The October Horse (94 page)

With three hundred million sesterces in his war chest from the Lycian campaign, most of it garnished from pirates, Brutus brought his army back to the Hermus valley in June. This time he and his legates took up residence in the lovely city of Sardis, forty miles inland and more ascetically pleasing than Smyrna.

The coast of Asia Province was not only rugged; it also thrust a series of peninsulas out into the Aegean Sea, which made voyages tedious for merchantmen sailing close inshore, always having to traipse around another rocky protrusion. The last such peninsula on the way to Rhodes was the Cnidan Chersonnese, with the port of Cnidus on its very tip; the entire very long, thin finger of land was simply referred to by the city's name, Cnidus.

For Cassius, Cnidus was handy. He took four legions from the Hermus valley and put them into camp there, while he marshaled his fleets at Myndus on the next peninsula up, just west of the fabulous city of Halicarnassus. He was using a vast number of big, slow galleys from quinquereme down to trireme, nothing any smaller, which he knew the Rhodians, masters of maritime warfare, would deem easy game. His admirals were the same trusty fellows who had made mincemeat out of Dolabella's men: Patiscus, the two Liberators Cassius Parmensis and Decimus Turullius, and Sextilius Rufus. The command of his land army was split between Gaius Fannius Caepio and Lentulus Spinther.

Of course the Rhodians heard about all this activity and sent an innocent-looking pinnace to spy on Cassius; when its crew reported back about the mammoth craft Cassius was employing, the Rhodian admirals had a good laugh. They preferred taut, trim triremes and biremes, usually undecked, with two banks of oars in outriggers and very businesslike bronze beaks for ramming. Rhodians never used marines or soldiers to board the enemy, they simply raced around clumsy warships in deft circles and either forced these leviathans to collide with each other, or got up a good straight run and rammed them so hard they were holed; they were also experts at coming alongside a ship and shearing off its oars.

“If Cassius is stupid enough to attack with his elephants of ships,” said the wartime chief magistrate, Alexander, to the wartime chief admiral Mnaseas, “he'll go the way of Poliorketes and King Mithridates the so-called Great, ha ha ha. Ignominious defeat! I agree with the Carthaginians of old—no Roman ever born can fight on the sea when the enemy's a seafaring people.”

“Yes, but in the end the Romans crushed the Carthaginians,” said Archelaus the Rhetor, who had been brought to the city of Rhodus from his idyllic rural retreat because he had once taught Cassius rhetoric when Cassius had been a youth in the Forum.

“Oh, yes!” sneered Mnaseas. “But only after a hundred and fifty years and three wars! And then they did it on land.”

“Not entirely,” Archelaus persisted stubbornly. “Once they invented the corvus gangplank and could board troops in number, Carthage's fleets didn't do very well.”

The two wartime leaders glared at the old pedant and began to wish that they had left him to his bucolic maunderings.

“Send Gaius Cassius an embassage,” Archelaus pleaded.

So the Rhodians sent an embassage to see Cassius at Myndus, more to shut Archelaus up than because they thought it would achieve anything. Cassius received the deputation arrogantly and loftily told its members that he was going to wallop them.

“So when you get home,” he said, “tell your council to start thinking about negotiating a peace settlement.”

Back they went to tell Alexander and Mnaseas that Cassius had sounded so confident! Perhaps it might be best to negotiate? Alexander and Mnaseas hooted in derision.

“Rhodes cannot be beaten at sea,” said Mnaseas. He lifted his lip in contempt and looked thoughtful. “To illustrate the point, I note that Cassius has his ships out exercising every day, so why don't we show him what Rhodes can do? Catch him sitting on the latrine, dreaming that Roman drill can beat Rhodian skill.”

“You're a poet,” said Archelaus, who really was a nuisance.

“Why don't you hop off to Myndus and see Cassius yourself?” Alexander suggested.

“All right, I will,” said Archelaus.

Who took a pinnace to Myndus and saw his old pupil, pulling all his rhetorical brilliance out of his magical speaking hat to no avail. Cassius heard him out unmoved.

“Go back and tell those fools that their days are numbered” was as much satisfaction as Archelaus could get.

“Cassius says your days are numbered,” he told the wartime commanders, and was sent back to his rustic villa in disgrace.

•      •      •

Cassius knew exactly what he was doing, little though Rhodes thought that. His drills and exercises went on remorselessly; he supervised them himself, and punished severely when his ships did not perform up to expectations. A great deal of his time was filled in shuttling back and forth between Myndus and Cnidus, which he could do while supervising, for the land army had to be fit for action too, and he believed in the personal touch.

