at one place so much water was being squeezed out of the rock by the enormous pressures of the upper mountain that a tiny rivulet twinkled and fell with copious splashes along its way, and ran off with the other seepage over the edge of the shelf. Clearly this was the reason why the grass on the plain at the northern base of the outcrop was sweeter.
Where the great cave now yawned had once been a deposit of mud agglomerate which penetrated much deeper into the lava plug, gathered water, and emerged to the surface only to be greedily chewed away by wind and frosts. One day, the expert mountain man Publius Vagiennius knew, the basalt crag teetering so ominously overhead would become undermined enough to break off; shelf and cave would be buried, as would the old volcanic chimney.
The great cave was perfect snail country, permanently damp, a pocket of humid air in a notoriously dry land, stuffed with all the decayed plant matter and minute dead insects snails adored, always shady, protected from the brunt of the winds by a crag from below that reared up much higher than the shelf for a third of its length, and curved outward, thus deflecting the winds.
The whole place reeked of snails, but not snails of any kind known to Publius Vagiennius, said his nose. When he finally saw one, he gaped. Its shell was as big as the palm of his hand! Having seen one, he soon distinguished dozens, and then hundreds, none of them shorter in the shell than his index finger, some of them longer than his outstretched hand. Hardly believing his eyes, he climbed up into the cave, scouted it with ever-increasing amazement, and finally arrived at its far edge, where he found a way up and up and up; not a snake path, he thought in amusement, but a snail path!
The path dived into a crevice which opened into a smaller, more enclosed, ferny cave. The snails kept getting more numerous. And then he found himself around the side of the overhang, discovered it was in itself over a hundred feet thick, kept on climbing until, with a heave, he came out of Snail Paradise into Snail Tartarus, the dry and windswept lava plug atop the overhang. He gasped, panicked, ducked quickly behind a rock; for there not five hundred feet above him was the fortress. So easy was the incline he could have walked up it without a staff, and so low was the citadel wall he could have pulled himself over it without a helping shove from beneath.
Publius Vagiennius descended back to the snail path, got down into the lower reaches of the cave, and there paused to pop half a dozen of the larges
A long drink of water, and he felt better; his snails were snug, slimy, safe. Not intending to share them with anyone, he transferred them from his tunic to his lunch pouch, complete with wet leaves and a few chunks of much drier humus collected in the dell, moistened from his water bag. The lunch pouch he tied securely to prevent the snails’ escape, and put it in a shady place.
The next day he dined superbly, having brought a kettle with him in which to steam two of his catches, and some good oil-and-garlic sauce. Oh, what snails! Size in a snail most definitely did not mean toughness. Size in a snail simply meant additional nuances of flavor and more to eat with a lot less fiddling about.
He dined on two snails each day for six days, making one more trip up the fumarole to fetch down the second half dozen. But on the seventh day his conscience began to gnaw at him; had he been a more introspective sort of fellow, he might have come to the conclusion that his pangs of conscience were increasing in linear proportion to his pangs of snail-sated indigestion. At first all he thought was that he was a selfish mentula, to hoard the snails entirely for himself when he had good friends among his squadron’s members. And then he began to think about the fact that he had discovered a way to scale the mountain.
For three more days he battled his conscience, and finally suffered from an attack of gastritis which quite killed all his appetite for snails and made him wish he had never heard of them. That made up his mind.
He didn’t bother about reporting to his squadron commander; he went straight to the top.
Roughly in the center of the camp, where the via praetoria connecting the main and rear gates intersected with the via principalis connecting the two side gates, sat the general’s command tent and its flagpole, with an open space on either flank for assemblies. Here, in a hide structure substantial enough to warrant a proper wooden framework, Gaius Marius had his command headquarters and his living quarters; under the shade of a long awning which extended in front of the main entrance was a table and chair, occupied by the military tribune of the day. It was his duty to screen those wanting to see the general, or to route inquiries about this or that to the proper destinations. Two sentries stood one to either side of the entrance, at ease but vigilant, the monotony of this duty alleviated by the fact that they could overhear all conversation between the duty tribune and those who came to see him.