Caesar's Women (22 page)

Though the two great kings were reconciled, Mithridates was too cagey to be with Tigranes—instead, he lay with an army of a mere ten thousand men to the north and west of where Tigranes had fled; his opinion of Tigranes as a military man was not high. With him was his best general, his cousin Taxiles, and when they heard that Lucullus was besieging Tigranocerta and that Tigranes was gathering an immense force to relieve it, Mithridates sent his cousin Taxiles to see the King of Kings.

“Do not attack the Romans!” was the Mithridatic message.

Tigranes was inclined to heed this advice, even after he had assembled one hundred and twenty thousand infantry from places as far apart as Syria and the Caucasus, and twenty-five thousand of the awesome cavalry known as cataphracts, horses and riders clad from head to foot in chain mail. He lay some fifty miles from his capital in a cozy valley, but he needed to move. Most of his supplies were in Tigranocertan granaries and storehouses, so he knew he must establish fortified contact with the city if his vast forces were to eat. And that, he reasoned, should not be too difficult if indeed, as his spies had reported to him, the Roman army did not have the strength to embrace the entire perimeter of so great a place as Tigranocerta.

He had not, however, believed the reports which said the Roman army was minute. Until he himself rode to the top of a high hill behind his capital and actually saw for himself what gnat was impudent enough to sting him.

“Too large to be an embassage, but too small to be an army” was how he put it, and issued orders to attack.

But vast eastern armies were not entities a Marius or a Sulla would have desired for one moment, even had those two Roman generals ever had such military largesse offered to them. Forces must be small, flexible, maneuverable—easily supplied, easily controlled, easily deployed. Lucullus had two legions of superb if disreputable soldiers who knew his tactics as well as he did, plus a very neat contingent of twenty-seven hundred horsemen from Galatia who had been with him for years.

The siege had not been without Roman losses, chiefly because of a mysterious Zoroastrian fire King Tigranes possessed. It was called naphtha by the Greeks, and it came from a Persian fastness somewhere on the southwest of the Hyrcanian Sea. Small light lumps of it lobbed onto the siege towers and shelter sheds roared through the air ablaze and splattered as they landed, flaring up so hot and so incandescent that nothing could extinguish them or the fires which spread from them. They burned and maimed— but worse than that, they terrified. No one had ever experienced anything like them before.

Thus when Tigranes moved his mighty force to attack the gnat, he failed to understand what a difference mood could make to the gnat. Every Roman in that tiny army was fed up—fed up with a monotonous diet, Zoroastrian fire, no women, cataphracts lumbering on their huge Nesaean horses to badger foraging parties, Armenia in general and Tigranocerta in particular. From Lucullus to the Fimbriani to the Galatian cavalry, all of them hungered for a battle. And cheered themselves hoarse when the scouts reported that King Tigranes was in the offing at last.

Promising Mars Invictus a special sacrifice, Lucullus girded his loins for the fray at dawn on the sixth day of Roman October. Siege lines abandoned, the General occupied a hill which intervened between the advancing Armenian giant and the city, and made his dispositions. Though he couldn't know that Mithridates had sent Taxiles to warn the King of Kings not to engage the Romans, Lucullus did know exactly how to tempt Tigranes into an engagement: huddle his little force together and appear to be terrified by the size of the Armenian giant. Since all the eastern kings were convinced an army's strength was in numbers, Tigranes would attack.

Tigranes did attack. What developed was a debacle. No one on the Armenian side, including Taxiles, seemed to comprehend the value of high ground. Nor, so much was clear to Lucullus as the seething host flowed up his hill, had anyone in the Armenian chain of command thought to develop tactics or a strategy. The monster was unleashed; no more was necessary.

Taking his time, Lucullus dealt out frightful punishment from the top of his hill, worried only that the mountains of dead would end in hemming him in, foil a complete victory. But when he put his Galatian cavalry to clearing lines through the Armenian fallen, the Fimbriani spread outward and downward like scythes through a field of wheat. The Armenian front disintegrated, pushing thousands of Syrian and Caucasian foot soldiers into the ranks of the mailed cataphracts until horses and riders fell, or they themselves were crushed. More of the Armenian host died that way than the berserk Fimbriani had the numbers to kill.