Early in April the Rhodians picked out their thirty-five best vessels and sent them out on a surprise raid, their quarry Cassius's busily exercising fleet of unwieldy quinqueremes. At first it looked as if the Rhodians would win easily, but Cassius, standing in his pinnace flagging messages to his captains, was not at all flustered. Nor did his captains panic, start to run into each other or present a tempting beam to the enemy. Then the Rhodians realized that the Roman ships were herding them into a smaller and smaller area of water, until finally they could not turn, ram, or perform any of the brilliant maneuvers for which they were so famous. Darkness enabled the Rhodians to break out of the net and dash for home, but behind them they left two ships sunk and three captured.

•      •      •

Rhodes sat ideally poised at the eastern bottom corner of the Aegean Sea; eighty miles long, the lozenge-shaped, hilly, fertile island was large enough to feed itself, as well as to form a barrier to ongoing sea traffic heading for Cilicia, Syria, Cyprus and all points east. The Rhodians had exploited this natural bounty by going to sea, and relied upon their naval superiority to protect their island.

Cassius's land army sailed on the Kalends of May in a hundred transports, with Cassius himself leading eighty war galleys that also carried marines. He was ready on all fronts.

When it saw this huge armada bearing down, out came the entire Rhodian fleet, only to succumb to the same tactics Cassius had used off Myndus; while the sea battle raged, the transports slipped past unharmed, allowing Fannius Caepio and Lentulus Spinther to land their four legions safely on the coast to the west of Rhodus city. Not only were there twenty thousand well-equipped, mail-shirted soldiers forming up into rank and column, but cranes were winching and gangways were rolling staggering amounts of artillery and siege machines ashore! Oh, oh, oh! The horrified Rhodians had no land army of their own, and no idea how to withstand a siege.

Alexander and the Rhodian council sent a frantic message to Cassius that they would capitulate, but even as this was being done, the ordinary people inside Rhodus were busy opening all the gates and doors in the walls to admit the Roman army.

The only casualty was a soldier who fell and broke his arm.

•      •      •

Thus the city of Rhodus was not sacked, and the island of Rhodes sustained little damage.

Cassius set up a tribunal in the agora. Wearing a wreath of victory laurels on his cropped light brown hair, he mounted it clad in his purple-bordered toga. With him were twelve lictors in crimson tunics bearing the axed fasces, and two hoary veteran primipilus centurions in decorations and shirts of gold scales, one bearing a ceremonial spear. At a gesture from Cassius, the centurion rammed the spear into the tribunal deck, a signal that Rhodes was the prisoner of the Roman war machine.

He had the other centurion, owner of a famously stentorian voice, read out a list of fifty names, including those of Mnaseas and Alexander, had them brought to the foot of his tribunal and executed on the spot. The centurion then read out twenty-five more names; they were exiled, their property confiscated along with the property of the fifty dead men. After which Cassius's impromptu herald bawled out in bad Greek that every piece of jewelry, every coin, every gold or silver or bronze or copper or tin sow, every temple treasure and every item of valuable furniture or fabric were to be brought to the agora.

Those who obeyed willingly and honestly would not be molested, but those who tried to flee or conceal their possessions would be executed. Rewards for information were offered to free men, freedmen, and slaves.

It was a perfect act of terrorism that achieved Cassius's ends immediately. The agora became so piled with loot that the soldiers couldn't carry it away fast enough. Very graciously he allowed Rhodes to keep its most revered work of art, the Chariot of the Sun, but he allowed it to keep nothing else. A legate entered every dwelling in the city to make sure no precious thing remained, while Cassius himself led three of the legions into the countryside and stripped it barer than carrion birds a carcass. Archelaus the Rhetor lost nothing for the most logical of reasons: he had nothing.

Rhodes yielded an incredible eight thousand gold talents, which Cassius translated as six hundred million sesterces.

•      •      •

On his return to Myndus, Cassius issued an edict to all of Asia Province that each city and district was to pay him ten years' tributes or taxes in advance—and that included every community previously enjoying an exempt status. The money was to be presented to him in Sardis.

Though he didn't leave at once for Sardis. Word had come through the regent of Cyprus, the very frightened Serapion, that Queen Cleopatra had assembled a large fleet of warships and merchant vessels for the Triumvirs, even including some of the precious barley she had bought from the Parthians. Neither famine nor pestilence had prevented her making this decision, said Serapion, one of those who wanted Arsinoë on the throne.

