The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough

  The parley began again, but now Aurelius drew forward his six guests, all clad in togas, escorted by twelve lictors wearing the crimson tunics and broad gold-embossed belts of duty outside Rome itself, and carrying axed fasces. Of course every German eye had noticed them, but now that introductions were performed, they stared at the billowingwhite robes—so unmartial!—in wonder. This was what Romans looked like? Cotta alone wore the purple-bordered toga praetexta of the curule magistrate, and it was to him that all the strange-sounding, unintelligible harangues were directed.

  He held up well under the pressure: proud, aloof, calm, soft-spoken. It seemed no disgrace to a German to become puce with rage, spit gobbets of saliva to punctuate his words, pound the fist of one hand into the palm of the other, but there could be no mistaking the fact that they were puzzled and made ill at ease by the unassailable tranquillity of the Romans.

  From the beginning of his participation in the parley until its end, Cotta’s answer was the same: no. No, the migration could not continue south; no, the German people could not have a right of way through any Roman territory or province; no, Spain was not a feasible destination unless they intended to confine themselves to Lusitania and Cantabria, for the rest of Spain was Roman. Turn north again, was Cotta’s constant retort; preferably go home, wherever home might be, but otherwise retreat across the Rhenus into Germania itself, and settle there, among their own peoples.

  It was not until dusk was fading into night that the fifty German thanes hauled themselves up on their horses and rode away. Last of all to leave were Boiorix and Teutobod, the younger man turning his head over his shoulder to see the Romans for as long as he could. His eyes held neither liking nor admiration. Aurelius is right, he is Achilles, thought Cotta, though at first the parallel’s rightness was a mystery. Then he realized that in the young German’s handsome face lay all the pigheaded, mercilessly vengeful power of Achilles. Here too was a man who would kick his heels by his ships while the rest of his countrymen died like flies, all for the sake of the merest pinprick in the skin of his honor. And Cotta’s heart thudded, despaired; for wasn’t that equally true of Quintus Servilius Caepio?

  There was a full moon two hours after nightfall; freed from the encumbrance of their togas, Cotta and his five very soberly silent companions ate at Aurelius’s table, then got ready to ride south.

  “Wait until morning,” begged Aurelius. “This isn’t Italy, there are no trusty Roman roads, and you know nothing of the lay of the land. A few hours can’t make any difference.”

  “No, I intend to be at Quintus Servilius’s camp by dawn,” said Cotta, “and try to persuade him yet again to join Gnaeus Mallius. I shall certainly apprise him of what’s happened here today. But no matter what Quintus Servilius decides to do, I’m riding all the way back to Gnaeus Mallius tomorrow, and I don’t intend to sleep until I’ve seen him.”

  They shook hands. As Cotta and the senators with their escort of lictors and servants rode away into the dense shadows cast by the moon, Aurelius stood clearly delineated by firelight and moonlight, his arm raised in farewell.

  I shall not see him again, thought Cotta; a brave man, the very best kind of Roman.

  *

  Caepio wouldn’t even hear Cotta out, let alone listen to the voice of reason.

  “Here is where I stay” was all he said.

  So Cotta rode on without pausing to slake his thirst in Caepio’s half-finished camp, determined that he would reach Gnaeus Mallius Maximus by noon at the latest.

  At dawn, while Cotta and Caepio were failing to see eye to eye, the Germans moved. It was the second day of October, and the weather continued to be fine, no hint of chill in the air. When the front ranks of the German mass came up against Aurelius’s camp walls, they simply rolled over them, wave after wave after wave. Aurelius hadn’t really understood what was happening; he naturally assumed there would be time to get his cavalry squadrons into the saddle— that the camp wall, extremely well fortified, would hold the Germans at bay for long enough to lead his entire force out the back gate of the camp, and to attempt a flanking maneuver. But it was not to be. There were so many fast-moving Germans that they were around all four sides of the camp within moments, and poured over every wall in thousands. Not used to fighting on foot, Aurelius’s troopers did their best, but the engagement was more a debacle than a battle. Within half an hour hardly a Roman or an auxiliary was left alive, and Marcus Aurelius Scaurus was taken captive before he could fall on his sword.