Said Lucullus in his report to the Senate in Rome: “Over one hundred thousand Armenian dead, and five Roman dead.”

King Tigranes fled a second time, so certain he would be captured that he gave his tiara and diadem to one of his sons to keep, exhorting the princeling to gallop faster because he was younger and lighter. But the youth entrusted tiara and diadem to an obscure-looking slave, with the result that the Armenian symbols of sovereignty came into the possession of Lucullus two days later.

The Greeks forced to live in Tigranocerta opened the gates of the city, so overjoyed that they carried Lucullus shoulder-high. Privation was a thing of the past; the Fimbriani dived with equal glee into soft arms and soft beds, ate and drank, wenched and pillaged. The booty was staggering. Eight thousand talents of gold and silver, thirty million medimni of wheat, untold treasures and art works.

And the General became human! Fascinated, Publius Clodius saw the Lucullus he had known in Rome emerge out of the hard-bitten, coldly ruthless man of months past. Manuscripts were piled up for his delectation alongside exquisite children he retained for his own pleasure, never happier than when he could sexually initiate girls just flowering into puberty. Median girls, not Greek! The spoils were divided at a ceremony in the marketplace with Lucullan fairness: each of the fifteen thousand men received at least thirty thousand sesterces in money, though of course it would not be paid over until the loot had been converted into cold, hard Roman cash. The wheat fetched twelve thousand talents; canny Lucullus sold the bulk of it to King Phraates of the Parthians.

Publius Clodius was not about to forgive Lucullus for those months of footslogging and living hard, even when his own share of the booty came in at a hundred thousand sesterces. Somewhere between Eusebeia Mazaca and the crossing at Tomisa he added his brother-in-law's name to the list he kept of those who would pay for offending him. Catilina. Cicero the small fish. Fabia. And now Lucullus. Having seen the gold and silver piled in the vaults—indeed, having assisted in counting it—Clodius concentrated at first upon working out how Lucullus had managed to cheat everyone when the spoils were divided. A mere thirty thousand for each legionary, each cavalryman? Ridiculous! Until his abacus told him that eight thousand talents divided by fifteen thousand men yielded only thirteen thousand sesterces each—so where had the other seventeen thousand come from? Sale of the wheat, said the General laconically when Clodius applied to him for elucidation.

This wasted exercise in arithmetic did give Clodius an idea, however. If he had assumed Lucullus was cheating his men, what would they think if someone sowed a seed or two of discontent?

Until Tigranocerta had been occupied, Clodius had been given no chance to cultivate the acquaintance of anyone outside the small and untalkative group of legates and tribunes around the General. Lucullus was a stickler for protocol, disapproved of fraternization between ranker soldiers and his staff. But now, with winter setting in and this new Lucullus prepared to give all who served him the time of their lives, supervision ceased. Oh, there were jobs to do: Lucullus ordered every actor and dancer rounded up, for example, and forced them to perform for his army. A circus holiday far from home for men who would never see home again. Entertainments were plentiful. So was wine.

The leader of the Fimbriani was a primus pilus centurion who headed the senior of the two Fimbriani legions. His name was Marcus Silius, and like the rest he had marched, an ordinary legionary not yet old enough to shave, east across Macedonia with Flaccus and Fimbria seventeen years before. When Fimbria won the struggle for supremacy, Marcus Silius had applauded the murder of Flaccus at Byzantium. He had crossed into Asia, fought against King Mithridates, been handed over to Sulla when Fimbria fell from power and suicided, and fought for Sulla, for Murena, and then for Lucullus. With the others he had gone to besiege Mitylene, by which time his rank was pilus prior, very high in the tortuous gradations of centurions. Year had succeeded year; fight had succeeded fight. They had all been mere striplings when they left Italy, for Italy by then was exhausted of seasoned troops; now in Tigranocerta they had been under the eagles for half of the years they had lived, and petition after petition for an honorable discharge had been denied them. Marcus Silius, their leader, was a bitter man of thirty-four who just wanted to go home.