Cassius detached Lucius Staius Murcus the Liberator and sixty big galleys from his fleets and ordered him to lie in wait for the Egyptian ships off Cape Taenarum at the foot of the Greek Peloponnese. An efficient man, Staius Murcus did as he was told swiftly, but he waited in vain. Finally a message reached him that Cleopatra's fleet had encountered a violent storm off the coast of Catabathmos, turned and limped back to Alexandria.

However, said Staius Murcus in a note to Cassius, he didn't think he could be of much use in the eastern end of Our Sea, so he was going to take himself and his sixty galleys off to the Adriatic around Brundisium. There, he thought, he could make plenty of mischief for the Triumvirs, attempting to get their armies across to western Macedonia.

Sardis had been the capital of the ancient kingdom of Lydia, and so immensely rich that its king of five hundred years ago, Croesus, was still the standard by which wealth was measured. Lydia fell to the Persians, then passed into the hands of the Attalids of Pergamum, and so, by the testament of the last King Attalus, into Rome's fold in the days when much of the territory Rome owned had been bequeathed to her in wills.

It rather tickled Brutus to choose King Croesus's city as headquarters for the vast Liberator enterprise, the place from which his and Cassius's armies would embark upon their long march westward. To Cassius when he arrived, an irksome nuisance.

“Why aren't we on the sea?” he demanded the moment he had shed his leather traveling cuirass and kilts.

“I'm fed up with looking at ships and smelling fish!” Brutus snapped, caught off guard.

“Therefore I have to make a hundred-mile round trip every time I want to visit my fleets, just to soothe your nose!”

“If you don't like it, go live with your wretched fleets!”

Not a good beginning to the vast Liberator enterprise.

Gaius Flavius Hemicillus, however, was in an excellent mood. “We will have enough funds,” he announced after several days in the company of a large staff and many abacuses.

“Lentulus Spinther is to send more from Lycia,” said Brutus. “He writes that Myra yielded many riches before he burned it. I don't know why he burned it. Pity, really. A pretty place.”

Yet another reason why Brutus was grating on Cassius. What did it matter if Myra was pretty?

“Spinther sounds a great deal more effective than you were,” Cassius said truculently. “The Lycians didn't offer to pay over ten years' tribute to you.”

“How could I ask for something the Lycians had never paid? It didn't occur to me,” Brutus bleated.

“Then it should have. It did to Spinther.”

“Spinther,” Brutus said haughtily, “is an unfeeling clod.”

Oh, what's the matter with the man? asked Cassius silently. He has no more idea how to run a war than a Vestal. And if he moans about Cicero's death one more time, I'll throttle him! He hadn't one good thing to say about Cicero for months before his death, now the passing of Cicero is a tragedy outranking the best Sophocles can do.

Brutus wafts along in a world all his own, while I have to do all the real work.

But it wasn't only Brutus who nettled Cassius; Cassius was nettling Brutus quite as much, chiefly because he harped and he harped about Egypt.

“I should have gone south to invade Egypt when I intended to,” he would say, scowling. “Instead, you palmed me off with Rhodes—a mere eight thousand gold talents, when Egypt would have yielded a thousand thousand gold talents! But no, don't invade Egypt! Go north and join me, you wrote, as if Antonius was going to be on Asia's doorstep within a nundinum. And I believed you!”

“I didn't say that, I said now was our chance to invade Rome! And we have money enough from Rhodes and Lycia anyway,” Brutus would answer stiffly.

And so it went, neither man in charity with the other. Part of it was worry, part of it the manifest differences in their natures: Brutus cautious, thrifty and unrealistic; Cassius daring, splashy and pragmatic. Brothers-in-law they might be, but in the past they had spent mere days living together in the same house, and that not often. Besides the fact that Servilia and Tertulla had always been there to damp the combustible mixture down.

Though he had no idea he wasn't helping the situation, poor Hemicillus didn't help, always appearing to voice the latest rumor about how much the troops expected as cash donatives, fuss and fret because he'd have to recalculate their expenses.

•      •      •

Then, toward the end of Julius, Marcus Favonius appeared in Sardis asking to join the Liberator effort. After escaping from the proscriptions he had gone to Athens, where he had lingered for months wondering what to do; when his money ran out, he realized that the only thing he could do was go back to war on behalf of Cato's Republic. His beloved Cato was dead four years, he had no family worth speaking of, and both Cato's son and Cato's son-in-law were under arms.