  Brought before Boiorix, Teutobod, and the rest of the fifty who had come to parley, Aurelius conducted himself superbly. His bearing was proud, his manner insufferably haughty; no indignity or pain they could inflict upon him bowed his head or caused him to flinch. So they put him in a wicker cage just large enough to hold him, and made him watch while they built a pyre of the hottest woods, and set fire to it, and let it burn. Aurelius watched, legs straight, no tremor in his hands, no fear on his face, not even clinging to the bars of his little prison. It being no part of their plan that Aurelius should die from inhaling smoke—or that he should die too quickly amid vast licks of flame—they waited until the pyre had died down, then winched the wicker cage over its very center, and roasted Aurelius alive. But he won, though it was a lonely victory. For he would not permit himself to writhe in agony, or cry out, or let his legs buckle under him. He died every inch the Roman nobleman, determined that his conduct would show them the real measure of Rome, make them take heed of a place which could produce men such as he, a Roman of the Romans.

  For two days more the Germans lingered by the ruins of the Roman cavalry camp, then the move southward began again, with as little planning as before. When they came level with Caepio’s camp they just kept on walking south, thousands upon thousands upon thousands, until the terrified eyes of Caepio’s soldiers lost all hope of counting them, and some decided to abandon their armor and swim for the west bank of the river, and safety. But that was a last resort Caepio intended to keep exclusively for himself; he burned all but one of his small fleet of boats, posted a heavy guard all the way down the riverbank, and executed any men who tried to escape. Marooned in a vast sea of Germans, the fifty-five thousand soldiers and noncombatants in Caepio’s camp could do nothing but wait to see if the flood would pass them by unharmed.

  By the sixth day of October, the German front ranks had reached the camp of Mallius Maximus, who preferred not to keep his army pent up within its walls. So he formed up his ten legions and marched them out onto the ground just to the north before the Germans, clearly visible, could surround his camp. He arrayed his troops across the flat groundbetween the riverbank and the first rise in the ground which heralded the tips of the tentacles of the Alps, even though their foothills were almost a hundred miles away to the east. The legions stood, all facing north, side by side for a distance of four miles, Mallius Maximus’s fourth mistake; not only could he easily be outflanked—since he possessed no cavalry to protect his exposed right—but his men were stretched too thin.

  Not one word had come to him of conditions to the north, of Aurelius or of Caepio, and he had no one to disguise and send out into the German hordes, for all the available interpreters and scouts had been sent north with Aurelius. Therefore he could do nothing except wait for the Germans to arrive.

  Logically his command position was atop the highest tower of his fortified camp wall, so there he positioned himself, with his personal staff mounted and ready to gallop his orders to the various legions; among his personal staff were his own two sons, and the youthful son of Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle, the Piglet. Perhaps because Mallius Maximus deemed Quintus Poppaedius Silo’s legion of Marsi best disciplined and trained—or perhaps because he deemed its men more expendable than Romans, even Roman rabble—it stood furthest east of the line, on the Roman right, and devoid of any cavalry protection. Next to it was a legion recruited early in the year commanded by Marcus Livius Drusus, who had inherited Quintus Sertorius as his second-in
-charge. Then came the Samnite auxiliaries, and next in line another Roman legion of early recruits; the closer the line got to the river, the more ill trained and inexperienced the legions became, and the more tribunes of the soldiers were there to stiffen them. Caepio Junior’s legion of completely raw troops was stationed along the riverbank, with Sextus Caesar, also commanding raw troops, next to him.

  There seemed to be a slight element of plan about the German attack, which commenced two hours after dawn on the sixth day of October, more or less simultaneously upon Caepio’s camp and upon Mallius Maximus’s line of battle.

