A Friend of Cæsar: A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. by - (great books of all time .TXT) 📕

"I hope the consuls are right," the first had said, "that Cæsar's army will desert him."

"Perpol," responded the other, "your wish is mine! If the proconsul really does advance, nothing will stand between him and the city!"

Gabinius kept his own counsel. "In times of war and confusion, the extremity of the many is the opportunity of the few," was the maxim he repeated to himself.

When he was well out of the city and moving up the Via Salaria, the trot and rattle of an approaching carriage drifted up upon him.

"Shall we stop and strip them?" asked Dromo, one of the accompanying brigands, in a matter-of-fact tone.

"Ay," responded Gabinius, reining in his own plodding draught-horse, and pulling out a short sword. "Let us take what the Fates send!"

A moment later and Servius Flaccus was being tumbled out of his comfortable travelling carriage, while one brigand stood guard over him with drawn sabre, a second held at bay his trembling driver and whimpering valet, and a third rifled his own person and his conveyance. There was a bright moon, and the luckless traveller's gaze fastened itself on the third bandit.

"By all the gods, Gabinius!" cried Servius, forgetting to lisp his Greekisms, "don't you know me? Let me go, for old friendship's sake!"

Gabinius turned from his task, and held to his nose a glass scent-bottle he had found in the vehicle.

"Ah! amice," he responded deliberately, "I really did not anticipate the pleasure of meeting you thus! You are returning very late to Rome from your Fidenæ villa. But this is very excellent oil of rose!"

"Enough of this, man!" expostulated the other. "The jest has gone quite far enough. Make this horrible fellow lower that sword."

"Not until I have finished making up my package of little articles," replied Gabinius, "and," suiting the action to the word, "relieved your fingers of the weight of those very heavy rings."

"Gabinius," roared Servius, in impotent fury, "what are you doing? Are you a common bandit?"

"A bandit, my excellent friend," was his answer, "but not a common one; no ordinary footpad could strip the noble Servius Flaccus without a harder struggle."

Servius burst into lamentations.

"My box of unguents! My precious rings! My money-bag! You are not leaving me one valuable! Have you sunk as low as this?"

"Really," returned the robber, "I have no time to convince you that the brigand's life is the only one worth living. You do not care to join our illustrious brotherhood? No? Well, I must put these trinkets and fat little wallet in my own wagon. I leave you your cloak out of old friendship's sake. Really you must not blame me. Remember Euripides's line:—

"'Money can warp the judgment of a God.'

Thus I err in good company. And with this, vale!"

Flaccus was left with his menials to clamber back into his plundered carriage. Gabinius drove his horse at topmost speed, and before morning was saluted by the remainder of the banditti, near their mountain stronghold. Dumnorix met him with news.

"It is rumoured in the country towns that Cæsar is driving all before him in the north, and will be down on Rome in less days than I have fingers."

Gabinius clapped his hands.

"And we will be down on Rome, and away from it, before a legionary shows himself at the gates!"

A messenger to the consuls! He had ridden fast and furious, his horse was flecked with foam and straining on his last burst of speed. On over the Mulvian Bridge he thundered; on across the Campus Martius; on to the Porta Ratumena—with all the hucksters and street rabble howling and chasing at his heels.

"News! News for the consuls!"

"What news?" howled old Læca, who was never backward in a street press.

"Terrible!" shouted the messenger, drawing rein, "Cæsar is sweeping all before him! All Thermus's troops have deserted him at Iguvium. Attius Varus has evacuated Auximum, and his troops too have dispersed, or joined Cæsar. All the towns are declaring for the enemy. Vah! He will be here in a few days at most! I am the last of the relay with the news. I have hardly breathed from Eretum!"

And the courier plunged the spur into his hard-driven mount, and forced his way into the city, through the mob. "Cæsar advancing on Rome!" The Jewish pedlers took up the tale, and carried it to the remotest tenement houses of Janiculum. The lazy street-idlers shouted it shrilly. Læca, catching sight of Lucius Ahenobarbus, just back from Baiæ, and a little knot of kindred spirits about him, was in an instant pouring it all in their ears. The news spread, flew, grew. The bankers on the Via Sacra closed their credit books, raised their shutters, and sent trusted clerks off to suburban villas, with due orders how to bury and hide weighty money-bags. The news came to that very noble lady Claudia, sister-in-law of the consul, just at the moment when she was discussing the latest style of hairdressing with the most excellent Herennia; and the cheeks of those patrician ladies grew pale, and they forgot whether or not it was proper to wear ivory pins or a jewel-set head-band, at the dinner-party of Lucius Piso that evening. The news came to Lentulus Crus while he was wrangling with Domitius as to who should be Cæsar's successor as Pontifex Maximus—and those distinguished statesmen found other things to think of.

The news flew and grew. The noble senators overheard their slaves whispering,—how it was rumoured on the street or in the Forum that Cæsar was in full advance on the city, that his cavalry were close to the gates. Cæsar at the gates! Why had they not remembered how rapidly he could advance? Why had they trusted the assurance of the traitor Labienus that the legions would desert their Imperator? Resist? By what means? The walls were walls only in name; the city had long outgrown them, spreading through a thousand breaches. There was not a trained soldier this side of Capua, whither Pompeius had departed only the day before to take command of the Apulian legions. Cæsar was coming! Cæsar—whose tribunes the oligarchs had chased from the Senate! Cæsar—whom they had proclaimed a rebel and public enemy! He was coming like a second Marius, who thirty-eight years before had swept down on Rome, and taken a terrible vengeance on enemies less bitter to him than they to the great Julian. "Moriendum est,"[157] had been the only reply to every plea for mercy. And would Cæsar now be more lenient to those who had aimed to blast his honour and shed his blood?