Brutus had been delighted to see him, Cassius far less so, but his presence did compel the two Liberators to put a better face on their constant differences. Until, that is, Favonius walked into the midst of a terrible quarrel.

“Some of your junior legates are behaving shockingly toward the Sardians,” Brutus was saying angrily. “There's no excuse for it, Cassius, no excuse at all! Who do they think they are, to push Sardians rudely off their own pathways? Who do they think they are, to walk into taverns, guzzle expensive wine, then refuse to pay for it? You should be punishing them!”

“I have no intention of punishing them,” Cassius said, teeth bared in a snarl. “The Sardians need teaching a lesson, they're arrogant and unappreciative.”

“When my legates and officers behave that way, I punish them, and you should punish yours,” Brutus insisted.

“Shove,” said Cassius, “your punishment up your arse!”

Brutus gasped. “You—you typical Cassian! There's not a Cassius alive who isn't an oaf, but you're the biggest oaf of all!”

Standing unnoticed in the doorway, Favonius decided that it was time to break the quarrel up, but even as he moved, Cassius swung a fist at Brutus. Brutus ducked.

“Don't, please don't! Please, please, please!” Favonius squawked, arms and hands flapping wildly as Cassius pursued the cringing Brutus with murder written on his face. Desperate to head Cassius off, Favonius threw himself between the two men in an unconsciously wonderful imitation of a panicked fowl.

Or at least that was how the mercurial Cassius saw Favonius as his rage cleared; he burst into howls of laughter while the terrified Brutus dodged behind a desk.

“The whole house can hear you!” Favonius cried. “How can you command an army when you can't even command your own feelings?”

“You're absolutely right, Favonius,” said Cassius, wiping the tears of mirth from his eyes.

“You're insufferable!” the unmollified Brutus said to Cassius.

“Insufferable or not, Brutus, you have to suffer me, just as I have to suffer you. Personally I think you're a gutless cocksucker—you'll always provide the orifice! At least I'm the one shoves it in, which makes me a man.”

In answer, Brutus stalked from the room.

Favonius gazed at Cassius helplessly.

“Cheer up, Favonius, he'll get over his snit,” Cassius said, clapping him lustily on the back.

“He had better, Cassius, or your enterprise will come to an abrupt end. All Sardis is talking about your rows.”

“Luckily, old friend, all Sardis will soon have other things to talk about. Thank all the gods, we're ready to march.”

•      •      •

The great Liberator enterprise got under way two days into Sextilis, the army marching overland to the Hellespont while the fleets made sail for the island of Samothrace. Word had come from Lentulus Spinther that he would meet them on the Hellespont at Abydos, and word had come from Rhascupolis of the Thracians that he had found an ideal site for a mammoth camp on the Gulf of Melas, only a day's march beyond the straits.

No Caesars when it came to rapid movement, Brutus and Cassius pushed their land forces north and west at a pace that saw them take a month to reach the Gulf of Melas, a mere two hundred miles from Sardis. The actual ferrying of troops across the Hellespont, however, took a full nundinum of that. Thence they took the sea-level pass that fractured the precipitous terrain of the Thracian Chersonnese, and so came down to the fabulously rich, dreamy expanse of the Melas River valley, where they pitched a more permanent camp. Cassius's admirals left their flagships to join the conference the two commanders held in the little town of Melan Aphrodisias.

And here Hemicillus did his final totting up, for here, the Liberators had resolved, they would pay their land and sea forces those cash bonuses.

Though none of their legions was at full strength, averaging 4,500 men per legion, Brutus and Cassius had 90,000 Roman foot soldiers distributed over 19 legions; they also had 10,000 foreign foot soldiers under Roman Eagles. In cavalry they were extremely well off, having 8,000 Roman-run Gallic and German horse, 5,000 Galatian horse from King Deiotarus, 5,000 Cappadocian horse from the new King Ariarathes, and 4,000 horse archers from the small kingdoms and satrapies along the Euphrates. A total of 100,000 foot and 24,000 horse. On the sea, they had 500 warships and 600 transports moored around Samothrace, plus Murcus's fleet of 60 and Gnaeus Ahenobarbus's fleet of 80 hovering in the Adriatic around Brundisium. Murcus and Ahenobarbus themselves had come to the conference on behalf of their men.

