A Friend of Caesar Part 42

Chapter XVIII

How Pompeius Stamped with His Feet

I

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 Laeca, who was never backward in a street press.

"Terrible!" shouted the messenger, drawing rein, "Caesar 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 Caesar. 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. "Caesar 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. Laeca, catching sight of Lucius Ahen.o.barbus, just back from Baiae, 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 n.o.ble 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 Caesar's successor as Pontifex Maximus--and those distinguished statesmen found other things to think of.

The news flew and grew. The n.o.ble senators overheard their slaves whispering,--how it was rumoured on the street or in the Forum that Caesar was in full advance on the city, that his cavalry were close to the gates. Caesar at the gates! Why had they not remembered how rapidly he could advance? Why had they trusted the a.s.surance 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. Caesar was coming! Caesar--whose tribunes the oligarchs had chased from the Senate! Caesar--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 Caesar now be more lenient to those who had aimed to blast his honour and shed his blood?

[157] He has got to die.

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 Laeca to Ahen.o.barbus. "Remember how he proscribed forty senators and sixteen hundred equites with one stroke. A fine example for Caesar! And Drusus, who is with the rebels, is little likely to say a good word in your behalf, eh?"

"The G.o.ds 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.o.a.rd 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 Caesar 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 superst.i.tion rea.s.serted themselves. Senators and magistrates, who had deemed it a polite avocation to mock at the G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds 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, praetors, consuls--men who had voted thrones to kings, and decreed the deposition of monarchs; whose personal wealth was princely, whose lineage the n.o.blest 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 Caesar into outlawry the aristocracy had laboured ten long years. And now the n.o.ble 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 antic.i.p.ate. Enough that neither Lentulus Crus, nor Domitius, nor Cato, nor the great Magnus himself, ever saw Rome again.

II

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 ill.u.s.trious fugitives.

"Yonder goes Cato," he was saying; "mark his bitter scowl! There goes Marcus Marcellus, the consular. There drives the chariot of Lucius Domitius, Caesar's great enemy." And Agias stopped, for his friend had seized his arm with a sudden grasp, crushing as iron. "Why, by all the G.o.ds, 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 Caesar'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 hoa.r.s.ely. "Only yesterday I ran upon you by chance in the crowd. We have many things to tell one another, chiefly I to tell you. Why do I hate Lucius Domitius? Why should you hate him? Who made you a slave and me an outlaw? Your father died bankrupt; you know it was said that Philias, his partner, ruined him.

That was truth, but not the whole truth. Philias was under deep obligations to a certain Roman then in the East, who knew of several crimes Philias had committed, crimes that would bring him to the cross if discovered. Do you understand?"

"Hardly," said Agias, still bewildered. "I was very young then."

"I will go on. It was shortly before Pompeius returned to Rome from the East. Your father had charge of the banking firm in Alexandria, Philias of the branch at Antioch. I was a clerk in the Antioch banking-house. I knew that Philias was misusing his partner's name and credit. The Roman whom I have mentioned knew it too, and had a supple Greek confidant who shared his spoils and gave the touches to his schemes. He had good cause to know: he was levying blackmail on Philias. At last a crisis came; the defalcation could be concealed no longer. Philias was duly punished; he was less guilty than he seemed.

But the Roman--who had forced from him the money--he was high on the staff of the proconsul--let his confederate and tool suffer for his own fault. He kept his peace. I would not have kept mine; I would not have let the real ruiner of my uncle escape. But the Roman had me seized, with the aid of his Greek ally; he charged me with treasonable correspondence with the Parthians. He, through his influence with the proconsul, had me bound to the oar as a galley slave for life. I would have been executed but for another Roman, of the governor's suite, who was my friend. He pleaded for my life; he believed me innocent. He saved my life--on what terms! But that is not all he did. He bribed my guards; I escaped and turned outlaw. I joined the last remnants of the Cilician pirates, the few free mariners who have survived Pompeius's raid. And here I am in Rome with one of my ships, disguised as a trader, riding at the river wharf."

