The Art of War

Chapter 40

Rome, November, AD 69

Geminus

I had heard about the gladiators in October when Lucius first commissioned them, but hadn’t paid them much attention. We were busy planning for Juvens’ triumphal exit from Rome and I didn’t have time to think about anything else.

On the ides of November, I watched him leave just as I had watched Caecina leave two months before; in fact they looked much the same. Juvens had had his usual mount taken away and had been forced on to a grey parade gelding all done up with white plumes, and he wasn’t happy about it. His men had been polished till they shone and they marched after him, looking almost as unhappy.

Fourteen cohorts of the Guard plus all the cavalry wings at our disposal went with him. The city cheered much as it had cheered Caecina, which didn’t feel like a good omen. Realizing this, Vitellius issued an edict to the effect that Caecina’s name was no longer to be mentioned, and that all talk of treachery was to be met with the greatest severity.

Given that there were only two cohorts of the Guard left behind, plus the Urban cohorts and the Watch, both of whom were loyal to Sabinus, who was looking increasingly like brother to next year’s emperor, that kind of order was always going to be difficult to enforce.

I had been left in charge of the Guard, with responsibility for discipline and order, and so found myself arranging the men into groups big enough to take care of themselves and sending them to those parts of the city least likely to harbour dissent. The problem, of course, was working out which those areas might be from an ever-dwindling pool of possible options.

We managed like this for half a month, and then we had word from Juvens that he required the emperor’s presence.

It was late November by then and Juvens had marched his cohorts a mere seventy-two miles up the Flaminian Way; he should have made that in half the time. He had dug in at Mevania, a small and insignificant town on the western edge of a flat plain, opposite the Apennines.

It was a good, defensible place with hills at his back and open country around and if all he had had to worry about was the enemy army that was currently marching through steep mountain passes in foul winter weather to get to him, he would have been fine.

But it wasn’t all. Far more damaging was the constant flow of letters sent to his men from their friends in the opposing army, letters that spent pages telling of the wonders of Antonius Primus, how Vespasian was by far the better emperor, and how good was life on their side of the line, where the men feasted on exotic food sent by shipload from the east, revelling in the endless supply of women, enjoying the fruits of their victories.

Juvens could, and did, intercept and destroy letters to the ordinary serving men, but he couldn’t stop the officers from reading letters that came in the wood piles, in secret compartments in the bottoms of wine barrels, in the hats of the men who treated the horses, in any of the dozen different ways that men used to communicate from one side of this civil war to the other. In the days since his army had come to a halt, he had lost a dozen senior officers to the enemy and the leak threatened to become a flood. And so he called for the emperor Vitellius to visit them to stiffen their resolve.

And Vitellius went.

And the flood became a deluge.

Truly, Vitellius was his own worst enemy. To put heart into his men a man must have heart himself, and as anyone who had known him closely could tell you, Vitellius hovered daily on the brink of abdication.

Lucius was the one who kept him steady, but Lucius was not prepared to go north himself, not when he had evidence that Pantera was busy trying to force him there.

And so Vitellius went alone, if by ‘alone’ you mean only in the company of every senator who wanted to make an impression on him, plus their mistresses, plus his tyrant of a mother. And yes, I went too: I was told to.

We knew Vitellius was not a natural orator, but it went far beyond that.

On his first day, he was giving an adequate enough address to the assembled troops, raising his voice at least sufficiently to be heard by the front ranks, when a flock of vultures flew overhead, so vast and so dark as to blot out the sun. Three of them came down low and knocked our emperor from his podium. Either that or he fell, recoiling in his terrified belief that they had come to lift him up to the heavens. Either way, it didn’t look good; the men held their silence, but it had a dull, flat feel to it.

The next day, a bull being led to the altar for sacrifice was spooked by a runaway mule, gored its handlers and joined the mule in an orgy of escape. The gods, quite clearly, had rejected the offering. That’s when the muttering started.

We might have survived both of these; it was the wine that sealed his fate. Vitellius was weak, and he looked it. He was uncertain, and it showed. He knew nothing of strategy and now, thanks to his idiocy in asking questions in public that should only ever have been asked in the privacy of his tent, if at all, his entire garrison had experienced his ignorance first-hand. And he drank from first light to last and was rarely seen sober among men who prided themselves on their ability to drink hard and fight hard and march on an aching head.

Any one of these three they could have tolerated, two perhaps; all three together, they most assuredly could not. A dozen officers were gone by the end of the first day and more each day after that.

When news came from Lucius that the Misene fleet had, in fact, defected to Vespasian, Juvens took the opportunity to suggest to the emperor that perhaps he was needed urgently in Rome. He was better gone, but when he — and I — left, we took seven of Juvens’ fourteen Praetorian cohorts with us, and virtually all of the officers followed us back to Rome.

The only good thing about being away was that Lucius had stayed behind in Rome and for eight days I had been free of him. The worst thing about coming back was that Lucius was there to greet us.

He was hopping mad — quite literally springing from one foot to the other, although whether in rage or delight was impossible to tell.

He didn’t seem overly moved by the desperate news from the front, and as soon as he could get me away from the emperor he virtually dragged me into a corner and gave me a lecture about his bloody gladiators.

So it was delight, not rage, that was moving him. The gladiators, by his account, were his secret weapon in his personal war against Pantera: one thousand hand-picked, hard-trained men who were going to carve through the marines at Misene like a knife through soft leather and restore the good name of Vitellius while simultaneously blocking the western port to Vespasian’s incoming ships.

He dragged me down into the city to see them: one thousand men crammed into an arena barely big enough for half that number, oiled, semi-naked, a landscape of rigid muscles and shaved cheeks. If I hadn’t known him always to favour women, I would have suspected Lucius of setting up a male harem on a grand scale.

While we were there, their leader, Julius Claudianus, took us to one side and said that Pantera had been seen heading for a particular brothel on the side of the Capitoline.

Actually, he said he had heard a half-baked rumour that the spy might have been there, but Lucius treated it as golden fact. I have never seen him move so fast.

He spat orders like a fishwife and within moments we had horses to ride — I was on an ugly chestnut beast that showed the white of its eye and resisted the bit — and two dozen men fully armed to go with us.

We rode as hard then as anyone has ever ridden in Rome’s streets, heading flat out towards the Capitoline. Nearing the slums, I leaned over to Lucius. ‘May I ask where we’re going?’

‘To a brothel. We were going anyway, but this just confirms- Oh, for fuck’s sake, man, don’t be such a prude! Wipe that scowl off your face and listen! Pantera’s been there seven times in the past two months but I’ve never had word in time to take him. Now there’s a chance, if we move fast enough. Bring those men and come on!’