In Caesar's time, it had cost 20 million sesterces to equip one full strength legion with everything: clothing, personal arms and armor, artillery, mules, wagons, oxen teams, tack, tools and implements for the artificers, and supplies of wood, iron, firebricks, molds, cement and other items a legion might need for the manufacture of gear on the march or under siege. It cost a further 12 million to keep a legion in the field for twelve continuous months in good, cheap grain years, what with food, clothing replacements, repairs, general wear and tear and army pay. Cavalry was less expensive because most horse troopers were the gift of foreign kings or chieftains, who paid to outfit them and keep them in the field. In Caesar's case, that had not held true after he dispensed with the Aedui and grew to rely on German cavalry; that, he had to fund himself.

Brutus and Cassius had had to bear the cost of creating and equipping fully half their legions, and also bore the cost of those 8,000 Roman-run horse troopers plus the 4,000 horse archers. Thus what money they had before the campaigns against Rhodes and Lycia had gone on equipping. It was the latter two sources of income that would pay at Melas; with what Lentulus Spinther had squeezed out of Lycia in Brutus's wake, and what the cities and regions of the East had managed to scrape together, the Liberators had 1,500 million sesterces in their war chest.

But there were more men to pay than the legionaries and the horse troopers: they also had to pay the army noncombatants; and the men of the fleets, who included oarsmen, sailors, marines, masters, specialist sailors, artificers and noncombatants. About 50,000 men altogether on the sea, and 20,000 land noncombatants.

It was true that Sextus Pompey didn't charge a fee for his help in the West, where he now virtually controlled the grain sea lanes from the grain provinces to Italy. But he did charge for the grain he sold the Liberators at ten sesterces the modius (he was charging the Triumvirs fifteen per modius). It took five modii to feed a soldier for a month. Between selling Rome back the wheat he stole from her grain fleets and what he sold the Liberators, Sextus Pompey was becoming fabulously rich.

•      •      •

“I have worked out,” said Hemicillus to the assembled war council in Melan Aphrodisias, “that we can afford to pay the Roman rankers six thousand each, going up to fifty thousand for a primipilus centurion—say—averaging out over the tortuous gradations of centurion rank—twenty thousand per centurion, and there are sixty per legion. Six hundred million for the rankers, a hundred and fourteen million for the centurions, seventy-two million for the horse, and two hundred and fifty million for the fleets. That comes to something over one thousand million, which leaves us with something under four hundred million in the war chest for provisions and ongoing expenses.”

“How did you arrive at six hundred million for the rankers?” asked Brutus, frowning as he did the sums in his head.

“Noncombatants have to be paid a thousand each, and there are ten thousand non-citizen foot soldiers to pay as well. I mean, troops need water on the march, their needs have to be catered for—you don't want to run the risk of noncombatants neglecting their duties, do you, Marcus Brutus? They're free Roman citizens too, don't forget. The Roman legions don't use any slaves,” Hemicillus said, a trifle offended. “I've done my computations well, and I do assure you that, having taken many more things into account than I have enumerated here, my figures are correct.”

“Don't quibble, Brutus,” said Cassius wearily. “The prize is Rome, after all.”

“The Treasury will be empty,” Brutus said despondently.

“But once we have the provinces up and running again, it will soon fill” from Hemicillus. He cast a furtive eye around to make sure that no representative from Sextus Pompey sat there, and coughed delicately. “You do realize, I hope, that once you have put Antonius and Octavianus down, you will have to scour the seas of Sextus Pompeius, who may call himself a patriot, but acts like a common pirate. Charging patriots for grain, indeed!”

“When we beat Antonius and Octavianus, we'll have the contents of their war chest,” said Cassius comfortably.

“What war chest?” from Brutus, determined to be miserable. “We'll have to go through the belongings of every legionary to find their money, because it will be where our money will be—in the belongings of every legionary.”

“Well, actually, I was going to talk about that,” said the indefatigable Hemicillus, with another little cough. “I recommend that, having paid your army and navy, you then ask to borrow the money back at Caesar's ten percent simple interest. That way, I can invest it with certain companies and earn something on it. If you just pay it over, it will sit there in legionary belongings earning nothing, which would be a tragedy.”

“Who can afford to hire the money in this dreadful economic climate?” Brutus asked gloomily.

“Deiotarus, for one. Ariarathes, for another. Hyrcanus in Judaea. Dozens of little satrapies in the East. A few Roman firms I know that are looking for liquid assets. And if we ask fifteen percent, who's to know except us?” Hemicillus giggled. “After all, we won't have any trouble collecting on the debts, will we? Not with our army and navy our creditors. I also hear that King Orodes of the Parthians is having cash flow troubles. He sold a good deal of barley last year to Egypt, though his own lands are in famine too. I think his credit is good enough to consider him a loan prospect.”