It hadn't been necessary for Clodius to ascertain this information now; even legates as sour as Sextilius did speak from time to time, and usually about Silius or the primus pilus centurion of the other Fimbriani legion, Lucius Cornificius, who was not of the rising family with that name.

Nor was it hard to find Silius's lair inside Tigranocerta; he and Cornificius had commandeered a minor palace which had belonged to a Tigranic son, and moved in together with some very delectable women and enough slaves to serve a cohort.

Publius Clodius, patrician member of an august clan, went visiting, and like the Greeks before Troy, he bore gifts. Oh, not the size of wooden horses! Clodius brought a little bag of mushrooms Lucullus (who liked to experiment with such substances) had given him, and a flagon of superlative wine so large it took three servants to manhandle it.

His reception was wary. Both the centurions knew well enough who he was; what relationship he bore to Lucullus; how he had done on the march, in the camp before the city, during the battle. None of which impressed them any more than the person of Clodius did, for he was of no more than average size and far too mediocre of physique to stand out in any crowd. What they did admire was his gall: he barged in as if he owned the place, ensconced himself chattily on a big tapestry cushion between the couches where each man lay wrapped around his woman of the moment, produced his bag of mushrooms and proceeded to tell them what was going to happen when they partook of this unusual fare.

“Amazing stuff!” said Clodius, mobile brows flying up and down in a comical manner. “Do have some, but chew it very slowly and don't expect anything to happen for quite a long time.”

Silius made no attempt to avail himself of this invitation; nor, he was quick to note, did Clodius set an example by chewing one of the shrunken little caps, slowly or otherwise.

“What do you want?” he asked curtly.

“To talk,” said Clodius, and smiled for the first time.

That was always a shock for those who had never seen the smiling Publius Clodius; it transformed what was otherwise a rather tense and anxious face into something suddenly so likable, so appealing, that smiles tended to break out all around. As smiles did in the moment Clodius triggered his, from Silius, Cornificius, both the women.

But a Fimbrianus was not to be caught so easily. Clodius was the Enemy, a far more serious enemy than any Armenian or Syrian or Caucasian. So after his smile died, Silius maintained his independence of mind, remained skeptical of Clodius's motives.

All of which Clodius half expected, had planned for. It had come to his notice during those four humiliating years he had slunk around Rome that anyone highborn was going to be viewed with extreme suspicion by those beneath him, and that on the whole those beneath him could find absolutely no reasonable reason why someone highborn would want to slum it. Rudderless, ostracized by his peers, and desperate for something to do, Clodius set out to remove mistrust among his inferiors. The thrill of victory when he succeeded was warming, but he had also found a genuine pleasure in low company; he liked being better educated and more intelligent than anyone else in the room, it gave him an advantage he would never have among his peers. He felt a giant. And he transmitted a message to his inferiors that here was a highborn chap who really did care, who really was attracted to simpler people, simpler circumstances. He learned to wriggle in and make himself at home. He basked in a new kind of adulation.

His technique consisted in talk. No big words, no inadvertent allusions to obscure Greek dramatists or poets, not one indication that his company or his drink or his surroundings did not please him tremendously. And while he talked, he plied his audience with wine and pretended to consume huge amounts of it himself—yet made sure that at the end he was the soberest man in the room. Not that he looked it; he was adept at collapsing under the table, falling off his stool, bolting outside to vomit. The first time he worked on his chosen quarry they preserved a measure of skepticism, but he'd be back to try again, then be back a third and a fourth time, until eventually even the wariest man present had to admit that Publius Clodius was a truly wonderful fellow, someone ordinary who had been unfortunate enough to be born into the wrong sphere. After trust was established, he discovered he could manipulate everyone to his heart's content provided that he never betrayed his inner thoughts and feelings. The lowly he courted, he soon decided, were urban hayseeds, uncouth, ignorant, unread—desperately eager to be esteemed by their betters, longing for approval. And just waiting to be shaped.

Marcus Silius and Lucius Cornificius were no different from any tavernload of Roman urban lowly, even if they had left Italy at seventeen. Hard they were, cruel they were, ruthless they were. But to Publius Clodius the two centurions seemed as malleable as clay in the hands of a master sculptor. Easy game. Easy …