  None of Caepio’s fifty-five thousand men survived when the Germans all around them simply turned inward on the three landward perimeters of the camp and spilled into it until the crush of men was so great the wounded were trampled underfoot along with the dead. Caepio himself didn’t wait. As soon as he saw that his soldiers had no hope of keeping the Germans out, he hustled himself down to the water, boarded his boat, and had his oarsmen make for the western bank of the Rhodanus at racing speed. A handful of his abandoned men tried to swim to safety, but there were so many Germans hacking and hewing that no Roman had the time or the space to shed his twenty-pound shirt of mail or even untie his helmet, so all those who attempted the swim drowned. Caepio and his boat crew were virtually the sole survivors.

  Mallius Maximus did little better. Fighting valiantly against gargantuan odds, the Marsi perished almost to the last man, as did Drusus’s legion fighting next to the Marsi. Silo fell, wounded in the side, and Drusus was knocked senseless by a blow from the hilt of a German sword not long after his legion engaged; Quintus Sertorius tried to rally the men from horseback, but there was no holding the German attack. As fast as they were chopped down, fresh Germans sprang in to replace them, and the supply was endless. Sertorius fell too, wounded in the thigh at just the place where the great nerves to the lower leg were most vulnerable; that the spear shore through the nerves and stopped just short of the femoral artery was nothing more nor less than the fortunes of war.

  The legions closest to the river turned and took to the water, most of them managing to doff their heavy gear before wading in, and so escape by swimming the Rhodanus to its far side. Caepio Junior was the first to yield to temptation, but Sextus Caesar was cut down by one of his own soldiers when he tried desperately to stop their retreat, and subsided into the melee with a mangled left hip.

  In spite of Cotta’s protests, the six senators had been ferried across to the western bank before the battle began; Mallius Maximus had insisted that as civilian observers they should leave the field and observe from some place absolutely safe.

  “If we go down, you must survive to bring the news to the Senate and People of Rome,” he said.

  It was Roman policy to spare the lives of all they defeated, for able-bodied warriors fetched the highest prices as slaves destined for labor, be it in mines, on wharves, in quarries, on building projects. But neither Celts nor Germans spared the lives of the men they fought, preferring to enslave those who spoke their languages, and only in such numbers as their unstructured way of life demanded.

  So when, after a brief inglorious hour of battle, the German host stood victorious on the field, its members passed among the thousands of Roman bodies and killed any they found still alive. Luckily this act wasn’t disciplined or concerted; had it been, not one of the twenty-four tribunes of the soldiers would have survived the battle of Arausio. Drusus lay so deeply unconscious he seemed dead to every German who looked him over, and all of Quintus Poppaedius Silo showing from beneath a pile of Marsic dead was so covered in blood he too went undiscovered. Unable to move because his leg was completely paralyzed, Quintus Sertorius shammed dead. And Sextus Caesar, entirely visible, labored so loudly for breath and was so blue in the face that no German who noticed him could be bothered dispatching a life so clearly ending of its own volition.

  The two sons of Mallius Maximus perished as they galloped this way and that bearing their distracted father’s orders, but the son of Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle, young Piglet, was made of sterner stuff; when he saw the inevitability of defeat, he hustled the nerveless Mallius Maximus and some half-dozen aides who stood with him across the top of the camp ramparts to the river’s edge, and there put them into a boat. Metellus Piglet’s actions were not entirely dictated by motives of self-preservation, for he had his share of courage; simply, he preferred to turn that courage in the direction of preserving the life of his commander.

  *

  It was all over by the fifth hour of the day. And then the Germans turned north again, and walked the thirty miles back to where their many thousands of wagons stood all around the camp of the dead Aurelius. In Mallius Maximus’s camp—and in Caepio’s—they had made a wonderful discovery: huge stores of wheat, plus other foodstuffs, and sufficient vehicles and mules and oxen to carry all of it away. Gold, money, clothing, even arms and armor didn’t attract them in the least. But Mallius Maximus’s and Caepio’s food was irresistible, so that they plundered the last rasher of bacon and the last pot of honey. And some hundreds of amphorae of wine.