"And the name of the Roman who ruined you and my father?" said Agias.

"Was Lucius Domitius. The friend who saved me was s.e.xtus Drusus, son of Marcus Drusus, the reformer. And if I do not recompense them both as they deserve, I am not Demetrius the pirate, captain of seven ships!"

"You will never recompense s.e.xtus Drusus," remarked Agias, quietly.

"He has been dead, slain in Gaul, these five years."

"Such is the will of the G.o.ds," said Demetrius, looking down.

"But he has left a son."

"Ah! What sort of a man?"

"The n.o.blest of all n.o.ble Romans. He is the Quintus Drusus who saved my life, as last night I told you."

"Mithras be praised! The name is so common among these Latins that I did not imagine any connection when you mentioned it. What can I do to serve him?"

"Immediately, nothing. He is with Caesar, and, as you see, the enemies of the Imperator are not likely, at present, to work his friends much mischief. Yet it is singular that his chief enemy and yours are so near akin. Lucius Ahen.o.barbus, son of Domitius, is thirsting for Drusus's blood."

"If I had my sword!" muttered Demetrius, clapping his hand to his thigh. "It is not too late to run after the fugitives!"

"Come, come," remonstrated Agias, feeling that his newly found cousin was indeed a fearful and wonderful man after twelve years of lawless and G.o.dless freebooter's life. "At my lodgings we will talk it all over; and there will be time enough to scheme the undoing of Domitius and all his family."

And with these words he led the sanguinary sea-king away.

Agias indeed found in Demetrius a perfect mine of b.l.o.o.d.y romance and adventure. It had been the banking clerk's misfortune, not his fault, that every man's hand had been against him and his against every man.

Demetrius had been declared an outlaw to Roman authority; and Roman authority at that time stretched over very nearly every quarter of the civilized world. Demetrius had been to India, to intercept the Red Sea traders. He had been beyond the Pillars of Hercules and set foot on those then half-mythical islands of the Canaries. He had plundered a hundred merchantmen; he had fought a score of Roman government galleys; he had been princ.i.p.al or accessory to the taking of ten thousand lives. All this had been forced upon him, because there was no tolerable spot on the planet where he might settle down and be free from the grasp of punishment for a crime he had never committed.

Demetrius had boldly come up to Rome on a light undecked yacht.[158]

The harbor masters had been given to understand that the captain of the craft was an Asiatic princeling, who was visiting the capital of the world out of a quite legitimate curiosity. If they had had any doubts, they accepted extremely large fees and said nothing. The real object of the venture was to dispose of a large collection of rare gems and other valuables that Demetrius had collected in the course of his wanderings. Despite the perturbed state of the city, the worthy pirate had had little difficulty in arranging with certain wealthy jewellers, who asked no questions, when they bought, at a very large discount, bargains of a most satisfactory character. And so it came to pa.s.s, by the merest luck, that the two cousins were thrown together in a crowd, and partly Agias, through his dim childish recollections of his unfortunate relative, and partly Demetrius, through memories of his uncle's boy and the close resemblance of the lad to his father, had been prompted first to conversation, then to mutual inquiries, then to recognition.

[158] A _celox_ of one bank of oars, a small ship much used by the pirates.

Demetrius had no intention of leaving Rome for a few days. Under existing circ.u.mstances the chances of his arrest were not worth considering. His cousin was eager to show him all the sights; and the freebooter was glad of a little relaxation from his roving life, glad to forget for an instant that his country was his squadron, his rights at law were his cutla.s.s. Moreover, he had taken a vast liking to Agias; deeply dipped in blood himself, he dared not desire his cousin to join him in his career of violence--yet he could not part with the bright, genial lad so hastily. Agias needed no entreaties, therefore, to induce his cousin to enjoy his hospitality.