Evening drew on, but the calamity was only delayed. There was not a soldier to confront the invader. Few men that night could sleep. Rich and poor alike, all trembled. To their imaginations their foe was an ogre, implacable, unsparing. "Remember how it was in Sulla's day," croaked Læca to Ahenobarbus. "Remember how he proscribed forty senators and sixteen hundred equites with one stroke. A fine example for Cæsar! And Drusus, who is with the rebels, is little likely to say a good word in your behalf, eh?"

"The gods blast your tongue!" cried the young man, wringing his hands in terror; for that Drusus would ruin him, if he gained the chance, Lucius had not the least doubt in the world.

So passed the night, in fear and panic. When morning came everything save flight seemed suicide. There was a great government treasure in the Temple of Saturn. The Senate had voted that the money be delivered to Pompeius. But the consuls were too demoralized to take away a denarius. They left the great hoard under mere lock and key—a present to their bitterest enemy. Then began the great exodus. Hardly a man had done more than gather a few valuables together: property, children, wives—all these were left to the avenger. Down the Via Appia, toward Campania, where was their only safety, poured the panic-stricken company. Every carriage, every horse, was in service. The hard-driven chariots of the consuls were the tokens merely of the swiftest flight. Lentulus Crus fled; Caius Marcellus, his colleague, was close behind; Domitius fled, with his sons; Cato fled, ironically exclaiming that they would have to leave everything to Pompeius now, "for those who can raise up great evils can best allay them." Favonius fled, whose first words, when he met the Magnus, were to command him to "stamp on the ground for the legions so sorely needed." Piso, Scipio, and many another fled—their guilty hearts adding wings to their goings. Cicero fled—gazing in cynical disgust at the panic and incompetence, yet with a sword of Damocles, as he believed, hanging over his head also. "I fear that Cæsar will be a very Phalaris, and that we may expect the very worst," he wrote to his intimate friend Atticus, who, safe from harm and turmoil, was dwelling under the calm Athenian sky. A great fraction of the Senate departed; only those stayed who felt that their loyalty to the advancing Imperator was beyond dispute, or who deemed themselves too insignificant to fall beneath his displeasure. In the hour of crisis the old ties of religion and superstition reasserted themselves. Senators and magistrates, who had deemed it a polite avocation to mock at the gods and deny the existence of any absolute ethical standards, now, before they climbed into their carriages for flight, went, with due ritual, into the temples of the gods of their fathers, and swore hecatombs of milk-white Umbrian steers to Capitoline Jove, if the awful deity would restore them to the native land they then were quitting. And as they went down from the temples and hastened toward the gates, friends and clients who could not join their flight crowded after them, sighing, lamenting, and moaning. Out over the Campagna they streamed, this company of senators, prætors, consuls—men who had voted thrones to kings, and decreed the deposition of monarchs; whose personal wealth was princely, whose lineage the noblest in the world, whose ancestors had beaten down Etruscan, Gaul, Samnite, and Carthaginian, that their posterity might enjoy the glory of unequalled empire. And these descendants fled, fled not before any foe, but before their own guilty consciences; abandoning the city of their fathers when not a sword had flashed against her gates! The war had been of their making; to send Cæsar into outlawry the aristocracy had laboured ten long years. And now the noble lords were exiles, wanderers among the nations. To Capua they went, to find small comfort there, and thence to join Pompeius in further flight beyond the seas to Greece. But we anticipate. Enough that neither Lentulus Crus, nor Domitius, nor Cato, nor the great Magnus himself, ever saw Rome again.

Agias stood in a shop by the Sacred Way watching the stream of fugitives pouring down toward the Porta Capena. At his side was a person whom a glance proclaimed to be a fellow-Greek. The stranger was perhaps fifty, his frame presented a faultless picture of symmetry and manly vigour, great of stature, the limbs large but not ungainly. His features were regular, but possessed just enough prominence to make them free from the least tinge of weakness. The Greek's long, thick, dark but grey-streaked beard streamed down upon his breast; his hair, of similar hue, was long, and tossed back over his shoulders in loose curls. His dress was rich, yet rude, his chiton and cloak short, but of choice Milesian wool and dyed scarlet and purple; around his neck dangled a very heavy gold chain set with conspicuously blazing jewels. The ankles, however, were bare, and the sandals of the slightest and meanest description. The stranger must once have been of a light, not to say fair, complexion; but cheeks, throat, arms, and feet were all deeply bronzed, evidently by prolonged exposure to wind and weather. Agias and his companion watched the throng of panic-struck exiles. The younger Greek was pointing out, with the complacency of familiar knowledge, the names and dignities of the illustrious fugitives.

"Yonder goes Cato," he was saying; "mark his bitter scowl! There goes Marcus Marcellus, the consular. There drives the chariot of Lucius Domitius, Cæsar's great enemy." And Agias stopped, for his friend had seized his arm with a sudden grasp, crushing as iron. "Why, by all the gods, Demetrius, why are you staring at him that way?"

"By Zeus!" muttered the other, "if I had only my sword! It would be easy to stab him, and then escape in this crowd!"

"Stab him!" cried Agias. "Demetrius, good cousin, control yourself. You are not on the deck of your trireme, with all your men about you. Why should you be thus sanguinary, when you see Lucius Domitius? Why hate him more than any other Roman?"

The consular, unaware of the threat against him, but with a compelling fear of Cæsar's Gallic cavalry lending strength to the arm with which he plied the whip—for the law against driving inside the city no man respected that day—whirled out of sight.

Demetrius still strained at his cousin's arm.

"Listen, Agias," he said, still hoarsely. "Only yesterday I ran upon you by chance in the crowd. We have many things to tell one another, chiefly