  One of the German interpreters, captured when Aurelius’s camp was overwhelmed and restored to the bosom of his Cimbri people, had not been back among his own kind more than a very few hours when he realized that he had been among the Romans far too long to have any love left for barbarian living. So when no one was looking, he stole a horse and headed south for Arausio town. His route passed well to the east of the river, for he had no wish to encounter the aftermath of the terrible Roman defeat, even by smelling its unburied corpses.

  On the ninth day of October, three days after the battle, he walked his tired steed down the cobbled main street of the prosperous town, looking for someone to whom he could tell his news, but finding no one. The whole populace seemed to have fled before the advance of the Germans. And then at the far end of the main street he spied the villa of Arausio’s most important personage—a Roman citizen, of course—and there he discerned activity.

  Arausio’s most important personage was a local Gaul named Marcus Antonius Meminius because he had been given the coveted citizenship by a Marcus Antonius, for his services to the army of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus seventeen years before. Exalted by this distinction and helped by the patronage of the Antonius family to gain trade concessions between Gaul-across-the-Alps and Roman Italy, Marcus Antonius Meminius had prospered exceedingly. Now the chief magistrate of the town, he had tried to persuade its people to stay in their houses at least long enough to see whether the battle being fought to the north went for or against Rome. Not succeeding, he had nonetheless elected to stay himself, merely acting prudently by sending his children off in the care of their pedagogue, burying his gold, and concealing the trapdoor to his wine cellar by moving a large stone slab across it. His wife announced that she preferred to stay with him than go with the children, and so the two of them, attended by a loyal handful of servants, had listened to the brief cacophony of anguish which had floated on the heavy air between Mallius Maximus’s camp and the town.

  When no one came, Roman or German, Meminius had sent one of his slaves to find out what had happened, and was still reeling with the news when the first of the senior Roman officers to save their own skins came into town. They were Gnaeus Mallius Maximus and his handful of aides, behaving more like drugged animals on their way to ritual slaughter than high Roman military men; this impression of Meminius’s was heightened by the behavior of Metellus Numidicus’s son, who herded them with the sharpness and bite of a small dog. Meminius and his wife came out personally to lead the party into their villa, then gave them food and wine, and tried to obtain a coherent account of what had happened. But all their attempts failed; for the only rational one, young Metellus Piglet, had developed a speech impediment so bad he couldn’t get two words out, and Meminius and his wife had no Greek, and only the most basic Latin.

  More dragged themselves in over the next two days, but piti
fully few, and no ranker soldiers, though one centurion was able to say that there were some thousands of survivors on the west bank of the river, wandering dazed and leaderless. Caepio came in last of all, accompanied by his son, Caepio Junior, whom he had found on the western bank as he came down it toward Arausio. When Caepio learned that Mallius Maximus was sheltering inside Meminius’s house, he refused to stay, electing instead to press onward to Rome, and take his son with him. Meminius gave him two gigs harnessed to four-mule teams, and sent him on his way with food and drivers.

  Bowed over with grief at the death of his sons, Mallius Maximus was unable until the third day to ask whereabouts the six senators were; until then Meminius hadn’t even known of them, but when Mallius Maximus pressed for a search party to find them, Meminius demurred, afraid that the Germans were still in possession of the field of battle, and more concerned with making sure that he and his wife and all his shocked guests were readied for a quick flight to safety.

  Such was the situation when the German interpreter rode into Arausio and located Meminius. It was immediately clear to Meminius that the man was big with news of some kind, but unfortunately neither of them could understand the other’s Latin, and it did not occur to Meminius to ask Mallius Maximus to see the man. Instead, he gave him shelter, and told him to wait until someone came with both the language and the state of mind to interview him.